Earlier this year, I published the Leadership Library. It brought together one hundred leadership capabilities that speak to the real, everyday work of leadership: trust, communication, conflict, accountability, collaboration, performance, and influence and so on. The practical disciplines that shape how we show up, how we decide, and how we carry responsibility inside organisations that are already stretched by pace, pressure, and constant change.

The Leadership Library was created to support leaders who want to grow their capability in the middle of real life, not in abstract theory. It was never about becoming “better leaders” in a generic sense. It was about becoming more conscious, more accountable, and more intentional in how we act, relate, and decide.

Alongside that work, I continued to deepen a long-standing interest in how organisations actually behave as systems. My first encounter with systems thinking was in the mid-nineties through Peter Senge’s work. It reshaped how I understood leadership, performance, and change. It gave language to patterns I had already seen: why well-intended actions produced unintended consequences, why problems returned in new forms, and why effort did not always translate into progress. That curiosity eventually led me to complete an MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice, and later into a growing interest in complexity and complex adaptive systems.

The Complexity Leadership Library is the natural continuation of that journey.

What the complexity leadership library is

The Complexity Leadership Library is a collection of twenty-five leadership capabilities organised into five progressive clusters. Together, they form a practical field guide for leading in environments where outcomes are uncertain, cause and effect are indirect, and trade-offs are unavoidable.

It develops a different layer of leadership capacity. Not just what leaders do, but how they sense, interpret, shape, govern, and recalibrate the systems they are part of.

The library strengthens how leaders:

  • Notice patterns and structural forces shaping behaviour
  • Make sense while situations are still unfolding
  • Shape conditions rather than trying to control people
  • Steward how systems learn and adapt over time
  • Protect judgement quality, trust, and ethical clarity under pressure

These are not “soft” skills. They are the disciplines that keep organisations viable when change is constant and certainty is limited.

How this fits with the Leadership Library

The two libraries belong together. The Leadership Library supports leaders to grow skill, presence, and effectiveness. The Complexity Leadership Library supports leaders to protect what those skills depend on: learning, judgement, trust, adaptability, and system health.

You do not outgrow the Leadership Library. You grow into the Complexity Leadership Library. It becomes most valuable at the point where experience no longer automatically produces learning, where certainty feels stronger than curiosity, and where systems begin to drift quietly beneath stable performance.

Together, they form a single developmental arc: from building leadership capability to stewarding the systems that shape whether that capability can continue to work.

Why this matters now

The leaders who thrive in complex environments are not those with the best answers. They are those who can stay in relationship with reality as it is forming. Those who can protect learning. Those who can steward trust. Those who can notice misalignment before it hardens into damage.

That is what this library exists to support. It is not about control. It is not about certainty. It is not about heroic leadership.

It is about stewardship. It is about keeping systems healthy, adaptive, and capable of learning while the world continues to change around them.

The Complexity Leadership Library is now live on the site, alongside the Leadership Library.

If you are curious about how leadership really works inside living systems, you are warmly invited to explore it. 

I still need to craft supporting visuals for each page, but they will come in the New Year!

As with everything I post, this is a work in progress, and I would appreciate your feedback and ideas. Just reply here or reach out!