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  Herein lies the mystery of the complexity through which you meta-lead. With a systems view of the puzzle, you seek connections and patterns among all these forces, both known and unknown. Acquiring knowledge is a critical step in navigating complexity, amplifying the “forces for,” mitigating the “forces against,” and engaging the “forces on the fence.” It is through meta-leadership connectivity that you and others accumulate, share, and apply knowledge to the problem at hand. Your objective: to lead your team to the best possible outcome.

  What could be hiding the unknowns from you? First, there are the technical problems. You may not have the tools, such as a microscope, or the training and specialized skills to uncover the unknowns. Second, others may hide information from you for their own purposes, which may be hostile. Third, the biggest impediment may be you yourself: narrow, limited thinking may obscure important information. If you exclude others and are not probing for what they know, what could be known to you remains out of reach.

  Figuring out what to do with all of this is the adaptive side of complex adaptive systems. What can you do to influence the forces in your favor? What can be changed? How might you move or win over others? At times, you relent on smaller issues in order to prevail on the big ones. Your responsiveness and flexibility are assets that, when strategically applied, realign forces to support and encourage what you hope to accomplish. Get it right and you advance. Get it wrong and you are stopped dead in your tracks.

  Begin by mapping the stakeholders and discerning who sits where. Rally those working for you to garner their advice, enthusiasm, and active support. Their spheres of influence can greatly expand yours. Understand those working against you. How legitimate are their objections? Is there a way to overcome or mitigate their opposition? It may be as simple as acknowledging them and genuinely listening to their point of view. Can you turn an enemy into a friend? Engage those who are on the fence to see what it will take to bring them to your side or prevent them from taking the side of your opponents.

  These forces exist in all complex systems. As a meta-leader, you recognize the forces, figure out what to do about them, and then work them into your strategy and actions. If you prioritize function—what you hope to accomplish—over form—the structure and rules of your organization—you align the forces with your leadership priorities. This was the lesson of the stories about both FEMA and Herman Miller. Both organizations changed what they were doing and how they did it to better accomplish their core mission. They made the necessary adaptation when operating in a complex adaptive system.

  When you bring all this together, you shape and discover emergence. Emergence happens when qualities not found in any of its individual components manifest in a system. For example, the flavor of a chocolate chip cookie cannot be tasted in the eggs, flour, chocolate chips, or other ingredients. It emerges when the ingredients are baked together. When you bring together different people, activities, and objectives, your meta-perspective opens up the possibilities and your meta-leadership aligns them in new ways. Emergence was vital to the success of the 2004 Red Sox. Complex adaptive systems have properties that emerge over time from the interactions of components. It turns a group of people into a team, or a problem into a solution.

  As a meta-leader, you can encourage leadership among those who are part of your system. That capacity transforms and binds relationships. It is not easy to identify the leader of the 2004 Red Sox. Leadership lived in the system and the mantel of leader was worn by different people at different times. The team’s historic victory came not from the sum of the individual abilities and actions of its members. It emerged from their personalities, relationships, skills, and motivations. They found shared purpose, which they integrated with adaptive capacity. They complemented and supplemented one another in ways that could not be duplicated by merely inserting other players of similar or even superior athletic prowess.

  In August 2012, Lenny met with two NPLI graduates just outside FEMA headquarters in Washington, DC: FEMA deputy administrator Rich Serino and Desiree “Desi” Matel-Anderson, FEMA’s newly hired chief innovation advisor. “What if you innovated in the midst of a disaster?” Lenny asked. The theme of the conversation focused on complexity and adaptation. Emergency management agencies often shy away from trying on new ideas or procedures in the midst of a disaster response for fear of distracting from core activities. This rigidity, ironically, can also cause leaders to miss important information, as was seen in the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

  Two months later, Super Storm Sandy hit New York and New Jersey with unprecedented fury. Rich Serino decided that innovation was exactly what was needed to fill the inevitable gaps when responding to a storm of this magnitude. Eager to innovate, Matel-Anderson was soon on her way to support the gaps inevitable when responding to a storm this large. Serino’s charge to her, “Solve problems. Don’t break the law.” A week later, she was joined by FEMA chief technology officer Ted Okada.

  Shortly after Super Storm Sandy struck, Eric flew to New York City, where the extent of the devastation was still unfolding. The city had taken a direct hit just seven days earlier. Power was out in many areas, and flooding was extensive. He made a brief survey of lower Manhattan before heading to Brooklyn, where he was to embed with the first FEMA Innovation Team to deploy in the midst of a response.

