Modelling leadership capital and expenditures from a cybernetic perspective – monitoring, intervention, and contradiction under conditions of complexity

Purpose From a cybernetic perspective, leadership can be approached as informed practices of status monitoring and intervention. This paper aims to use this approach to describe leadership capital and expenditures in complex-adaptive systems, addressing the efforts to keep an organization in the state of boundary stability between order and chaos. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on recent works on complexity leadership, the authors capture two different monitoring and intervention activities. One is directed at the creation of order, the other at its disturbance. A combination of both is needed to avoid both stagnation and complete disintegration. In consequence, it also becomes necessary to spend effort on handling contradictions resulting from this combination. To illustrate the validity and relevance of their approach, the authors discuss its application to (1) identify leadership capital and expenditures (2) understand implications of different leadership styles. Findings The model distinguishes three types of issues that leadership must address to enable successful management, which can be further broken down to monitoring, intervention and processing contradiction. This leads to a radically different account of leadership capital and expenditures than elsewhere in organizational studies. Requisite variety in the organization emerges as a critical factor regarding the frequency of interventions and confrontation with contradictions and tensions. Originality/value The model shows how leadership in complex-adaptive systems can be formalized to identify intangible assets for leadership in organizations, identify necessary expenditures and discuss strengths and weaknesses of different leadership practices. It departs from earlier work in cybernetics focusing exclusively on floating equilibria, shifting the focus on boundary stability between order and chaos as the goal of monitoring and intervention.