Leading together in polycrisis: influencing what’s next for thriving, not just surviving
In brief: Polycrisis is not a set of separate emergencies but tangled ones, and leadership approaches that try to solve climate, inequality, polarisation and institutional distrust one at a time miss what connects them. Drawing on three decades in social change work and current PhD research at ANU's School of Cybernetics, this piece from guest author Liz Skelton argues that navigating polycrisis calls for a different kind of leadership: relational, courageous, often invisible work of building trust and sitting through uncertainty rather than pretending stability is still on offer. The aim is a stance of ruthless realism paired with relentless optimism, one that can hold both what is being lost and what still makes thriving possible.
Today I share the first article in my Speaking the Unspeakable newsletter written by someone other than me. The questions you and I have been diving into together these past few months are complex and subtle, and bringing in other perspectives can only enrich our understanding of them.
So I'm very pleased and excited to introduce you to Liz Skelton, a pioneering practitioner in systemic and adaptive leadership for equitable and inclusive social change, recognised globally as an author, teacher, coach and capacity builder. Her expertise lies in guiding multisector collaborations through complex adaptive challenges, and she draws on more than 30 years of leadership experience, including catalysing social change initiatives in Australia and the UK. Her approach weaves together collaborative adaptive leadership, power intelligence, racial equity, systems thinking, deep democracy and role theory to support individuals and collaborations in creating meaningful change.
Liz has recently embarked on PhD research exploring the conditions for systemic leadership as we navigate deepening polycrises, and it is this research that inspires the guest article below. I certainly enjoyed reading it, and I suspect you will too.
Jean Renouf
Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Anthropocene Problematique, Systemic collapse are different attempts to describe the entanglement of climate disruption, rising inequality, polarisation, declining trust in institutions, and rapid technological change. They are deeply interconnected, each influencing and amplifying the others. You can't take these apart and solve them one at a time, yet mainstream mechanistic thinking continues to perpetuate that approach.
The language we use to describe these conditions matters, as the lenses and the language we use to interpret them, perpetuate and shape our realities. Our assumptions, prior experiences, and ways of making sense of the world shape whether and how we exercise leadership in the face of increased complexity. They influence whether we retreat, react, adapt, or step into leadership, not through a position of authority, but how we participate in shaping what happens next.
This “crisis of relationality”[1] is evident in how we relate to one another, to institutions, and to the natural systems on which life depends. Dominant leadership approaches over time have tried to flatten challenges, separating them out, trying to solve each one separately, to the point that we’ve stopped seeing the relationship between them. For instance, our leadership narratives and structures continue this fragmentation. We paradoxically hold on to the fantasy of the heroic individual leader - the politician, CEO, or public figure who we project expectations of fixing our problems onto, whilst growing complexity requires collaboration, now more than ever.
Thinking and leading systemically is increasingly valuable and essential for these current conditions. Systemic leadership refers to the practices required to understand and navigate the interconnectivity and relationality of systemic challenges. In polycrisis, it calls us to have the courage to not pretend any longer. It challenges the tacit leadership agreement that we can maintain status quo and its illusion of stability and certainty.
This is the landscape of my PhD research with ANU, School of Cybernetics, exploring systemic leadership in polycrisis. At its heart, the research is asking: How do we all participate in navigating and thriving through this next horizon?
(Picture from Eilis Garvey)
I have spent three decades working in the messy, relational, and deeply human work of social change. My journey began in Scotland, working with grassroots organisations committed to social justice. For over two decades I have lived and worked in Australia, now living in Bundjalung Country in the Northern Rivers of NSW. Leading not-for-profit organisations exposed me to the challenge of repeatedly addressing symptoms without changing the underlying conditions that produced them. This led me into leadership development through the Sydney Leadership Program[2], where I first encountered leadership as a lever for systemic change. From there I co-founded Collaboration for Impact, working alongside communities, governments, philanthropy and organisations seeking to shift entrenched systems on systemic issues such as early childhood, homelessness, polarisation, health, and educational inequality.
This involved supporting people’s capacity to think and act systemically, to see themselves as part of, not outside of the systems they were trying to change, recognising patterns and power dynamics, and deepening their capacity to collaborate across difference. I witnessed leadership practised in powerful, impactful ways. Divided communities learned to sit together and explore shared challenges. People who never saw themselves as leaders began to recognise and exercise their own influence. Small shifts in relationships and perspectives created ripple effects that led to much larger systemic change.
Yet the condition building that made these shifts possible, is often invisible, under-resourced, and undervalued. The leadership practices that lead to building trust, developing relationships, creating spaces for hard dialogue, and sustaining collaboration rarely attract attention or investment. It requires navigating uncertainty, competing values, and conflicting agendas. It demands courage and skill to explore disagreement rather than avoid it, to test assumptions, experiment, learn from failure, and remain engaged when progress is slow. It’s often dismissed as navel-gazing, not action. Navigating polycrisis requires all this and more. Creating conditions for ethical intuition; nervous system awareness; learning in public; reflexivity; letting go of heroism and control; Power Intelligence; preparing for and navigating loss; to name just a few leadership practices I’m experimenting with. My research seeks to shine a light on the conditions that enable systemic leadership to emerge and stick. In doing so, building recognition and legitimacy for this often-invisible work.
Living in NSW’s Northern Rivers has given me further insight into what this can look like in practice. When devastating floods hit the region in 2022, I witnessed community leadership in action as people self-mobilised to support each other, with informal networks becoming lifelines. It gave me hope in our shared humanity along with the stark realisation that the cavalry is not always coming. This practice of ‘relentless optimism’ with ‘ruthless realism’[3] acknowledges the necessity to confront harsh realities whilst orientating to sources of hope, acknowledging that loss is a necessary and natural part of change. It challenges us to realise the diversity of forms ‘agency’ or ‘power’ can take, and to step into and use this agency for the collective good.
My research explores how we can cultivate these conditions, not only during crises, but as an ongoing capability that enables communities to thrive. Working with local and statewide collaborations, using action learning approaches to explore what systemic leadership looks like at personal, relational, and ecosystem levels, whilst identifying the conditions that support its emergence. My intention is that this work will be a practical and useful resource, not just a thesis that sits on a shelf, but a resource for change-makers, communities, and collaborations navigating polycrisis. For the people doing the hard, often unrecognised work of shifting systems from within, I hope it offers language, insight, and practical support for what is here now and for what lies ahead. For those of you interested in exploring further, I would recommend reflecting on the following questions:
Do your strategies, policies and future plans assume the illusion of stability and certainty? What would be required to explore and challenge these assumptions?
What is needed to create conditions for navigating increasing disruption and crises to enable ongoing thriving?
If you explored leadership through the lens of working with “ruthless realism and relentless optimism”, what would anchor your work and what would need to be let go of?
What relationships do you consider you/ your organisation/community to be part of and accountable to? What/who else may you be in relationship with or accountable to that is missing or seen as marginal?
If you’d like to stay connected, please contact Liz at Elizabeth.Skelton@anu.edu.au
[1] Vanessa Andreotti Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse, August 2025.
[2] The Sydney Leadership program, Benevolent Society, 1999 – 2015. Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, developed into a leadership development organisation using systemic and adaptive leadership becoming Social Leadership Australia.
[3] Adaptive leadership (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). Prendergrast (2025) and Scharmer (2024)
