Why do we need to change the way we lead and organise our work?
44 min read 7 sections
{elena’s story}
Elena arrives at the monday morning meeting with her usual PowerPoint slides, which include an overview agenda for the meeting, colour-coded status updates, some new info about demographics (in following years, they will have more demand for elderly care but the expectation is to maintain the budget), and the quarterly kpi dashboard that her director wants to be filled in by Friday. She quickly runs through some of the KPIs ahead of the meeting: response times, number of home visits completed, average case resolution. She knows that these numbers don’t represent the reality of what happens out there in the city: there is no information about whether Mrs. Andersson feels less alone than she did six months ago. That falls outside all the numbers Elena needs to report.
She sets down her papers and notices Jonas before the meeting starts.
He’s 25 and joined the team eight months ago. His master’s degree focused on ways to improve the social life of elderly care recipients. During his first week at work, he stayed late every day to map out the informal social networks around three of their care recipients: who visited them, who called, who lived nearby. He presented it to Elena with a hand-drawn diagram on a3 paper. The ideas were about connecting people at various events held in buildings owned by the municipality. She’d nodded at the time.
Since then, she’s meant to bring it up with her director. But other things have come first. Elena rarely has time to sit and plan, and she spends most of the week trying to fix problems.
Now Jonas is sitting at the far end of the table, turning his phone over and over in his hand. Last week, he’d proposed something smaller: a monthly, volunteer-run coffee meeting between care recipients in the same neighborhood. He’d sent it to Elena in a two-page email with a budget breakdown. Since the budget had already been approved and fixed a few weeks ago, Elena had forwarded the suggestion upwards–but she knew that now was not a good time, especially with the new restructurings, especially if some people might be laid off.
She had talked with Jonas briefly when she saw him in one of the corridors. ”The idea is great, really,” she’d said. “It’s only that these things take time. Keep the ideas coming.”
She watches him now as the meeting begins. He opens his notebook and writes the date at the top. That’s all he writes for the first 20 minutes. The meeting moves through the agenda. kpis are reviewed. Response times are up 3%: good. The number of completed home visits is slightly down: needs attention. Elena presents the numbers with the fluency of someone who has done this for seven years. She answers questions. She nods at the right moments. She updates the presentation based on the feedback she receives. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she is thinking that last week there was a book event and she met Mrs. Andersson, who told her that the best part of her week was when the young man from the municipality took the extra time to be with her, discuss some books and asked her to join the book club of the municipality (whispering, “where she could discuss books with single men from the neighbourhood”).
That young man had been Jonas. There is no column on the kpi dashboard about helping Mrs. Andersson get out of her house to attend a book club.
Now, towards the end of the meeting, someone references Jonas’s coffee morning proposal. It is mentioned as an example of why clearer submission guidelines are needed for new initiatives. They stress the importance of using the right template and storing submissions in a specific Microsoft Teams folder. Jonas looks up for a moment. Elena watches his face move through something (a brief flash of emotion that might be indignation, or hope that someone is fi-nally discussing his idea?), but then it settles back into its neutral position. Jonas writes something in his notebook and nods.
After the meeting, Elena finds herself standing next to Jonas at the coffee machine. She is no longer sure of what to say. She feels there is something wrong with the system. She knows the system is broken. She feels it in her body. In her stomach. But she doesn’t have the time, nor the energy. She needs to update the PowerPoint with the new information and send it soon–otherwise she will be late for the next meeting.
What can I do about it? She wonders. I need to do something. I really do.
1.1Cracks in our society and working environments#
Over the last few years, we have visited and collaborated with many municipalities and public sector organisations in Sweden. As we observed their workplaces, we began to notice some common patterns. The public sector buildings looked good and were generally well kept. They had clean facades, doors that opened on schedule, and people in the reception who greeted us with a smile and a genuine desire to make our society better. Yet, each time we spent a few hours inside, something else started to emerge.