  Dusk was falling as Eric made his way toward the designated meeting point. He expected to find a large emergency operations center, not the residential building before him. Perplexed, he rang the bell. Matel-Anderson ushered him into an apartment where a dozen people were busily at work on their computers. Among them, Eric met Willow Brugh of Geeks Without Bounds, John Crowley of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Galit Sorokin of the aid crowd-source group Synergy Strike Force. McNulty discovered that the FEMA Innovation Team didn’t actually include many people from the government. Most were self-deployed volunteers—designers, programmers, artists, and more—who were young, tech-savvy, and eager to make a difference on the ground.

  That evening he watched as the team gathered social media information and confirmed or debunked rumors about the response. They mapped internet connectivity voids based on the absence of geo-tagged tweets. Innovating to expedite survivor assistance, they also crafted blueprints to redesign Disaster Recovery Centers and, alongside FEMA Corps, started using tablets to register survivors. They also tapped into an extensive informal network for ideas, skills, and resources. These were people who had honed their expertise in international humanitarian response efforts. Over the next several days, Eric watched the team applying their expertise and tech talents across New York and New Jersey. Well beyond that, they recruited support and involvement from volunteers across the internet. There may have been few people in that room, though there were hundreds if not thousands across their fast-sprouting network, processing a vast collection of valuable information.

  Matel-Anderson later explained that while innovation in a response was new at the federal level, local communities had been doing it for some time. “I am from Milwaukee,” she explained. “We never had enough resources. People learned to innovate in austere conditions. I saw that local emergency managers, citizens, innovators of all types could support response and recovery efforts to deliver unconventional solutions in real time to meet the challenges they faced. Now we were trying it on a larger stage.”

  One of the transformative changes at FEMA was engaging the team to connect the formal government response with informal community-led initiatives. The hope was that rather than working in isolation or possibly at cross-purposes, the formal and informal networks could link and leverage each other’s resources and efforts. There was a lack of trust on both sides. Groups like Occupy Sandy were no fans of the establishment, and seasoned professionals at FEMA were wary—these “amateurs” might do more harm than good. The Innovation Team brought information in from the field, enlightening official agencies: “Someone stranded in Brooklyn.” They pushed inf
ormation from those agencies out to people and communities in need of it, such as how to apply for FEMA transitional shelter assistance. Together, they were able to turn important unknowns into valuable knowns. It was unprecedented collaboration.

  Building connectivity called for true meta-leadership. Matel-Anderson and the other members of the Innovation Team proved to be adept translators for the array of stakeholders. Fluent in the “languages” spoken on each side, they could explain the camps to each other. Some Innovation Team members looked like straight arrows, and others had interesting collections of tattoos and piercings. The team used appearance to establish “street cred” and manage dissonance in formal and informal exchanges. Most important, they avoided “us-versus-them” situations by showing respect, judging only mission-centric results, and embracing the ethos of “how can we help make you a success?”

  “It’s about breaking down the barriers by showing that you are there to listen and be useful,” Matel-Anderson said. “Empathy is the translator. Being humble, caring, and listening for the heartbeat of the community. People have to be heard before you can help them. Then it doesn’t matter what you look like. You’re in.”

  She explained that innovation leaders create physical and psychological space and support people in that space. When deployed, the first FEMA Innovation Team created such a space. “From there, we begin thinking about design. It isn’t just brainstorming. It isn’t off the cuff. It is quite strategic,” she said.

  Matel-Anderson has since left government and is now chief wrangler of the Field Innovation Team, an independent nonprofit organization, and CEO of Global Disaster Innovation Group, LLC. She and her teams have been active in responses from refugee camps in Lebanon to Hurricane Harvey to wildfires in northern Spain and Portugal.

  “I have always believed that we, as humanity, can do better. The leaders in disasters are not always who you think they are going to be. People step up. I try to lead by example. Leaders walk, they don’t just talk,” she said. “Listen, solve fast, and make it happen. Less talk… more action, listening, and doing… more ‘we.’”

  Complexity is a source of both great challenge and tremendous opportunity. This is the advantage of the meta-view in your leadership. Working with complexity reveals a wider canvas and otherwise overlooked opportunities. You act upon that expanded landscape to link and leverage what you are doing and the forces that can work in your favor. Aware of the complexity through which you lead, you ask more, learn more, and then assimilate all that as you continue to question, be curious, and discover. In that quest, you are more likely to find your answers.

  You develop the mind-set and master the tools to effectively navigate complexity.

  Complexity is.

  Questions for Journaling

  In what ways is complexity found in your organization or community? Distinguish a simple task from one that requires complex adaptive system thinking and interactions.

  What are the critical relationships and interactions that impact your leadership objectives? Have you experienced or observed situations in which swarmlike interactions emerged?

