Organisational Ecology and Strategic Leadership

Both strategy and leadership are today a matter of course. How comes, then, that so very few enterprises do actually practise Strategic Leadership? The reasons are many. Top managers want to keep all ways open, not being bound to follow previously decided paths. They want to keep flexibility. Sometimes they have hidden agendas that would surface if strategy was overtly formulated. In some cases middle management hides from strategy and leadership because they want to have the liberty to side with the top one day, the bottom the other - even on the same topic. Leadership is dangerous, many managers seem to feel. One sticks one's neck out, and it might be cut off. Strategic decisions might be unpopular. Ore one's incompetence as strategic leader might become evident. Sometimes processes as those presented here are avoided simply because they take time. There are so many good reasons - and many of them are respectable and sensible.

Organisational Ecology and Resistance to Change

During the past years, management literature has described many success stories and provided success prescriptions and guidelines for decision makers. In this manner, market demand for pragmatic aids has been met. But all prescriptions and tools have their limitations. Contemporary challenges also require sound theoretical understanding on the part of decision makers. Rash decisions taken in the heat of the moment, based on immediate pressing needs and visible factors, will increasingly be seen as incorrect decisions. It is precisely this which ecologists more clearly than any others have proved.

Organisational Ecology and InterHuman Communication

Human behaviour within organisations seems to follow certain patterns. It is as if the organisation develops unstated rules and habits, without anyone at any time having sat down and decided:' This is how we shall think and behave.' It is easy to see the world from one's own point of view, or first position as we refer to it here. It is more difficult to see it from the other's - second position. But seeing relationships between one's self and others is the most difficult of all - from the third position. This perspective: to see processes and patterns from an outside viewpoint, is also called system-perspective, or systemic thinking.