We noticed long corridors with closed office doors that felt like labyrinths. Special cards were required to move through these buildings and citizens were kept outside or could only access areas specially designated for citizen-service areas. People didn’t greet each other in the elevators or on the stairs. Kitchens with tables and chairs were often empty, as many people prefer to work from home since the pandemic. On the walls, we saw colourful posters with slogans like “Together we are building a better society” or “Collaboration is our strength”. And next to them, we saw maps showing how different teams and departments were scattered across different floors and buildings – people were physically distant from each other, with no chance of crossing paths during the week. When we entered the meeting rooms, we found them, as we’d heard many times, “wellequipped” with long rectangular tables, projectors, new sound systems for online meetings, and big screens. Everything needed to present information to each other is there. But, as we and the participants in our projects keep asking, where are the spaces for co-creation and co-learning? How can we organise a workshop where everyone can share stories while sitting in a circle, or where we can have a big empty space for moving or painting together? Flexible spaces that allow different forms of participation and co-creation between colleagues and together with citizens are still rare. And the question is: even if the work places were redesigned, is there enough psychological safety between people and a culture that allows space for shared co-creation and experimentation? Or are we so stuck in existing processes and structures that it has become difficult to free ourselves from them, even though we know this is what’s needed?
Outcome of a workshop exercise, where participants explored what they needed and longed for together.
When we spoke with the participants in our projects and asked them to identify current challenges and needs for change, they all agreed they want to deepen relationships with each other, create a stronger sense of a shared purpose, and open up more opportunities for shared learning and reflection at work. They said that they want to bring more fun, play and experimentation into their workplaces and increase engagement among both colleagues and citizens. Many expressed feeling lonely, disconnected, and lacking a sense of belonging – even though they appreciated the flexibility that remote work gave them. They said they craved more connection and a sense of togetherness, not only at work but also in their local communities.
We deliberately use this image of physical workplaces, even though the main challenge is, of course, not how offices are designed. But their architecture reflects an underlying worldview based on a mechanistic understanding of organisations and workplaces. The structures, processes, and leadership models built in these organisations over the past century were designed for a different world. A world where problems had clear department boundaries within which the same expertise was concentrated, where planning in spreadsheets could help to anticipate the future to a great extent, and where citizens could be serviced in a transactional manner. However, that world looks profoundly different today. And the people working inside these organisations feel it. They know that solving the challenges they are facing demands placing more trust in those who work closest to the citizens. They know that, to solve the problems they are encountering, they will need more collaboration and shared leadership across their organisations and with other external actors, including citizens. They recognise a lot of unused potential – not only among their colleagues but also within their broader ecosystems.
When we look at the buildings we’ve described, we see the cracks. Even when the buildings have been recently repainted. We do not see these cracks as signs that everything is about to collapse. But we do see structures and pillars under enormous stress, structures that were not designed to hold what is currently being asked of them. In our experience, the people working inside public organisations already sense this. What we found is that people are waiting for an honest conversation about what to do about it. Recognising and being aware of the cracks is the beginning of that conversation.
That is precisely what this chapter invites us into.
Unfortunately, the public sector is struggling to keep up with the major challenges society is currently facing. Some examples of urgent issues include climate change, the rapid development of artificial intelligence and its integration into work environments and everyday life, demographic shifts marked by a growing ageing population and declining birthrates, and geopolitical and social fragmentation. What all these challenges have in common is that they are complex, they affect each other and they evolve continuously over time. Such qualities make it hard to solve them in isolation and call for a more systemic way of looking at the world and dealing with wicked problems.
Complex challenges facing the public sector today.
The urgency of the climate situation is already visible: extreme weather events, rising sea levels, retreating glaciers, and people being displaced from their homes. The World Meteorological Organisation* reported in 2025 that greenhouse gas concentrations reached record levels and continue to rise.
Artificial intelligence is already integrated in governments, healthcare, and financial systems, often in ways that make human oversight difficult. Regulatory frameworks and the public sector are lagging behind a technology that is already reshaping everyday life and affecting how we work. A recent paper from Stanford* found that generative AI is displacing entry-level workers in tasks vulnerable to automation, while more senior roles seem to be more protected for the moment. The fact that these adjustments are showing up as job losses rather than wage changes raises a pressing question about how the next generation will enter the workforce and develop professional expertise. Beyond the labour market, the Center for Humane Technology* has documented how AI is amplifying existing social harms: algorithmic filter bubbles are deepening polarisation and distrust in the world, AI-generated content is making it harder to agree on shared facts, and the concentration of AI capabilities in a small number of companies is changing power and creating demand for new regulations.
