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Network Logic 7

Asked about
leadership, most
people reach for
the organogram.
But when it comes
to networks there
are no such easy
answers . . .
Leading between
Paul Skidmore

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7. Leading between
leadership and trust in a network
society
Paul Skidmore

The institutional landscape of modern society is being ripped up. Be

they companies or public agencies, individual organisations are
finding that the only way to satisfy the changing demands and
expectations of customers and citizens is to be embedded in networks
of organisations able to stitch together different products, services,
resources and skills in flexible combinations and deliver them when
and where they are most needed. Splendid isolation is out.
Collaboration is in.
But this radical disruption also spells trouble for many of the
assumptions we have about what leadership means, what it is for and
where we might look for it. Networks challenge our conceptions of
leadership, which too often are still rooted in an outmoded great
man theory that mistakes the formal authority of status, rank or
station with the exercise of leadership. When you ask people about
the leadership of an organisation, most people reach for the
organogram and point to the top. When it comes to leading across
networks there are no such easy answers.
New network-based ways of organising social and economic
activity will only thrive if we can evolve new models of leadership that
embrace the distinctive organising logic of networks, and do not seek
to apply an old set of principles in an environment that has been
dramatically altered. We must learn what it means to lead effectively
not just within individual organisations, but across the networks of
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Network logic

which they are part. Leading between will be the new leadership
imperative of the coming decades.
The challenge of leadership in a network society
Our increasing personal and institutional interconnectedness, the
long-term trends driving it, and the challenges that arise from it, are
all familiar terrain.1 The organisational responses to these developments have also been chronicled. Companies have been reorganised
internally as networks of sub-units, and externally as specialised hubs
in distributed production networks involving other suppliers and
subcontractors, often crossing national boundaries.2 This model is
exemplified by Cisco Systems, a company that mediates between
customers and a diverse array of manufacturers of components used
in information technology networks.
According to Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, these trends
are set to accelerate and intensify in the coming decades with the
emergence of the support economy. Their thesis is that the drive to
specialisation has left individual corporations unable to provide the
deep support that consumers need to help them navigate through
ever-more complex arrays of choice and offering, or to engage with
the personals needs and aspirations of individual customers. As a
result, most will therefore find themselves drawn into federated
support networks: fluid configurations of firms brought together to
provide unique aggregations of products and services.3
The same drive to integrate has also been felt across the public
sector. Public policy problems are now understood to cut across
traditional institutional boundaries. As Prime Minister Tony Blair put
it, Even the basic policies, targeted at unemployment, poor skills, low
incomes, poor housing, high crime, bad health and family
breakdown, will not deliver their full effect unless they are properly
linked together. Joined-up problems need joined-up solutions. Public
services are under growing pressure to offer genuinely personalised
solutions if they are to meet the individual needs of an increasingly
demanding citizenry.4 Yet the agencies charged with meeting these
challenges have spent the last century retreating into ever-more
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specialised functional silos, supported by powerful institutional,

professional and disciplinary cultures or tribes that make effective
coordination very difficult.
The trouble is that this increasing interconnectedness does not
reduce our requirement for leadership. By creating new and tough
problems, and undermining the legitimacy and effectiveness of some
of the traditional institutional responses to them, it actively increases
it. But the question is what kind of leadership do we need?
Old theories die hard
Too often in the face of these pressures we look to locate leadership at
the top of institutions. In an uncertain world, we expect individual
leaders to somehow provide certainty where previous leaders could
not: We call for someone with answers, decision, strength, and a map
of the future, someone who knows where we ought to be going
someone in short who can make hard problems simple.5
In education, for example, we have seen the rise of superheads
headteachers and principals brought into failing schools and given
more resources and higher remuneration on the assumption that they
will personally be able to reverse the decline, often with very mixed
results.
In local government we have seen the introduction of US-style
elected mayors, in the hope that concentrating power in a single office
will create more visible and effective leadership. But so far these have
failed to capture the imagination or energise citizens, and in the few
municipalities that have opted for local mayors electoral turnouts
have not markedly improved.
In business we have seen the cult of the CEO, with senior
executives paid vast salaries because corporate survival is seen to
depend on attracting and retaining talent. But as the controversy over
rewards for failure indicates, many such remuneration packages are
only tenuously linked to actual business performance, and in a
number of notorious cases (for example, at GE Marconi) executives
have been given multi-million pound severance packages even after
leading their companies to the verge of ruin.
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Finally, in the reform agenda of the European Union, particularly

