Hard Science and "Soft" Skills: Complex Relational Leading

Since the 1990s, complexity science has been utilized as a metaphor for understanding health care organizations and new ways of leading within them. In this article, 3 principles of complexity leadership put forth by Porter-O'Grady and Malloch in the text Quantum Leadership are explored: (1) wholes are not just the sum of their parts; (2) all health care is local; and (3) value is now the centerpiece of service delivery. Each of these principles is discussed from a 20th-century "organization as machine" perspective, a complexity science perspective, and a complex relational processes (CRP) view. The CRP lens provides a useful bridge from the hard science (nonhuman) systems metaphor to what we often think of as the soft skills of relationship building and communication. CRP does this by drawing on philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and psychology as a way to humanize the nonhuman metaphors of complexity science. This opens up new ways of understanding and talking about leadership in organizations. This shifts our traditional thinking of individuals as leaders to a more relational process of complex relational leading that occurs between people within organizations.