Evolution has a cyclic nature, clockwise of course. A self aware species develops “leadership and management”. In this drawing I explain how we deal with both in a natural chronological order.

Leadership introduces change after a burst of awareness. It expands into new phases of wellness through the acceptance and co-creative efforts that change entire communities.

Management wants to keep wellness by growing its values out of greed or the fear for loosing it. It tends to avoid change while introducing control mechanisms by building bureaucracies.

Excessive management and focus on growth or risk avoidance tends to blocks leadership out of fear that change affects control mechanisms and hierarchies of power. This unavoidably leads to a crisis, chaos and collapse. After the collapse leadership and change become dominant again with the introduction of new values, making the cycle complete.

When then can Leadership and Management work together effectively in a complex society?  That occurs when the eminence of chaos and collapse is so powerfully present and destructive that management open up to leadership development, accepting change as part of the management process. Leadership and management goals can find a match. The purpose then is harmony and chaos avoidance.

STIR Foundation shapes this by taking leadership initiatives around complex issues. We position ourselves in the field of awareness and leadership and invite top level management officials to participate in change processes and co creation towards harmony (symbiosis). The management officials then have to introduce change through managed routines and controlled processes. Total chaos can be avoided when multidisciplinary coalitions address the issues together. This we call Sustainocracy, the complex but highly productive process of interaction between leadership and management.

Experience shows that bureaucracy is largely eliminated, decisions accelerated and result driven processes terminated in years rather than decades. The pain of chaos is reduced to a minimum and surrounded by care.