A companion for a journey

Introduction#

Where does this handbook come from?#

The ideas, practices, interviews and stories found in this handbook grew out of two research projects conducted in collaboration with the Swedish public sector between 2022 and 2026: “Leading From Afar: Hybrid Leadership Practices for Well-being” (funded by AFA Försäkring) and “Embodying Self-Leadership and Distributed Leadership in the Swedish Public Sector” (funded by Forte). In both projects, we collaborated closely with municipalities, government agencies, and public sector organisations, including Lidingö, Umeå, Eskilstuna and Uppsala municipalities, the Swedish Police, the Swedish Transport Administration, the Swedish National Grid, Formas and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, among others.

Both research projects set out to understand the same problem. When discussing their strategies, Swedish public institutions frequently name self-leadership and trust-based leadership as priorities. However, the gap between their policies and daily work remains considerable. Many organisations struggle to implement these forms of leadership in practice, and there are many different interpretations of what these terms actually mean. As one long-time public sector employee described in a workshop, “This is us. We stand for self-leadership and trust-based leadership. But I have never experienced any of that in practice. What do we mean by self-leadership?”

The COVID-19 pandemic made a significant impact on the way people work today. The shift from the standard 8am-4pm in-office work day to various forms of remote, hybrid and on-site working styles has increased workplace complexity. Having more flexibility and autonomy helps people exercise more influence over where, when and how they work; however, it also adds new pressures. Working remotely and in distributed teams puts more pressure on individual self-leadership, and sometimes increases the feeling of isolation. Boundaries between private and work life, including working hours schedules, become more blurred. Managers are trying to foster trust and collaboration in teams that rarely meet in person and whose members have widely diverse needs and working styles. On top of that, the public sector is faced with increasingly complex societal challenges that are hard to solve within existing organisational structures and processes – which are based on top-down hierarchies – and budgets and goals tied to separate departments that often work within their own silos. The complex challenges confronting us as a society due to an aging population, increased individualism and social degradation, polarisation and geopolitical fragmentation, AI integration, and climate change, among other trends, cannot be solved within a specific department. They call for increased collaboration and distributed leadership across ecosystems. These challenges require us to work in a more systemic way, adopting a long-term perspective on transformation to help us build a sustainable society. The public sector, therefore, needs to work in a more proactive and preventive way, in co-creation with citizens, rather than offering transactional services in a reactive, short-term manner.

New laws, like the Social Services Act (Socialtjänstlag, 2025)* demand that the public sector works in more proactive and collaborative ways, strengthening co-creation between different actors in the system and working through a more holistic lens. However, many organisations struggle with implementation because current hierarchical structures hinder transformation towards increased participation, co-creation and leading together across boundaries.

This handbook, therefore, strives to highlight possibilities for systemic transformation, suggesting how the public sector can move from hierarchies towards increased trust, participation and collaboration by exploring how to lead more together. The purpose of this transformation is to create more human, meaningful, resilient and sustainable workplaces, local communities, and society. However, making the shift to a more distributed form of leadership demands significant changes on various levels. Organisations must not only learn to work in parallel with transformation on both an individual and cultural level, but they also need to redesign processes and structures that can enable transformation towards leading together.

What did the learning process look like?#

The two research projects that provided the basis for this handbook were designed in line with participatory action research principles. Co-creation with participants from partner organisations was at the core of these projects and took different shapes. Each project included a series of creative workshops conducted during a period of approximately one and a half years. In workshops, participants were invited to explore different aspects of systemic transformation, ranging from hierarchies to more collective forms of leadership, through a combination of theoretical study and practical exercises. Participants were further invited to reflect on how they could apply learnings and methods from workshops in their own teams and organisations.

Workshops were designed to engage participants holistically, not only activating their cognitive capacities, but also utilising design and artistic practices to activate their body, intuition, imagination and emotion, while exploring leadership on a deeper level – both individually and collectively. A professional choreographer adapted contemporary dance methods to help participants physically explore and embody concepts like trust, shared responsibility, and letting go of control. A photographer invited participants to practise the Photovoice method, taking photos to reflect on their current work situation and needs for change and development. A poet helped teams to land in themselves and reflect on their learnings through writing poems. Innovation and design facilitators guided participants in working with visual and tangible materials. The workshops took place in different spaces, including local museums and art galleries. Spaces that invoked a different quality of attention and openness in the learning process, compared to the typical conference room and corporate environment. These experiences helped participants leave the comfort zones of their job routines behind and become more vulnerable and brave enough to move together, share personal stories and poems, look at familiar situations with new perspectives, and connect their personal experiences with the larger transformation they were part of.

Between workshops, participants were invited to test and integrate their learnings into the daily practices of their teams and organisations. One-on-one and small group meetings were arranged between workshops to provide additional implementation support. Participants were also invited to reflect on their learning between workshops, taking reflective walks where they captured their learnings through taking photos and writing poems.