Demographic shifts are calling for radical changes too – especially in Sweden, where the population is rapidly aging. According to recent statistics*, by 2070 more than a fifth of the population will be 70 or older, with annual deaths projected to outnumber births. A smaller working-age population will need to support an increasingly elderly one. The Central Bank of Sweden has noted that maintaining healthcare under these circumstances will require a reallocation of the workforce into elderly care. Such reallocation might trigger new consequences, such as intensified competition for jobs, and will place increased pressure on finances.
Alongside these challenges, Sweden and many other Western societies are also dealing with a rise in individualism, loneliness and burnout levels. Mental health problems have increased, particularly among young people. The slow disintegration of local communities and the rise of youth crime point to something failing at the foundations of how we live together. Democratic participation is declining, and cycles of unfulfilled promises are deepening mistrust. Ironically, this is happening in the public sector, where institutions exist to support citizens and promote well-being in society at large.
This handbook does not aim to map every crack in the system. What we want to point out is that the challenges society faces today, in all their complexity and urgency, cannot be addressed by hierarchical organisations that are divided into isolated parts, and are rigid and slow in responding to changes in external environments. These challenges call for new ways of working, collaborating, and organising. They call for the activation of the full potential of every individual, be it a public official or citizen, trusting in their abilities and seeing their potential beyond their formal role and title. Most of all, these challenges call for the deepening of relationships and collaboration between different actors across ecosystems. For a more systemic way at looking at these challenges – recognising how they are interwoven and that a long-term transformation is needed to address them. They call for a new paradigm shift that demands a change in values, belief systems, and language. They call for more collective forms of leadership and making decisions together across departmental and organisational borders.
Workshop participants mapping the system from the inside.
Internal cracks: what is happening inside our organisations?#
The cracks are not only external. Inside public organisations, something has also broken down under the paradigm of the New Public Management*. Work is increasingly measured using quantitative indicators – for example, number of cases processed, response times, and percentage of targets met – and with the urgent objective to address short-term results. These metrics are relevant, but when they become the centre of attention for the organisation and different levels of management, a diminished understanding of reality replaces the real complexity and nuances that the public officials face in their daily meetings with different citizens. The consequence is that the metrics can be manipulated, and managers can end up as administrators with a focus on controlling and improving metrics that don’t represent the full picture of reality. Employees who try to fulfill the expectations of this system become caught up in reporting the right metrics while losing connection with their primary purpose of serving citizens and their needs. The unfortunate result is that the mission and purpose of the public sector – which is to support the well-being of citizens and society at large – vanishes into the background, workers lose their motivation and engagement drops.
These results also highlight additional consequences for public sector employees. Many build a quiet frustration over the years: the sense that they cannot focus on what really matters, and that they instead waste their time on administrative tasks that do not create value for citizens. They also feel that their potential is reduced to a narrow and formal role, while their experience from other areas of life, their ideas, and their genuine interests can’t find a place in predefined and outdated job descriptions. When people are not viewed as whole human beings, when the only kind of performance considered relevant is that which can be measured by reductive performance indicators, work becomes a chore to get through. It grows abstract, repetitive, and disconnected from the joy that drew most people to public service in the beginning: the desire to be useful and to contribute to a better society in a meaningful way. The sense of doing something that matters is lost.
In some ways, digitalisation and remote working have worsened this situation. It’s easier for people to become prisoners of their own project bubbles and silos, lose sight of the bigger picture and become disconnected from their team, as well as from other parts of the organisation and the citizens they are meant to serve. Some of the consequences directly affect their well-being and result in loneliness, higher burnout levels, and increased mental health problems. These are signals that something needs to change.
One striking insight from our collaborations is how consistently we observed and heard the same things: frustration, a sense of untapped potential, and health issues. It is not a problem specific to one municipality or team. It is systemic. That is why we asked our advisory board members and our artistic collaborator to share their perspectives on what might lie beneath these challenges and what we can do about it. What emerged from their reflections was how the current system is built on a limited understanding of what human beings are, what they are capable of, and what they need in order to do their best. Changing that system requires a different way of seeing people: seeing them as whole human beings.
What did participants say they needed most? Connection – with each other, with their purpose, and with the citizens they serve.
1.2We are in the middle of a systemic transformation#
Workshop participants engaging in movement as a way to explore trust and leading together.
A systemic transformation is a paradigm shift, a profound change that reshapes our understanding of how the systems in our society function. In the context of organisations, this shift addresses multiple aspects simultaneously. It includes the process on how decisions are made, how work can be organised and how leadership is implemented in the reality of everyday work.
