A short look at Systems Leadership.

A short orientation.

In everyday PA work, it is natural to respond to what is most visible: a late submission, a missed target, a tense meeting, a quiet stakeholder, or a decision that did not land well.

Systems Leadership helps us slow down and look at what keeps producing the visible Event. It asks how people, incentives, routines, information flows, relationships, and beliefs are connected.

This matters because effort alone can sometimes leave the Pattern unchanged. A team can work harder, communicate more, or add more checks, but still get the same result if the underlying system keeps pulling people back into the same behaviour.

The PA Systems Leadership Playbook frames this as part of building a Learning Organisation: developing aspiration, generative conversations, and understanding complexity so we can create the future we desire.

The goal of this preview is not to turn you into a systems expert before class. It is to give you shared language for noticing patterns, asking better questions, and examining your own thinking before acting.

So here is the idea.

Levels of Perspective helps you avoid staying only at the Event level. Events are the immediate, visible things we can point to: the complaint, the missed deadline, the low turnout, or in the video, litter on the ground.

The playbook then asks us to look below the surface. Patterns are what keeps happening over time. Systemic Structures are the policies, processes, routines, information flows, and physical arrangements shaping those Patterns. Mental Models are the beliefs and assumptions that keep those structures in place.

The video makes this concrete: littering is not only about one person dropping one item. We can ask where it keeps happening, what makes disposal easier or harder, and what assumptions people hold about shared responsibility for the space.

There is a fifth, deeper layer, Vision, which we work on together in class.

So here is the idea.

The Creative Tension Model belongs to Creation Mastery. It helps leaders create desired futures instead of simply making current problems go away.

Creative tension is the pull between two honest statements: what is true now, and what you want to create.

The same gap can also create emotional tension: frustration, anxiety, defensiveness, or impatience because current reality is not yet where you want it to be.

There are two common ways to resolve the tension. One is creative: keep the vision steady, face current reality clearly, and learn or act so reality moves closer to the vision. The other is relief-seeking: lower the vision, soften the facts, distract yourself, or explain the gap away so the discomfort fades.

The practice is to notice the emotional pull without letting it quietly shrink the goal. Hold both sides clearly: current reality and desired future, then choose actions that move reality towards the vision.

So here is the idea.

Core Theory of Success is a practical loop for Collaboration Mastery. Daniel Kim frames it as a reinforcing engine: results are shaped by more than action alone.

When the quality of relationships improves, people share more perspectives and the quality of thinking improves. Better thinking supports better coordinated actions. Better actions improve results. Better results can then strengthen relationships.

In PA's playbook, this connects to outcomes such as stronger cross-functional collaboration, better organisational alignment, adaptability, innovation, and the ability to identify high-leverage interventions.

So here is the idea.

Inquiry and Advocacy is a practice for improving the Quality of Conversations. It matters when people are seeing the same situation differently, when a conversation feels stuck, or when we need to slow down our own reaction before responding.

Inquiry opens up perspectives. Advocacy makes your own perspective visible. Balancing both helps the conversation move from defending positions to testing thinking together.

Deep listening is the foundation. With deep listening, inquiry becomes curiosity rather than interrogation, and advocacy becomes an invitation to understand rather than convince. This sets the ground for the Ladder of Inference work we practise in class.

So here is the idea.

Mental Models are deeply ingrained assumptions, beliefs, generalisations, pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and respond to situations.

In work settings, Mental Models might sound like: "this unit prefers detail", "that stakeholder moves carefully", or "this issue is mainly a resourcing problem". Any of these may be partly true. The question is whether they have been checked recently.

The playbook places Mental Models under Collaboration Mastery because surfacing them helps people create shared understanding and tap collective wisdom.

They are also one of the deepest levels in Levels of Perspective. If a belief keeps shaping the same pattern, changing the surface action may not be enough.

So here is the idea.

The Ladder of Inference describes how quickly we move from observable data to action. We do not take in everything. We select some data, add meaning, form assumptions, reach conclusions, reinforce beliefs, and then act as if our view is the whole picture.

This is useful because it separates what happened from the meaning we made from what happened. The meaning may be reasonable, but it is still worth checking before we act strongly.

In PA work, this matters when we interact with residents, manage community feedback, work with partners and stakeholders, or design engagement programmes.

There are two directions to remember. In real life, we usually climb up the Ladder of Inference in seconds. In reflection, we deliberately walk down from our action to the data we selected. Then we expand the pool of available data and choose a more grounded next action.