The whole process was organised as a series of iterative prototyping and learning cycles. Each cycle commenced with a workshop, continued with testing and integrating learnings from the workshop into the daily work practice, and ended with reflection. Before, during and after the workshop series took place, data were collected in various ways, including the Photovoice method, field observations, quantitative surveys, individual interviews and focus group interviews.

Altogether, our experiences from these research projects enrich this handbook with real stories from real teams, practices we tested in the field, and honest reflections about what made the journey difficult and insightful. Over the course of these projects, we visited municipalities, sat with teams in their meeting rooms and kitchens, and interviewed people across a wide range of roles in public sector environments, always including both team members and formal managers. We met change agents who were quietly transforming their organisations with little formal support, and decision makers who were trying to figure out how to lead differently within systems that were not designed for it. We worked with an advisory board of expert consultants and senior researchers who have spent decades helping organisations move towards more collaborative ways of working. We participated in research conferences, where conversations with other practitioners and researchers helped us challenge and refine our ideas and practices. All of these experiences – the interviews, site visits, informal corridor and kitchen conversations, conference discussions, and focus groups – have shaped what ended up on these pages. This handbook aims to provide an overview of what we witnessed, questioned, and came to understand together with participants while supporting the transformation from hierarchies to more collaborative ways of leading together.

If you are reading this, you are probably someone who cares about making things better, whether that’s within your team, your organisation, or society at large. We hope that somewhere in these pages, you find support and a sense of warmth and recognition, and that what you find here sparks enough curiosity to help you take the next step in your own journey. You are not alone.

Who is this handbook for?#

If you feel that the way leadership and work are structured in your organisation isn’t working – and you’re curious about what else might be possible – this handbook is for you. When we wrote these pages, we had three kinds of readers in mind. The first is a transformation agent; someone who is already driving, or wants to drive, transformation in their organisation, whether or not they carry a formal title that gives them that mandate. The second is a decision maker, politician, manager, or someone who works in another role that controls and designs the conditions in which people work and holds the power to enable change in an organisation or prevent it from happening. The third reader we have in mind is a curious employee; someone who feels that something could be different, who wants to understand what making a change towards leading together can look like in practice.

Depending on who you are and where you are in your own journey, this handbook can help you in different ways. If you are new to leading together, it can help you to understand why moving your organisation from a hierarchical style of leadership to one that is co-creative and shared is important – not only for yourself but especially for the people inside your organisation and the communities and citizens your organisation aims to serve. And if you are already working within the domain, we hope this handbook can offer you new practices to explore, stories from other organisations that might resonate with your own experiences, and ideas that can help you to make sense of where you can go next.

Throughout this handbook, you will find practices that have been developed and tested in our workshops, which you can adapt and try out in your own context. You will find stories of teams and individuals who have already been on this journey. You will encounter reflection questions designed to help you open up conversations with your colleagues. You will find artistic practices for working individually and in teams. (If the word artistic makes you hesitate, we ask that you stay with us a little bit longer. When the work is fundamentally about how people relate to each other, how they listen, trust, share decision-making, and show up for each other, art-based methods are very helpful.) You will also find guidance and references on how to think about and navigate your own transformation process. Of course, we acknowledge that every context is different and that no single recipe will work for everyone.

How should you use this handbook?#

This handbook is designed to be a companion for a journey. Not a journey with a fixed destination or a straight path, but one that emerges differently for each person and each organisation that decides to join the path towards leading together. You can read it from start to finish, or skip to specific chapters as new terrain opens up before you. To help you find your way, here is a brief overview of the recurring sections you’ll encounter, which are woven throughout this handbook.

Introduction to concepts. In different chapters, we introduce and explain various concepts related to leading together. These explanations are based on both theory and practice. Visual diagrams are provided to support the descriptions.

Practices. Conceptual introductions are always followed or complemented by practical exercises to help you apply these concepts in your own work. These are concrete, tried-and-tested methods and exercises that will hopefully inspire your own practice. They range from short reflective practices you can do individually to structured processes you can facilitate with a group. Each practice is described in enough detail to help you get started. Where relevant, we also point you to additional resources so you can explore further along that particular path if you wish.

Voices from the field. Here, you’ll find excerpts from conversations with expert practitioners and consultants actively working in the field, who offer their experienced perspectives. They have been our advisors during the process of writing this handbook and have co-led some of the workshops held for one of our research projects. We hope their words provoke thought, offer insights into how you can work with collective forms of leadership, and remind you that many others are on this journey alongside you.

Voice from the artistic field. This section features excerpts from conversations with Dejan Srhoj, who is a dancer and choreographer. For over 20 years, he has used artistic methods in organisational and other contexts to explore how they can support innovation and transformation.. He offers another perspective, through his artistic lens, on systemic transformation towards more participatory structures and shared leadership.