Currently, we are moving away from a paradigm called modernity. The term modernity is in itself quite contested. There is no single definition because it varies enormously depending on who is defining it and from which part of the world and time. Some consider modernity to be humanity’s best achievement because it embodies the progress of reason, science and the comfortable freedoms and services we are used to in our daily lives. However, others view it as a system that has produced great outcomes while also leading to the production of terrible ones, where violence, terror and resource exploitation of the planet are usually brought to the table. This is well reflected in one of the books we usually recommend called Hospicing Modernity. In the book, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira invites us to sit with this complexity and stay for a while to reflect both on what it has to offer us and its consequences. We find this a useful starting point. What matters for us is the practical side: that the particular way of organising work, leadership, and institutions that modernity produced is now struggling to meet the demands of the complexities of the current world we live in. Recognising this is the first step towards imagining something different.
In organisations, this progress of modernity translated into a way of structuring work that made sense at the time. Work was divided into specialised roles and departments, each with defined goals, expected outcomes and clear responsibilities. Hierarchies were designed to control and ensure these goals and outcomes, having a flow of communication to inform employees of decisions. The primary perspective was the performance. And for that, enormous emphasis was placed on measuring and tracking every aspect of the organisation, with the intention of maximising efficiency. The act of planning, consequently, was seen as a tool of control: by setting the right targets, you could probably anticipate and prepare for what was coming next.
This model works well in specific circumstances, for example, when problems are complicated but maybe predictable, when the same processes need to be repeated often, and when the everyday work is, in a way, a routine where no big surprises are expected. One example to imagine this model is to think of a factory. In a factory, the goal is to produce as much as possible, as efficiently as possible, with as little variation as possible. Every role has a defined job that is to be executed through a series of specific tasks. Every process has a recipe. The manager’s job is to maintain an overview of the machinery and the team, making sure that they are maximising production. Deviation from the plan is seen as a problem to be fixed. Employees who follow instructions are considered good workers. This model rewards control and predictability above almost everything else. And of course, for the sake of the example, we are oversimplifying this model.
For a long time, this was not a bad way to run things. But the world has changed. The problems that public organisations are now asked to address – the ones we described in the previous section – are not oversimplified factory problems. They involve people, relationships with other departments and organisations, competing values, and constantly evolving situations that are hard to predict. Today’s challenges do not fit nor can be solved in isolated departments. These challenges are usually referred to as “wicked problems”: interconnected, dynamic challenges in which every intervention produces unexpected consequences, and in which the actors involved hold different and often contradictory worldviews.
This shift does not mean that everything from the way we did things under the modernity paradigm should disappear. Organisations still need structure, processes and some forms of accountability. They also need new skills and capacities that enable them to keep up with the new complexities. This means they need to be able to adapt, learn, and respond to the unexpected.
The Berkana Institutes Two curve model, illustrating the experience of living in two paradigms at the same time.
Being in the middle of this systemic transformation feels uncomfortable. It’s because we are trapped between two very different worlds: the old model is no longer able to provide us with answers, but the new one is not yet fully formed and we are in the process of figuring it out. The natural instinct (understandably and unfortunately) is to be tempted into asking for more of the same – reaching for the tools we already know and pushing a little bit further in our quest for more efficiency (clearer plans, tighter structures, more control). But these ways of working are precisely the least suited for addressing the current challenges we face.
The current problems are complex and relational, but the methods that we apply were designed for situations that were complicated but predictable. This gap between the complexity of the challenges and the limitations of the modernity model is where many organisations are stuck today. Moving forward requires awareness and honesty about the depth of change needed. It also calls for the ability to work on multiple levels at once and think with a systemic perspective.
To deepen your understanding of this transition, we recommend reading two books that offer complementary entry points. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity invites a reflective engagement with what we are leaving behind, viewing modernity as an old paradigm, and Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations examines organisations that have already begun operating from a different set of assumptions, documenting ways of leading together.
Working in complex contexts requires maintaining awareness of multiple dimensions simultaneously. Changing processes is not enough if people do not change internally. It is not enough for individuals to change if the team culture does not change as well. And it is not enough to change the culture if the formal structures are designed to support the opposite direction.