  Consider a recent leadership experience. What were the “forces for,” the “forces against,” and the “forces on the fence”? How did you influence them? How did they influence you? What might you have known or done differently?

  FOUR

  META-LEADERSHIP THINKING

  The Cone-in-the-Cube

  Noon, Sunday, April 26, 2009, Washington, DC, the White House press briefing room. Ninety people are dead in Mexico from a mysterious influenza virus. There are reports of the virus spreading into Texas and California. Scientists and policymakers are working around the clock to determine the characteristics of the virus and what to do about it. Some experts believe that a fast-moving and aggressive killer virus is invading the country. An extensive pandemic would devastate vulnerable populations and cause widespread disruptions, jeopardizing the American and Mexican economies. Others believe that, though mysterious, the virus is a milder variant of typical seasonal flu with a much lower risk. If the response is not cued precisely to the magnitude of the risk, overreaction or underreaction will impose a disaster on top of a disaster. There is little time.

  This was the beginning of the swine flu, later renamed the H1N1 influenza pandemic.

  CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser, who has advanced training in meta-leadership, follows the president’s press secretary, his homeland security advisor, and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security into the White House press briefing room for a nationally telecast announcement. The Obama administration has a strategy for combating the virus and keeping the public safe.

  Lowest in rank among those on the podium, Besser takes his turn to address the assembled journalists. A physician, public health expert, and accomplished meta-leader, Besser grasps the challenges that lie ahead. He begins: “First, I want to say that our hearts go out to the people in Mexico and the people in the United States who’ve been impacted by this outbreak. People around the country and around the globe are concerned with this situation we’re seeing, and we’re concerned as well. As we look for cases of swine flu, we are seeing more cases and expect to see more cases of swine flu. We’re responding aggressively to try and learn about this outbreak and to implement measures to control this outbreak.”

  Soon, reporters are lobbing medical and health-related questions at the group. The others on the podium step aside, and Besser steps forward to lay out what is known about H1N1 influenza, what is unknown, and what scientists are doing to close the gap. His comments are clear, crisp, and—even when so little is known—reassuring.

  “I knew that I was ‘it,’” he told us later. “And I knew that while we could buy time with the public, we had to be very aggressive in finding everything we could know about this virus and its impact on human health. Science had to drive decision-making, and the sooner we had the science, the better able we’d be able to guide policy decisions and inform the public.” Besser’s leadership task was to maintain connectivity and communication between the epidemiological investigation, policy decision-making, and the public. There were many different options and opinions about what should be done.

  “I felt it was my job to raise the likelihood that together—nationally and internationally—we would be making the right choices,” Besser explained.

  Ten days later, Besser briefs the president and his cabinet at the White House. When Besser finishes his comments, President Obama declares, “We will follow the science.” This is a clear signal to all around the table that the decision-making process going forward will avoid speculation, political consideration, or bureaucratic turf battles. The criteria are and will be derived from evidence-based knowledge.

  At this point, Besser is meta-leading across (within his team) and beyond to an array of political and governmental officials and organizations, including state and local public health officials as well as World Health Organization leaders over whom he has no command-and-control authority. Within and between these groups are inevitable rivalries and frictions. Presidential advisors are used to managing political considerations—the “optics”—and for them, the science is not their only consideration. As the personification of the science-based approach endorsed by President Obama, Besser balances these many competing and complex priorities, resources, concerns, biases, perceptions, and personalities as he works to shape the effort. His personal mission is to keep everyone moving cohesively in the same direction.

  One point of contention is the question of whether or not to close schools. Those who see a grave danger in the virus genuinely fear that hundreds of thousands of children, rapid spreaders of a flu virus, may die if schools are not shuttered. Others are less concerned about the lethality of the virus, given the preliminary epidemiological data streaming into the CDC. The virus could result in a similar number of deaths (usually in the thousands) as a standard seasonal flu outbreak. Keeping children at home might keep them f
rom catching it, but would also prevent many parents from going to work. Children whose parents have to go to work might be left alone or at a mall or other public place where the virus could spread as fast as it would at school. With the country tumbling into the Great Recession of 2009, economic fallout is a critical consideration.

  Different people have conflicting, fervently held beliefs about what is happening and what should be done about it as they look at the same problem from different perspectives. “It’s a ‘cone-in-the-cube’ problem,” observes Dr. Carter Mecher, the lead physician policy advisor in the White House. He is right: the swine flu response is what we call a “Cone-in-the-Cube” problem. It is the same type of dilemma faced by leaders confronted by a possible product defect or a customer data breach. So what exactly is the Cone-in-the-Cube, and how does it inform this puzzle?

  Integrating Different Perspectives