Movement scores. Here, you’ll find exercises and prompts, created by Dejan Srhoj, that you can explore on your own or together with others in your work environment. They have been tried and tested by participants of various workshops, within different contexts, and allow for embodied experiences of specific topics.

Elena’s story. This section tells the story of Elena, a mid-level manager in a public sector organisation who is trying to lead differently and struggles to find her way in a system that presents many barriers. Elena is a fictional character, but her story is not entirely invented. It is heavily inspired by our own experiences working with organisations in transformation, as well as the many conversations and interviews we’ve had with people navigating this journey. Her story is full of doubt, small breakthroughs and setbacks, because in our experience, this is what the journey can look like. We have included this story because we view transformation not only as an intellectual process but also as an emotional and relational one. Elena’s path is meant to help you feel what leading together can mean from the inside.

Questions for reflection. At the end of each chapter, we include a list of questions to help you reflect on the ideas just explored. These questions serve as great starting points for a dialogue with colleagues, within a study circle or a learning group. There are no right answers. We view the questions as open invitations to slow down, make the material personal and explore what it means to you in your specific context.

Further exploration. Lastly, some sections of this handbook provide a selection of resources to inspire your learning journey beyond its pages. We have chosen not to limit the suggested resources to academic papers. You will find well-known books that have shaped thinking in the field, along with podcast episodes and TED Talks that bring these ideas to life. Whether you are looking for a quick dose of inspiration or motivation, our hope is that there is something here for every kind of traveller.

Voices from the field#

Throughout this handbook you will often see a section called Voices from the field. These are edited excerpts from interviews we held with three senior practitioners who have spent years accompanying organisations through transformation towards leading together, which we explore in the book. We invited them because they were our expert advisors during our research projects, and because they have seen things we have not, worked in contexts different from our own, and developed perspectives that might sometimes challenge our own views and practices.

Each of them offers a different background and perspective. We have tried to preserve them, because leading together is not a static field with agreed answers. It is a living and evolving practice. You will find their contributions placed throughout the chapters, at the points where their experience speaks directly to the theme being explored. We recommend reading them as conversation partners: people thinking aloud about hard problems, sharing what they have learned.

Mette Aagaard (Denmark) is a frontrunner in expanding our understanding of leadership and organisations for the future, as well as an expert on the practical design and implementation of less hierarchy and more shared leadership. As a former executive, she has more than 30 years of experience transforming organisations and leadership. Based on her practical experience integrating shared and distributed leadership to reduce hierarchy in a Danish municipality, she published the first – and now best selling – book in Danish on the subject. Today, she is an executive advisor and consultant for workplaces that wish to rethink their organisations, as well as a lecturer on shared leadership, among other topics, at the Copenhagen Business School Executive program.

Karin Tenelius (Sweden) co-founded Tuff Leadership Training in 2003 with a mission to transform the way we lead and organise at work. Drawing from hands-on experiments in small companies—later captured in the book Moose Heads on the Table—she developed practical, empowering methods to help leaders cultivate responsibility, engagement, and initiative within their teams. Over the years, Karin has trained hundreds of managers and supported numerous organisations in creating more collaborative and self-managing cultures.

Nati Lombardo (Argentina/Spain) is a facilitator, coach, and advisor with nearly two decades of experience in self-organising teams, supporting diverse groups worldwide in the development of more participatory and adaptive ways of collaborating. She is co-founder of The Hum, a consultancy specialising in collaborative culture and organisational development, and a member of the Enspiral network, a pioneering global community experimenting with distributed leadership and self-management at scale. Her work focuses on process design and dialogue, helping groups strengthen relational capacity and shift towards more shared forms of leadership. Born in Argentina and now based in Europe, she brings a cross-cultural perspective grounded in practice and informed by long-term engagement with decentralised and purpose-driven organisations and networks.

Voice from the artistic field#

In this handbook, you will also find a voice that does not come from organisational and leadership research and practice, but from the artistic field.

Dejan Srhoj, a contemporary dance choreographer, contributed to the co-design and co-facilitation of many workshops that were part of the research projects described in this book. He worked with participants from public sector organisations – people who spend most of their professional lives attending meetings, writing reports, and carrying out structured processes – and invited them to instead move, create and learn together by being present with each other in ways they were not used to.

Contemporary performing arts have long been experimenting with the questions this book explores: How do people share authority? How does something meaningful emerge from a group? What hap-pens when you replace a single director with a score that everyone inhabits together? Dejan carries that tradition into organisational contexts. He offers a practice, a way of attending to space, time, body, presence and relationships that conventional leadership approaches rarely consider.