The I, WE, and IT model, inspired by Ken Wilber’s integral theory framework and adapted to an organisational context by Daniel Ofman, offers a way to maintain this system perspective. Each of the three dimensions in the framework points to a different layer of transformation needed. Some are more external and visible, such as the office design or the key performance indicators. Others, such as values and norms that are part of a culture, or an individual’s inner feelings are more internal and invisible. All three dimensions are interwoven and influence each other, so we need to address their interconnections. For example, if efficiency is highly valued in an organisational culture (WE dimension), this will affect how individual employees behave (I dimension) and will be reflected in organisational processes and performance indicators (IT dimension).
The I-WE-IT model adjusted from the models of Wilber and Ofman.
Transformation only happens when we are aware and work at acknowledging these three dimensions. This does not mean everything needs to change at once, but it asks us to keep the three in our mind, being aware that each layer affects the other two, and noticing when progress in one dimension hinders or enables progress in the other two. If you would like to go deeper into this framework, Fred Kofman’s Conscious Business develops these ideas and applies them to the context of organisations.
What this model also makes visible is that the I and WE dimensions (our inner life and how we relate to others) cannot be reached just through rational thinking and applying structural changes to the organisation. You can rewrite a job description, introduce a new meeting format or hang new posters on the walls; but supporting how a person relates to uncertainty, or how a team navigates trust after it has been broken, requires something different: approaches that can engage people not only as rational beings but as whole human beings – with their bodies, emotions, intuition, will and the capacity to make meaning together.
One way to engage people in a more holistic way during transformation processes is through art-based methods.
Systemic transformation cannot be driven through rational planning alone. It involves deep change processes on the level of mental models and underlying beliefs and values, as well as in structures and processes that are, ultimately, reflected in people’s behaviours. In transformation processes it is therefore crucial to engage people beyond the cognitive level – through their emotions, intuition, relationships and shared meanings – to achieve transformation on deeper levels. To be able to leave behind beliefs and systems that we have been educated in and grew up in, imagination needs to be activated so we don’t get stuck in the known and comfortable. Artistic methods and practices can play an enabling role in these processes of opening up, going deeper, questioning existing ways of being and imagining new ones.
Theatre, collective storytelling, movement, visual arts, poetry and music are tools that allow us to access dimensions of experience that conventional meetings and strategy documents cannot reach. They can help a team see its own dynamics differently, articulate what it cannot yet say, or imagine futures that do not yet exist.
Artistic methods provide a platform for people to meet on equal ground, because when a group suddenly moves or sings together, one’s formal job title or expert background becomes irrelevant. Even if people enter the room with different agendas and worldviews, artistic methods allow them to meet through what they share – being human. When people share their personal poems or perform improvisational theater together, they find themselves in a bit of a challenging situation where they share the discomfort of doing something new together. Something that invites them to be vulnerable with each other and take risks together. Trust and connection are built in ways that are hard to achieve using traditional work set-ups.
Artistic methods are also useful when working with co-creation processes that are emergent, complex and uncertain – like any transformation. Rather than forcing something according to a predetermined plan, they follow the group’s energy and the places where interest in development resides. Real change rarely happens according to a plan. It happens when the right conditions are created for it to emerge.
Artistic practices engage individuals and collectives as a whole, activating their bodies, senses, emotions, intuition, imagination and thinking. They accomplish this by inviting people to stay with the complexity and, at the same time, stay in touch with themselves, with each other, and with their environment. By opening access to other sources of knowing and being together, artistic practices allow space for experimentation. Space where we can explore and practise new ways of being together before we can fully understand them, make sense of them through thinking or describe them to others through language.
This is not a new insight. It is, in our understanding, a very old one that has simply been developing in a parallel room, waiting to be invited.
What Dejan points to is something this field is still working out in practice: when the old ways of organising authority no longer fit, new language is needed to describe what is trying to emerge. And when we start talking about new forms of leadership and organising principles that move away from traditional hierarchies and towards increased participation, co-creation, distributed forms of decision-making and leading, we can find a great variety of terms that can lead to confusion. Terms like self-management and self-managing organisations, or self-leadership, trust-based leadership, shared leadership, distributed leadership, collective leadership, systemic leadership, adaptive lead-ership and emergent leadership — to name a few. In certain academic contexts, the term collective forms of leadership is used as an umbrella concept. This proliferation of terms reflects the fact that we are in a field that is still under development, where different theoretical traditions and organisational development practices have developed their own terms in an effort to highlight specific aspects of a higher-level transformation in leadership practice that shares the same ground.
