WHAT IS A CULTURE OF CHANGE ANYWAY? I USE the phrase in two ways. One is the fact that changes are always rolling into and over all our organizations these days. One form of leadership in this latter case is protecting the organization from constant, superficial change. The second and more fundamental use is how to change the existing culture so that it has the capacity to manage and incorporate change on a continuous basis that serves the goals of the organization, including deliberately incorporating new goals and their implementation.

The more complex society gets, the more sophisticated leadership must become. Complexity means change, but specifically it means rapidly occurring, unpredictable, nonlinear change. Moreover, the pace of change is ever increasing, as James Gleick, the author of Chaos, pointed out in a book called Faster, which he subtitled The Acceleration of Just about Everything (Gleick, 1999). That was two decades ago, much before the advent of the iPhone, introduced in 2007 and artificial intelligence! How do you lead in a culture such as ours, which seems to specialize in pell-mell innovation?

This is the leader's dilemma. On the one hand, failing to act when the environment around you is radically changing leads to extinction. On the other hand, making quick decisions under conditions of mind-racing mania can be equally fatal. Robert Steinberg said it best: “The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly” (cited in Gleick, 1999, p. 114).

This book is about how leaders can focus on certain key change themes that will allow them to lead effectively under messy conditions. The book is also about how leaders foster leadership in others, thereby making themselves dispensable in the long run. And it is about how we can produce more “leaders of leaders.”

Now 19 years after the first edition of “Leading in a Culture of Change” the five themes still hold true, but we have much more specificity about their role in change. And we need to relabel some of the concepts to make them more precise, relative to current knowledge. Moral purpose remains the rock, but we now focus on its actual impact and how to get it if you don't have it. Second, understanding change is laced with a new insight: nuance. In complex societies, effective change and nuance pretty much go hand in hand. Third, relationship building is still key but we have sorted out what effective and not-so-effective relationships are, which I examine under the banner of effective collaboration. Fourth, knowledge building and sharing is ever critical, but now we see it in relation to “deep learning” that encompasses technology and innovation. Fifth, coherence making has turned out to be a powerful concept; we have pinpointed the role of leadership as coherence makers in complex times.

The other major development over the past 20 years is that the world has become much more complex, but more than that—the world is becoming ever more troubled. Worsening climate change, unknown job markets, greater superficial closeness via technology but less closeness, more stress and anxiety, and less trust decade by decade, and corresponding erosion of trust. All of this puts moral purpose to greater tests as it makes it more crucial. Leaders don't need to become better at a bad game; they need to change the game! The framework and examples I provide in this book will put leaders in a position to lead change under ever increasing challenges to help people and organizations thrive. Complexity always brings new opportunities but only when society has strong leadership dispersed across the system.

Schools and businesses increasingly have more in common because both are trying to find their way in ever challenging circumstances. In our own work over the past decade we have pretty much concluded that schools as we know them are past their due date. They no longer serve the purpose they were originally assigned some 200 years ago—to produce reliable workers for an industrial society. We are in the midst of trying to change that in our work on “deep learning” that we will take up in various parts of the book.

Clearly these are difficult, even threatening times—there is a lot going on. Not the least of these developments is the new realization that leadership is key to large-scale improvement yet must be radically different than it has been. Further, effective leadership is in very short supply. In the course of this book, I will map out the new leadership that will be required to take us forward from 2020 onward.

In complex, what I have called chaotic times, leaders must be able to operate under conditions that are not always clear—worse, not as clear as they appear to be. G.K. Chesterton identified the challenge best: “Life is not an illogicality, yet it is as trap for logicians…. Its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude hidden. Its wildness lies in wait” (quoted in Bernstein, 1996, p. 331). Coping with wildness lying in wait may not be a bad job description for leading in a culture of change.

One last point: Over the years, we have found that about 80% of our best ideas come from “leading practitioners.” You will find that the ideas in this book are well grounded, and cutting edge. Thus, in the course of this book you will discover what it means to be leader in a culture of change. In many ways, the ideas and insights come from the horse's mouths, although I have been able to articulate it in precise and, I think, insightful language. Commit yourself to leading in a culture of change, and find out how in the following chapters.

Although there are overtones of saving the world in this book, the core message is: Make your organization the best it can be. To do this effectively, you have to take into account the bigger picture. This is a practical matter for me. You have “to go outside to become better inside,” as we say. If many leaders do this, they will end up improving both the inside and the outside. All good solutions are system solutions.