as embodied in the recent Constitutional Convention, we are seeing a
push towards a conventionally hierarchical model of political
leadership, with greater decision-making power concentrated at the
centre. As Mark Leonard has argued, this search for some neat
institutional arrangement ignores the fact that the EU is more like a
network than a traditional organisation. It misses the chance to
breathe new life into a debate hamstrung by the false choice between
federal superstate and a free trade area, and could undermine the very
flexibility on which EU integration has depended.6
What is striking about all these examples is that the response to a
crisis of authority is to reinforce the traditional model of leadership.
We seek saviours, and then berate them when they fail. Wherever we
look, our instinctive response to the complexity of organisational life
is to strengthen the very forms of institution, and institutional
authority, that it has exhausted. The command-and-control form of
authority on which most large organisations were built does not tally
with the underlying social reality. It is at odds both with the
complexity of the context in which they are asked to operate and the
prevailing social expectations about how they should behave.
Control, as Veenkamp et al argue, seems more important but less
feasible than ever before.7
We need to take a different starting point.
Leading with questions not answers
In Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz argues that
conventional models of leadership confuse it with authority. In so
doing, they perpetuate the seductive but dangerous myth that
leadership is about influence and persuading people to follow a
particular vision. So followers look to a leader to solve their
problems for them, ignoring their own capacity (and responsibility)
to solve it for themselves. People in authority believe that their vision
of change is legitimate simply because they are leaders. And when
things go wrong, it is the leaders who are blamed and replaced, with
little or no reflection on the underlying causes of the problem.
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To put it another way, leadership is not something you are but

something you do; it is an activity, not a position. For Heifetz,
leadership is about mobilising people to do what he calls adaptive
work. It is about forcing them to confront the gap between the
rhetoric of what they are trying to achieve and the reality of their
current capacity to achieve it. Leaders do not try to impose change.
Instead they make the case for why change is necessary, and
then make the space for it occur. Leaders create a holding environment for those they lead, managing the tension and stress that
change inevitably generates but never allowing them to run away
from it.
This simple insight is profound in relation to leadership within an
organisation, but it is revolutionary in helping us to see the challenge
of leadership across networks. Divorced from formal positions of
authority, leadership mobilising people to do adaptive work is as
feasible between organisations as it is within them, even if the
resources that are deployed and constraints experienced may vary
depending on the context.
The six characteristics of network leadership
So what is it that network leaders do?
Network leaders lead from the outside in

As the Global Business Network notes, many firms think about their
strategy from the inside-out, beginning with the organisations
purpose and core strengths, then working out to explore its
marketplaces and only then looking externally for broader,
underlying shifts that might matter.8 The problem is that by the time
they get there they have imposed so many filters that theyre not
seeing the real world at all. They are looking through the lens of their
own perspectives and assumptions about what matters, not those of
the customers, users or citizens they are there to serve.
Network leaders start from the outside-in. They start with the
deepest needs of their users, and work back to establish the
configuration of organisations, resources and capacities needed to

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Network logic

meet them. The task then is to find ways of persuading other

organisations of the need to work together.
Network leaders mobilise disparate supplies of energy

Leadership is often seen to be synonymous with decisive action:

defining a vision and pursuing it. Network leaders understand that
decisive action may be of little use in an unpredictable world, particularly when the knowledge about how best to improve performance
often resides in the tacit and explicit knowledge of front-line staff.
As Nonaka and Takeuchi argue, finding ways to unlock and
harness this knowledge by developing procedures for the creation and
sharing of knowledge among staff is therefore a crucial leadership
task.9 In this context, leadership is less about decision than
deliberation.
Douglas Rushkoff argues that the real power and attraction of the
internet is not the knowledge or facts or ideas it supplies but the
opportunity to interact with others: Content is not king. Contact is
king.10 The same goes for leadership. Network leaders know that they
cannot provide some definitive vision statement but they can
structure the right kind of conversation. They can create a language
that enables people to cross boundaries within or beyond their
organisation that they otherwise would not.
Network leaders foster trust and empower others to act