In this book, we use the term leading together, both in the title and as a guiding thread, to highlight a movement away from a traditional understanding of leadership that is attached to individuals, often formal managers, who hold the power within a hierarchy. Instead, we understand leadership as a collective and emergent practice that is shared and developed within teams, between different parts of an organisation and even distributed among various actors in the ecosystem that need to collaborate and make decisions to address complex challenges together. Leadership is, therefore, something that we need to learn to practice together and share. Besides leading together, we also use the terms shared leadership, collective (forms of) leadership and distributed leadership interchangeably throughout the book. These are the most established terms in research, as well as the terms that the practitioners we worked with mostly related to. Self-leadership is closely connected to collective forms of leadership. This is because having autonomous, responsible and self-driven individuals who possess strong self-leadership skills is often a precondition for the individuals being ready to move towards leading together and sharing leadership with others in their team, organisation or ecosystem. We explain self leadership and its relationship to leading together in more detail in Chapter 2.
Based on our experience working with practitioners, we have found it is often not very useful to get stuck on nuances between the different terms describing collective forms of leadership, which academics might do. The practitioners we worked with highlighted the importance of choosing the terms that resonate the most in your context and that the people in your organisation can relate to. Several participants in our projects shared that they intentionally chose not to talk about self-leadership and shared or distributed leadership with their colleagues but instead focused on naming what needed to change in the culture, behaviours and ways of working to achieve the desired purpose and work in more sustainable and effective ways together. That included practices that revolved around self-leadership and shared leadership without necessarily naming them. Whatever words an organisation chooses, what matters most is that they point towards the underlying transformation: moving away from a model where leadership is held by a few people in formal power, towards one where everyone practices it together.
From the old paradigm to the new paradigm: A side-by-side comparison of the basic principles driving how each paradigm works.
What is important to notice is that leading together is connected to a deeper systemic transformation or shift between two different paradigms that operate on different principles and also use a different language. On one hand, we have the more functional mechanistic logic of modernity and scientific management from the early 20th century, which still dominates our organisations today. This paradigm views the organisation as a machine that can be divided into different functions based on different competencies and work tasks. For example, into finance, HR, development, marketing, production, etcetera. People can be distributed into different units and departments based on their competence and budgets, with goals that are tightly linked to these specific parts or silos within the organisation. The problem with this top-down, functionally organised structure is that it fails to account for the complex and interwoven reality we live in today. A reality in which people with different competencies need to collaborate across borders to solve complex problems. A reality in which processes are hard to plan in advance or control using reductive measurements that don’t represent the full reality of things. Today, we need to lead based on a complexity paradigm. A logic where we see that many things are interrelated and influence each other at all times. Where we adopt a more systemic perspective, and short-term goals are balanced with long-term ones. A more organic logic with language describing organisations as living systems in a constant state of change is more appropriate.
The modernity paradigm emphasises separation, individualism, fragmentation, competition, transactional logic, productivity and continuous growth. It operates with a focus on economic performance indicators and treats people and nature like resources. On the other hand, the complexity paradigm emphasises a holistic and systemic perspective, where collaboration and deep relationships, the creation of shared meanings and the well-being for all living beings and the planet are at the centre. When this is translated into organisations and workplaces, the language also shifts. Leadership moves away from being concentrated at the top, universal, formal and steering to being more distributed, context-specific, informal and enabling. Ultimately, this also translates into two sets of logic about how citizens are viewed and treated by public officials. In mechanistic logic, they are viewed as customers, to whom public officials must efficiently deliver standardised services through one-way transactional logic. When looking at citizens through a complexity lens, we see them as active participants and co-creators who find context-specific solutions together with public officials.
Participants using the Photovoice method to reflect on their work situation.
And this paradigm shift, it turns out, has consequences that are beneficial, concrete and measurable.
The shift towards leading together produces outcomes that organisations can see and feel, and in many cases also measure. Organisations that have moved in this direction report greater adaptability, resilience under crises, and deeper and more trusting relationships within teams, between departments and with citizens.
