Menzies Leadership Forum Thriving in complexity || with Dr Toby Newstead + Professor David Snowden
Nov 10, 2025
Professor David Snowden, a pioneer in complexity science, joins Toby Newstead from the University of Tasmania to discuss leadership in an era marked by polycrisis. They explore how leaders can thrive amidst challenges like climate change and social division. Key topics include the importance of resilience, systems thinking, and collaboration. Snowden emphasizes developing these capabilities through education and highlights the need for leaders to adapt their strategies and embrace a more complex understanding of organizational dynamics.
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Build Resilience Not Predictive Plans
- Leaders must build organizations that can handle the unimaginable by prioritizing resilience over predictability.
- Resilience requires capability-focused design, informal networks, and weaving risk into strategy from the start.
Activate Informal Networks Fast
- Create and nurture informal networks like 'entangled trios' to surface knowledge and speed crisis response.
- Use rapid, organization-wide swarming to iterate responses in hours and identify critical outliers.
Change Energy Gradients, Not Targets
- Map system elements and their energy gradients to see what can realistically change and where effort will be effective.
- Change environments to make desirable behaviors more likely rather than imposing targets and KPIs.