But deliberation does not mean inaction. Networked leadership is not

leadership by committee, where the sole criterion for action is the
lowest common denominator. As Danny Chesterman argues in his
study of leadership in local multi-agency partnerships, The first
assumption is that consensus is necessary by all before any
partnership can act collaborativelyWe talk as if agreement is a
precondition for action. It isnt. But sufficient trust is.11 Network
leaders understand that different actors will not always agree on the
appropriate course of action, not least because in a complex world the
correct path will rarely be clear, and stumbling upon it may require
processes of trial and error, and learning by doing.
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By sharing perspectives and building understanding, however, it is

possible to foster the trust and the set of common values on which all
networks depend, and which are robust enough to withstand
considerable variety in the actions undertaken by others. Geoff
Mulgan describes the medals once awarded to the general who
disobeyed orders, but in so doing changed the course of battle.12 It is
a spirit that lives on today. The day before the Eden Centre in
Cornwall opened to the public, managing director Tim Smit called
the staff together and said, Tomorrow, people will ask you for things,
or to do things, we havent thought of. If you respond in a way which
goes wrong, no one will blame you. If you do nothing, Ill sack you.13
True authority, as Capra puts it, consists in empowering others to
act.14
Network leaders help people grow out of their comfort zones

Network leadership would not be necessary if the organisational silos

in which many of us find ourselves were not so attractive. As senior
managers responsible for multi-professional learning in Britains
NHS explained, these tribes provide us with stability, a sense of
identity and a shared language that allows information to travel fast.
Above all, they allow us to maintain our existing routines: Its very
seductive to fall back into old behaviours because thats the known
world, as one put it.15 In the public sector, multi-agency working is
now de rigueur, with local service delivery of everything from
education (such as Excellence in Cities clusters) to economic
development (like local strategic partnerships) structured around
networks of agencies. Unfortunately, partnership is often treated as a
structure rather than an activity, and formal mechanisms for
decision-making are put in place before the different actors have had
a chance to move out of their particular silos.16
Network leaders understand the attraction of these comfort zones
but look for ways to help people grow out of them. Traditional
performance management systems typically reward people for staying
within particular silos and running away from the problems that fall
between the gaps but, as Karen Stephenson shows, developments in
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social network analysis have allowed a number of organisations to

begin to reward people for running towards them. In the public
sector, extrinsic rewards have often proved effective in the short run,
with organisations happy to work in partnership so long as there is a
clear and immediate return on their investment. But longer-term
commitment seems to reside in more intrinsic rewards: tapping into
peoples sense of professionalism, and reconnecting them with the
higher moral purpose that first motivated them to enter that
particular field.
Network leaders are lead learners not all-knowers

Certainty of vision is wrapped up in many of our mental models of

leadership. But in the modern world this can be a dangerous myth,
leading us down seductive avenues that turn out to be blind alleys
think of Cable and Wireless doomed foray into business services
under Chief Executive Graham Wallace, a strategy that may have
seemed sensible at the height of the internet bubble but a few years
and 35 billion in lost shareholder value later increasingly looked
like a great example of what Michael Fullan calls the visions that
blind.17
The original meaning of authority, Fritjof Capra has noted, is not
power to command but a firm basis for knowing and acting.18
Given the complexity of modern organisational life, it seems the only
firm basis for acting is to be a permanent learner. Network leaders do
not see themselves as all-knowers but as lead learners. They
understand that a large part of leadership is about shutting up and
listening. Network leaders make a point of not having all the answers.
Network leaders nurture other leaders