From the perspective of people at work, the impact is visible. In the organisations we collaborated with, we observed lower rates of sick leave, increased engagement, improved well-being and a stronger sense of meaning at work. For example, at Lidingö’s elderly care department, sick leave declined and staff retention improved to the point where fewer external consultants were needed, reducing costs while raising the quality of the work. Colleagues from other parts of the city’s administration began asking if they could be placed on the team or collaborate with them, because the environment gave them energy. In one of Umeå’s departments, survey results revealed that scores in some dimensions actually became harsher – not because things had gotten worse, but because people had developed enough agency and critical awareness to call out what wasn’t working. This shift from acceptance to active engagement is a form of organisational health. When people feel that their contribution matters, that they have autonomy and that they are part of something larger, they engage on a deeper level. The human element, which so many public organisations have lost, returns, making itself felt during the work day.
From an economic perspective, leading together is also more sustainable. A public administration that acts preventively and co-creates solutions with citizens, which, in turn, activates volunteering, can generate a much greater impact using the same resources. In Lidingö, a network of self-governing local communities is now largely selfrun, with the municipality playing a connecting and supporting role instead of being responsible for delivering them. They helped create communities that meet regularly, look out for each other, and draw upon the energy of local actors including restaurants, schools, churches and cultural institutions. From this perspective, the public sector stops acting in transactional ways (services in exchange for taxes), and becomes a process of shared value and meaning creation where citizens are actively involved.
These examples of benefits represent organisations that are more capable, more humane and more effective at the same time. The evidence points in a consistent direction, and so do the stories of the people doing this work on the ground. Because while data can describe a direction, it is rarely what moves an organisation to change. What moves people are specific moments in specific places where something shifted, and someone was paying close enough attention to notice. This is why we have also compiled, at the end of this book, four case journeys with examples on how different organisations in our projects explored leading together while reflecting on their insights, enablers, hinders and benefits.
As this chapter comes to an end, we would like to highlight a few resources that may spark some inspiration. The work of Buurtzorg, the Dutch home care organisation, is a great example of leading together. They redistributed decision-making to self-managing nursing teams. This case has been extensively documented and shows what’s possible when bureaucracy is reduced and professional autonomy is increased. Jos de Blok, Buurtzorg’s founder, has spoken about this journey during a TEDx talk in Geneva and a presentation at the ICT&Health World Conference in 2025. If you are specifically interested in public sector contexts, we can recommend checking out the Human Learning Systems initiative’s great collection of well-documented case studies exploring how public organisations are moving toward more adaptive, relational and person-centred ways of working.
Before moving on to the next chapter, we invite you to spend a few minutes with these questions. You can reflect individually or collectively, using the questions as a starting point for a conversation with your colleagues.
What cracks do you recognise in your own organisation? Which of the problems described, both external and internal, feel familiar to you?
Where do you feel the tension between the two paradigms? Have you experienced moments in your work where the current system clashes with what you know would need to be done differently?
How is leadership practised and understood in your organisation? Does it rely heavily on a few people in power or is it more distributed?
What words do you use in your organisation to talk about leadership, purpose, culture and organisation? Is there a shared language for these things, and does it represent the language you think is needed?
What generates the most resistance in you from what you have read in this chapter? Resistance often points to something important. Where does it come from? What would you be willing to let go of in order to move forward?
Looking at the I, WE and IT model. In which of the three dimensions do you think your organisation needs to invest most in? Why? How do you view the relationships between the changes needed in the three dimensions?
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In this chapter, we have seen that the challenges facing public organisations today are a signal that something more fundamental needs to change. The cracks are real, they are structural, and they are felt by the people working inside these organisations. The world has changed faster than the systems and models integrated in organisations, and the gap between what is being asked of public organisations and what their current structures allow them to do can’t be solved through working hard and putting in more effort. It requires changing how people relate to each other, how authority is shared, how decisions are made, and ultimately how leadership is understood.
Alongside the diagnosis, we have seen evidence that the transformation is already happening – in nursing teams and municipal departments, in NGOs and performing arts studios. Something new is emerging wherever people have decided to try a different way of being together at work. It might not have a clear shared language yet. But the knowledge exists. The examples are there. What tends to be missing is the inner capacity of people to lead themselves before they can lead together with others.
That is where the next chapter begins. Leading together is a personal question. Before exploring how teams and organisations can share leadership, we need to investigate what it takes for each person to show up as someone capable of being self-aware and willing to take responsibility for their tasks and for their own growth. In Chapter 2, we will explore what self-leadership means in practise, and why it serves as the starting point for everything that follows.