“This is the [chaotic] terrain that many movement leaders recognize as their daily reality—navigating systems that are alive, adaptive, and full of emergent surprises. Good leadership here means experimenting, running short feedback loops, letting go quickly of what isn’t working, and gathering information from the margins of the system, where problems are felt first, and solutions are often generated earliest. ”
– Elissa Sloan Perry
Elissa Sloan Perry wrote “Leading in Chaos” for this moment, for our leaders. It takes the Cynefin framework we’ve engaged with at Change Elemental for over a decade (a sensemaking map that helps us recognize which kind of ground we’re standing on, from Clear to Complicated to Complex to Chaotic), and turns it toward something the map alone can’t hold: who is reading it, and what it costs us to do so. The same disruptions land differently for leaders depending on our relationships to power, access, and experiences with oppression, and so the piece explores what actually makes sensemaking legible and sustainable when the leaders doing it are depleted, isolated, or flooded. This learning comes from our leadership development work with grassroots, philanthropic, and movement leaders in our learning labs and through coaching and consulting, where we meet this terrain together to find strategic and liberatory ways in, through, and toward vision.
In this piece, Elissa names and explores what we might call strategic chaos, chaos that is deliberately sown and continuously renewed as a mechanism of power, inundating our attention, keeping us from one another, and exhausting the inner resources we need most when the moment demands them. Meeting this terrain requires more than strategy alone. It requires all of us who care about love, dignity, and justice returning to source, walking with one foot on land and the other in water, honoring many kinds of wisdom, and tending to our inner compass—individually and collectively—so that we might discern well as we block, build, believe, and be toward the future we want.
We invite you to spend time with the full piece, reach out to us to explore ways to partner with us in this work, and look for additional stories and practices for moving in complexity and chaos—that draw on many wisdom traditions, including Indigenous wisdom—in the coming months.