Leadership networks: the reality ahead

Science is slow. It took us 500 years to turn Da Vinci’s submarine idea into reality, a century to develop the first flying taxi or the video-call imagined in 1900, and it will still take us several millennia to implement a Dyson sphere. Granted, some areas of technology move at an ever faster pace, overtaking their fiction. This always happened. We tweaked the genetics of animals and plants long before science knew about genes. But in most cases, fiction runs ahead.
Leadership Networks The Reality Ahead
Science is slow because it is built by a global network of researchers without any form of leadership. They share a process, several methodologies and agreed tools to design a better understanding of how reality comes about. They might even share common themes, but fundamental science does not try to reach an end goal.

Technology evolves faster than fundamental science because we design it on purpose, and build it on applied science. It does have goals, deadlines, and we can set up specific organizations to achieve them.

The same design principles can be used to reshape our businesses. We can use independent networks of stakeholder teams and connect them with purpose(s). We can animate them with emergent leadership processes to align local actions with global goals. And we can support the underlying development process with learning tools and platforms that speed up the process, as all progress is knowledge based.

Leadership networks are a form of organization that decentralizes everything but the purpose we want to achieve. Be it replacing your top product, developing new markets or reshaping the organization, we can design leadership networks to outpace any centralized structure in innovation processes. By enabling leadership networks to emerge and take the job, companies tap into the swarm intelligence of their stakeholders in a loose structured way that flexibly adapts to the complexity of its context. Leadership networks are still in their infancy, but so are all our endeavors when compared with their fiction.