At Lipson Community College, a large secondary school in

Plymouth, the pool of potential leadership talent is drawn very
widely. In fact, it extends to students themselves. Older students have
received coaching as mediators to help younger pupils settle disputes
or other problems getting in the way of their learning without
involving staff. Students of any age are encouraged to become lead
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learners, trained to take real responsibility for their learning and to

mentor others.
Candidates for new teaching posts are asked to teach a lesson, and
students in the class give feedback on their performance to the
schools management team. Smaller groups of students who have
been given special training then comprise one of the interview panels
and often have the main say in who is appointed. Principal Steve
Baker talks of playing a long game through a sustained programme of
activities that brings in, reaches out to and raises expectations of the
whole community.
Network leaders like these understand that leadership is not about
a simple transaction between leaders and led. Instead they reach back
to the ancient ideal of self-government as the ultimate goal of
leadership. They understand that most systems from organisations
to cities to biological ecosystems are too complex and unpredictable
to be controlled from the top-down. Yet they display an underlying
tendency towards self-organisation and order, leading to what Briggs
calls meaningful patterns of uncertainty.19 This self-organisation can
be shaped in purposeful ways, provided we can develop leadership
models that distribute leadership across organisations rather than
imposing it from the top. To align leadership with the built-in
instinctive adaptive responses of organisations, in other words,
network leaders understand the need to nurture other leaders
wherever they may be found. As Sun Tzu put it long ago: The good
leader is the one the people adore; the wicked leader is the one the
people despise; the great leader is the one the people say we did it
ourselves.
Trust, betrayal and network leadership
Network leadership is increasingly necessary if organisations are to
satisfy the needs of those they serve. But the mental leap involved in
accepting network leadership is not easy. Perhaps the most important
commodity for this new conception of leadership to take hold is trust.
Leaders in hierarchies rely on chains of command and clear lines of
accountability to ensure that the right decisions are made, and the
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right people censured if they fail. Network leadership rejects that

model of authority, and the blame games it promotes.
But network leaders nonetheless carry responsibility, in particular
to preserve the trust on which their networks depend. In an
unpredictable world in which some failures are almost bound to
happen, that is a tough challenge. Acknowledging the depth of our
interdependence with others, and the limited capacity of our leaders
to manage it, will be a frightening experience. It is much more
convenient to think that leaders will be saviours and that we have
someone to blame when things do not go our way. But if it wakes us
up to the potential within each of us to solve our own problems, then
so much the better.
Paul Skidmore is a senior researcher at Demos.
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14

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See for example G Mulgan, Connexity: responsibility, freedom, business and

power in the new century (London: Vintage, 1998).
M Castells, Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); A Giddens,
The Third Way: the renewal of social democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998).
S Zuboff and J Maxmin, The Support Economy: why corporations are failing
individuals and the next stage of capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
C Leadbeater, T Bentley and J Wilsdon, The Adaptive State: strategies for
personalising the public realm (London: Demos, 2003).
R Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge, MA: Belknapp Press,
1994).
M Leonard, Network Europe (London: Foreign Policy Centre, 1999).
T Veenkamp, T Bentley and A Buenfino, People Flow: managing migration in a
New European Commonwealth (London: Demos, 2003).
Global Business Network, What Next? Exploring the new terrain for business
(Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002).
I Nonaka and H Takeuchi, The Knowledge Creating Company (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
D Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy (London: Demos, 2003).
D Chesterman with M Horne, Local Authority? (London: Demos, 2003).
G Mulgan, Communication and Control: networks and the new economies of
communication (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
T Smit, Eden (Bantam Books, 2001), cited in J Chapman, System Failure
(London: Demos, 2002).
F Capra, The Hidden Connections (London: HarperCollins, 2002).

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15
16
17
18
19

M Horne, P Skidmore and J Holden, Learning Communities and NHSU

(London: Demos/NHSU, 2004).
Chesterman with Horne, Local Authority?
M Fullan cited in D Wilkinson and E Appelbee, Implementing Holistic
Government (Bristol: Demos/Policy Press, 1999).
Capra, Hidden Connections.
Cited in Zuboff and Maxmin, The Support Economy.

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