Many have heard ELI talk about the importance of everyone learning to think like entrepreneurs. One such way that the most successful entrepreneurial thinkers “do it” is by applying the tools of systems leadership. Put simply; systems leaders are those who can take action while also considering the situation they (and their team) are in, in order to foster collective leadership. In this article from Peter Senge et al., we learn several tools that will help foster my system leadership in an organization. What’s fascinating about these is how well they match up with the life lessons of everyday entrepreneurs we talk about in ELI’s work.

“There is a widespread suspicion that the strategies being used to solve our most difficult problems are too superficial to get at the deeper sources of those problems.” Learning to act like a systems leader, especially an entrepreneurial one, can be an antidote to this suspicion.    

In the vein of entrepreneurial leadership, one core capability Senge et al. discuss is the importance of fostering reflection and generative conversation. In this recent piece from the New Yorker, we read about the “civilizing power of conversation” and how we’ve fallen so far from this as a society.

“As the philosopher Michael Oakeshott observed, in conversation, ‘there is no ‘truth’ to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought.’ What matters, he continued, is the ‘low of speculation.’” Conversation, much like entrepreneurial discovery, is not necessarily about the destination but rather about encouraging participants to delve deep while promoting psychological safety.