Complex responsive processes: a new lens for leadership in twenty-first-century health care

Health care is currently in the midst of an age change. Leadership styles and organizational structures that were prevalent in the twentieth century no longer apply in twenty-first-century health care. Leaders of health care must embrace and help others to embrace new ways of being and relating in twenty-first-century organizations.

This paper introduces a new framework through which leaders can see their organizations differently. Complex responsive processes (CRPs) focus on the interactions between people that take place in the living present as the building block of transformative organizations. This paper also introduces the seven da Vincian principles as a personal tool that twenty-first-century leaders might use to increase their capacity for creativity and to develop their ability to thrive in uncertainty.

The power to shape the preferred future of health care lies within our relationships with others that take place locally and in the living present.

Viewing organizations through the lens of CRPs and developing practices around the seven da Vincian principles provides directions and a starting point for traditional leaders to move away from rationalist, twentieth-century practices toward transformative leadership practices.