Leadership isn’t about power – it’s about enabling collaboration. Yet, many still associate leadership with authority, control, and ego.
“The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration” challenges this idea. It argues that effective leadership is adaptive, service-oriented, and shaped by collaboration itself. Without strong leadership, collaboration breaks down. But without collaboration, leadership is meaningless.

So, what defines leadership in a collaborative world according to our analysis?

• Leadership as a Catalyst and Service: The best leaders don’t dictate – they facilitate trust, shared vision, and participation.
• Collaboration Shapes Leadership: Leadership isn’t a fixed role; it evolves within a dynamic web of team interactions, goals, constraints, and their many feedback loops.
• Leadership Failure Is Multifaceted: Poor leadership isn’t just about ego and arrogance. Fear, incompetence, lack of preparation, incompetence, and cognitive biases can all derail collaboration.
• Context and Culture Matters: Effective leadership looks different across cultures and industries – it’s not one-size-fits-all. These factors, in turn, shape leadership.
• Trust & Ethics Are Non-Negotiable: Without integrity and moral grounding, even the best collaborations will fail. Leaders must be living examples of moral values, not just profess to them.

The takeaway? Collaboration needs strong leaders, and leaders need collaboration. Yet, the best leaders don’t just lead; they realize and sustain collaboration by creating the conditions for others to succeed. Understanding leadership failures and their impact on teamwork is critical in business, politics, research, and beyond.

Our Strungmann Report on the Forum “How Collaboration Arises and Why It Fails” addresses the factors that make collaborations succeed or fail. One of these is the role of leadership, a topic ever more critical in a volatile, fragmenting, and increasingly adversarial world that is disconnecting from a moral grounding that has contributed to some sense of global stability since the Second World War. Collaboration is a dynamic process governed by many feedback loops between task space, agents, virtualizations, conventions, and the resistance created by opposing forces, particularly collectives of other collaborative agents (see Chapter “Reflections on Collaboration” for our attempts to get to a definition to which I will return in a future post). Leadership stands at the heart of these feedback loops, ensuring positive outcomes relative to the collective’s mission and mitigating disruptive perturbations. These perturbations come in many forms, such as the lack of a collective and shared understanding of the mission, divergent goals, ego and personal agendas, organizational inertia, coercion, culture clashes, echo chambers, miscommunication, disinformation, and the abuse of trust.

Effective leadership serves the collaboration instead of dominating it and adjusts itself relative to the development of the collaboration. Indeed, the collaborative process itself is a key part of the leadership mission. This requires a blend of vision, adaptability, empathy, and the ability to foster trust and participation among team members. Leadership is thus not about control or dominance per se but rather about guiding and shaping collaborative efforts and recognizing the collective value of the team rather than the individual at the top. Indeed, without a collective, the leader has very little to lead, yet a collaboration will not scale without a leader.

A detailed analysis of leadership is provided in the group report “How Collaboration Breaks Down” by Simon De Deo et al. In the Chapter “Collaboration Failures and Their Potential Mitigation,” various forms of failing leadership as a critical disruptor in diverse settings are presented, from the military and global health to political institutions and from philanthropy to trade unions and business based on the 24 podcast interviews. These include disempowering leadership dominance, stifling and eroding authoritarian governance, responsibility and strategy agnosia, negligent leadership, ego and selfishness, integrity breaches, and loss of moral grounding. These failures often do not occur in isolation but form a tangled web of self-reinforcing toxic leadership that destroys collaborative processes through behavioral feedback, dissolving the collaboration into a Hobbsian cage fight. Yet, we should be mindful that failures due to autocratic leadership, bullying, and ego are only one type of failure mode in the architecture of collaboration. Similarly, collaborations can fail due to leaders succumbing to fear, anxiety, ill preparation, and complacency or being plainly incompetent and the product of the Peter principle. Behind these symptoms lurk ancient psychological mechanisms such as coping with cognitive dissonance and the overcompensation of uncertainty. Issues elaborated in “Innovation Perspectives and Commons” by Sander van der Leeuw, while in “Collaboration in Great Apes,” Stephanie Musgrave reviews the common prosocial traits humans share with other great apes from which collaboration is bootstrapped.

The Chapter “The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration” looks at diagnostics and mitigation of failing leadership, including in the podcast chapters “The Psychology of Collaborating Situated Agents” and “Change, Power, Systems, and Politics“.

