When Urgency Stops Working

On Power, Uncertainty and the Practice of Systems Leadership

This reflection was written part way through my experience with the Small Giants Mastery of Systems Leadership, and originally published on the Small Giants website.

Like so many, I began 2025 with an unrelenting sense that we are on the precipice of a necessary shake-up. The narratives and structures we have relied on for decades no longer seem to hold, and yet there is little shared clarity about what might replace them.

I entered the year with a determination to change, without knowing how or toward what. As we move into 2026, in no small part thanks to my experience so far with the Small Giants Mastery of Systems Leadership (MSL), I feel more equipped - not because I have answers, but because I have developed a deeper patience for what is unfolding.

“The times are urgent; let us slow down.” – Bayo Akomolafe.

For most of my life, I have identified myself as a ‘fixer’ - someone who can sense the problem from multiple perspectives, and who is motivated to optimise or improve wherever possible. Creating positive change excites me, and yet this response has sometimes been met with frustration by those who I’m trying to help. Over time, I began to see how this fixer orientation, however well-intentioned, had trained me to remain in a state of urgency, both in how I related to others’ problems and how I approached my own. Experiencing the turbulence of 2025 with this kind of approach was burning me out physically and emotionally, and I felt deeply dissatisfied with the tools available to create meaningful change in the face of so many challenges.

While I have been circling around the discipline of systems thinking for a few years now, in trying to overcome my difficulty in grappling with the state of 2025, I decided I was lacking the necessary frameworks and language to even make sense of what was going on around me, in order to determine a path forward. When Small Giants announced its newest Mastery program would specifically delve into the art and science of systems leadership, it felt like a divine intervention into the year that would fundamentally change its course. What I didn’t appreciate fully at the time was that the real work of systems leadership is a deep-dive into self. As we pass the half-way mark of the program, I find myself contemplating the reality that how we show up in systems shapes what becomes possible within them.

From fixing to sensing

The MSL program commenced in London, bringing together 40 global cohort members over 5 days to connect, lay groundwork and establish some common language for our 10-month journey together into the belly of systems thinking and complexity. This ‘island of coherence’ has become a touchstone and sounding board over the past few months as we have been exposed to thought leadership around the metacrisis and complex systems change. It has been confronting, energising and strangely calming in equal parts. I have become an active student in growing my complexity tolerance, grappling with the magnitude and dimensions of the challenges before us, and perhaps most critically, developing a patience for allowing patterns to emerge, without the immediate pressure to translate them into action.

This shift from fixer-orientation to sense-making has been the most profound one for me so far, and something that feels like the most resilient building block of my journey with systems leadership. If I reflect back just six months ago, I remember days where I was so emotionally overcome by the scope of the global tragedies and atrocities we are living through, that I broke down through sheer overwhelm and the stark awareness that there was nothing I could do to change any of it. I found myself without a map, without agency and without a clear next step I could take to change any of it.

Today, what has changed is not the situation itself, but my capacity to locate myself within it - to enquire, to map, and to recognise that different vantage points generate different truths. The multiplicity of paths forward, rather than a single ‘right’ next step, and the fact that these systems are living and evolving and changing organically alongside our efforts to steer them, has become a comfort as opposed to a threat that is out of my control.

Doubt as a superpower in the age of complexity

The idea of uncertainty is an uncomfortable one, and has certainly been seen as the antithesis of strong leadership in our modern era. Reflecting on the perspectives of one of our guest speakers, Indy Johar, has caused me to reckon with this notion in a different way. He argues that in these times we really have to become comfortable with the ‘partiality of knowing’ as opposed to relying on the illusion of certainty. The ability to hold ideas in paradox, or operate from the basis of partial knowing, may well become the leadership superpowers required to steward in the kind of adaptive and evolving systems change required today. Instead of certainty and data, we will be required to bring ‘tenderness, tentativeness and care’ to the decision-making process. In this framing, leadership is not about eliminating doubt, but about creating conditions where doubt can be held collectively without paralysis.

‍From ‘power over’ to ‘power with’

Reflecting on this shift from fixing to sensing has also fundamentally reshaped how I think about power. For most of my life, the notion of power has been largely conflated with competence. Those perceived to hold power are those who can see the whole picture, anticipate the risks, tolerate complexity and carry the responsibility where others can not. In positive expressions of power and leadership this is welcomed and celebrated, however on reflection it still centralises agency, even when exercised with care. As we were introduced to the work of Riane Eisler, it became clear that a paradigm of systems leadership requires a shift away from consolidated ‘power over’ dynamics toward a more collaborative process of ‘power with’. In this process, we start to move away from the fragility of centralised power structures, to ones that steward the conditions for agency to be distributed more widely, and for trust to strengthen the bonds in between.

This kind of power is slower, more intentional and requires presence and patience as new conditions emerge. It’s not about directing and controlling outcomes, but being an agent of change as the collective path unfolds. Similarly, a collaborative approach to ‘power with’ becomes an expression of doubt and uncertainty being held and metabolised by the group, as opposed to being the shadow of a singular leadership figure. Learning to observe and practice this kind of power has altered how I relate to uncertainty - not as a problem to be solved or a gap to be closed, but as the liminal space where collective intelligence can emerge.

Changing the system begins with self

As 2026 ramps up its intensity even faster than the years before it, I am so grateful to find myself within the container of the Mastery of Systems Leadership, alongside my incredible cohort. While the frameworks and tools are useful, we have been reminded often that the ‘map is not the territory’. Reflecting on my experience so far, it has been more useful to locate myself on the map of systems change and understand the strengths, worldviews, biases and blindspots I bring to the puzzle, and start from there. I am confident that building capability for holding uncertainty and doubt, and orienting toward more collaborative and distributed models of power and agency, will be the foundation stones of a new generation of leadership in these complex times. And that sometimes the most responsible action is to pause.

Applications for the Mastery of Systems Leadership open early February. Learn more here.