We include his voice because we understand that the transformation this handbook talks about cannot unfold solely on a cognitive level. Comprehending new concepts about leadership is not the same as embodying them. And there are things that happen when a group of people moves together, creates something together, or simply inhabits silence together, that are impossible to experience through language. Dejan has facilitated such processes for many years. Both in the context of dance and in various organisations. He has also seen what gets in the way: self-consciousness, the hierarchy that follows people into the room even when nobody intended it, and the relief when it loosens.

His perspective may not always fit perfectly alongside the other voices in this handbook. And that is the point. We invite you to read it as a new outlook on a different way of knowing. We ask you to listen to what transformation feels like from the inside.

Dejan Srhoj (Slovenia) is a contemporary dance artist and choreographer who integrates his extensive background in performance and improvisation into the field of systemic transformation. His artistic career spans a wide range of formats, from professional ballet to experimental contemporary dance practices, with a specific focus on the development and application of choreographic scores. Through a long-standing collaboration with Nina Božič, he has developed methodologies that translate choreographic knowledge into organisational and social contexts. He is a co-founder of the regional dance platform Nomad Dance Academy and of the international dance festival CoFestival in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He holds an MA in New Performative Practices from the Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH).

A voice from fiction#

In addition to the researchers, practitioners, and the performing artist who speak on these pages, you will meet one more figure in this handbook: Elena. She appears at the start of each chapter, in a short fictional narrative that follows her journey as a manager inside a public sector organisation.

Elena is not real. She does not work in any specific municipality, and her story did not happen. But it was not invented either. Her doubts, her decisions, her moments of recognition and her setbacks are drawn from our years of working alongside people navigating this kind of transformation, as well as the many conversations and interviews that have informed this handbook. She is, in a sense, a collage of what we have heard and witnessed from many real-life journeys.

We chose fiction because some truths and emotions are best communicated through storytelling rather than analysis, and the kind of transformation we explore in this handbook can be a complex and sometimes scary process to embark on. We consider storytelling to be a powerful practice in the transformation processes, enabling us to communicate about complex challenges in more relatable, empathic and meaningful ways.

Elena (Sweden) is a fictional character. She is a manager at a Swedish municipal department responsible for elderly care services. With seven years of experience in public sector leadership, she has built a great reputation. She is perceived as a reliable, structured and people-oriented manager who delivers on her promises while also fighting to protect her team’s well-being under the constant pressures of restructuring and budget cut-offs.

She is also aware, at the start of this story, that something is not working. The system and organisational structures are not designed for the work that actually matters to her, her team and her citizens.

About the authors#

Nina Božič Yams is a senior researcher and leader of the Societal transformation group at IVL – Swedish Environmental Research Institute. She has more than 20 years experience of working with organisational development, innovation and systemic transformation across business, public and research sectors. In her research she combines participatory action research with art-based methods, often bringing together different stakeholders around shared complex challenges, facilitating co-creation and co-learning processes between them. She has led a range of nationally and EU funded research projects and assignments, exploring self-leadership, distributed leadership, hybrid work, new ways of organising in complexity, sustainable future work, future literacy, and innovation management. She holds a PhD in Innovation Management from Mälardalen University, and an MA in Marketing and Communications from the University of Ljubljana. Her work bridges the worlds of organisational development and artistic practice, and has been published widely across design, business, and technology research journals. Before IVL she worked for many years as a senior researcher at RISE and previously across different roles, among others as the director of Center for Entrepreneurship and Executive Development Slovenia, the head of communications at a publishing house and management consultant at Deloitte.

Laura Gottlieb is a researcher and facilitator in participatory design, shared leadership, and self-leadership within public sector innovation. Her work focuses on the design of methods and tools that strengthen relational sensitivity and support meaningful learning conversations, bringing together citizens, workers, and organisations to shape more participatory and adaptive ways of collaborating. She is currently a researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, where she works on projects exploring the future of work and strengthening participation in both civic and workplace contexts, using design and art-based methods. She holds a PhD in Innovation and Design from Mälardalen University, where she also taught at Bachelor’s and Master’s levels, and a Master’s in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in London. She is a qualified facilitator trained in Integral Facilitation, and her research has been published in leading journals, including CoDesign.

Álvaro Aranda Muñoz is a designer, researcher, and facilitator with over a decade of experience working in research in different public sector and industrial contexts. He creates materials and facilitation methods that bring together participants from different backgrounds and experiences to help people reach shared understandings, explore futures, and identify opportunities for change. His work explores participatory design, shared leadership, and emerging technologies, with a focus on how collaborative processes can support organisations and communities in shaping their own paths forward. He has a PhD that focused on the conditions that support successful collaborative design with and through technology. He is currently a researcher at IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute and affiliated with Mälardalen University (MDU), where he coaches students in design research. He has previously worked at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and ABB Corporate Research, contributing to human-centred approaches in organisational environments. His research has been published in leading design and futures journals and conference proceedings.

Credits