The book advances strategies for effective leadership, including several criteria that can be summarized as vision, trust, love, capability, and dignity. Current examples of global leadership might appear to fall short. Yet, when there is a leader, a collective must support him or her. Leaders with no followers are usually only found in asylums. In understanding collaboration, the fundamental co-dependency of the leader and the collective must be recognized. This is well illustrated in Chris Nierstrasz’s “Collaboration, Trade, and Colonialism: The Commons of Exploitative Collective Action“. Colonialism could flourish because of hierarchical and partially formalized collaborative arrangements comprising oppressors and oppressed. In “The Structure of Collaboration in Women’s Self-Help Groups“, McLain et al. look at alternative practices of leadership. Appropriate and effective leadership also depends on its cultural embedding, which is elaborated by Melody Ndzenyuiy and Heidi Keller in ” The Cultural Nature of Collaboration“.

I summarize these various perspectives in the concluding chapter, “Reflections on Collaboration: A Roadmap for Future Research” as:

“As with all complex control systems, the question is: What constraints must a collaboration satisfy to be deconstrained in its task space? For instance, leadership, agent features, joint intention, “group-mindedness,” norms, communication, and incentives might be considered necessary for successful collaboration, yet what are the potential unforeseen consequences when these constraints are not met or absent? For example, think of the devastating effects of failing and malignant leadership (1), the abuse of trust (2), or the distortions introduced by disinformation and misleading narratives, all of which contribute to failing or pathological collaborations. Especially in the design of future collaborative artificial and hybrid systems, understanding these architectural constraints will be of the essence (3).”

(1) Chapter 19 Verschure “Collaboration Failures and Their Potential Mitigation: Insights from the Podcasts”

(2) Chapter 11 Beinhocker, “Fair Social Contracts and the Foundations of LargeScale Collaboration”

(3) Chapter 5 Freire and Verschure, “Synthetic Collaborative Systems: Present and Future”

Ten key lessons about leadership that emerge from “The Nature and Dynamics of Collaboration” can be summarized as:

1. Vision and Shared Goals: Effective leadership begins with the ability to foster a shared understanding of the problem and to build a deep understanding of the interests of all participants. Good leaders create a sense of collective ownership by ensuring that all voices contribute to shaping the collaboration’s direction. They instill trust that the shared vision can be achieved by building and maintaining the common narrative that gives meaning and direction to the collaboration.
2. Adaptability and Flexibility: Leaders must be able to adapt to changing circumstances and be open to diverse perspectives. They should be skilled in navigating complex situations, adjusting goals when needed, and incorporating different viewpoints. This is particularly crucial in dynamic and unpredictable environments.
3. Mission-Focused Approach: A key aspect of good leadership is a clear focus on the mission and ensuring that everyone is working toward the same goal. This involves translating a high-level vision into actionable steps and providing teams with goals through broad guidance and autonomy in trusting them to determine the specifics of execution.
4. Humility and Empathy: Good leaders demonstrate humility by acknowledging they don’t have all the answers and by valuing the team’s collective effort. Empathy is essential, showing genuine concern for others, listening to their needs, and supporting their outcomes. A lack of empathy can derail collaboration and disempower participants. Yet, empathy does not imply that all positions and feelings must be condoned but rather addressed through common understanding.
5. Decisiveness and Timely Action: While collaboration and consultation are important, leaders must be able to make quick decisions and take charge when necessary, particularly in emergencies. This includes ensuring the right people are involved in the planning and execution of coordinated efforts.
6. Building and Maintaining Trust: Leaders play a key role in building and maintaining trust within collaborative efforts. This involves creating a commitment to the collective vision, ensuring that each participant contributes honestly and effectively, and recognizing the value of each member. Trust is built within relationships and through shared goals and respect for individual autonomy.
7. Participatory Governance: Effective leaders foster participatory governance, allowing all members to shape the vision and its realization. This can be done by creating clear rules and boundaries underpinned by trust, respect, and shared values and offering opportunities for group members to participate in decision-making processes.
8. Mentoring and Development: Good leaders understand the importance of observation and emulation, to learn from other leaders, and to develop their own positive traits and skills. They also mentor team members as a strategy for building stronger teams.
9. Strategic and Operational Thinking: Leaders should be able to think strategically, understanding the bigger picture while acting operationally, translating vision into actionable steps. They must be able to connect smaller tasks to the broader vision and to seemingly unrelated elements.
10. Balance of Structure and Autonomy: Effective leaders balance the need for structure and transparency in collaboration with individual autonomy within collaborative efforts. This requires the integration of formal rules with informal norms and fostering a culture in which these can co-develop.

Collaboration needs leaders, and leaders need collaborations. Indeed, members of the collaborating collective also bear responsibility for success and failure, which is a topic for future posts. Leadership failure will automatically lead to collaboration failure. Given that democracy and the rule of law depend on large-scale collaboration, rapid progress on diagnostics of leadership failure and mitigation strategies is of the essence. Our current lack of understanding of collaboration is a critical risk.