AN INTERACTIVE ESSAY
GLOBAL CHALLENGES REQUIRE A NEW KIND OF LEADERSHIP
HOW CAN WE ALL BE
SYSTEMS LEADERS
An ever-more complex world, with ‘wicked’, interconnected, problems, calls for a different form of leadership – systems leadership.
Systems leadership is a set of skills, behaviours and actions that any individual or organisation can use to catalyse, enable and support the processes of systems-level change to address the complex challenges of our time.
Patrick Moriarty, CEO of IRC, explores what this is and what we can do to accelerate the thinking and behaviours that we need now, and for the future.
01
BORN TO BE A
SYSTEMS LEADER
When I think of systems leadership, I think of Vida Duti, our Country Director in Ghana. Vida embodies what it means to lead change and social justice within complex systems.
So, where better to start than with her? And what better moment than the day the President of Ghana signed the Presidential Compact on Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene – a turning point in our work for systemic change.
“Sitting in the Office of the President in the moment before he signed the Compact, there were many things going through my mind,” Vida tells me.
“This was a momentous occasion. A triumph of systems leadership by many people. Ghana had raised water, sanitation and hygiene to the highest possible political level. I thought back to our early conversations in IRC, when, Patrick, you said ‘I want us to move beyond water and sanitation relationships to work with other sectors; beyond the Ministries of Water to work with Heads of State.
That is the only way that we’re going to achieve real, lasting change.'
President Akufo-Addo with Hon. Lydia Seyram Alhassan, Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources and the UN in Ghana Delegate showing the signed Presidential Compact on Water , Sanitation and Hygiene.
“I thought back to my father, and our family’s move to Sefwi Bodi, the village where he grew up in Ghana,” Vida continues.
“For the first time in my life, I had to go to the stream to fetch water. I went every morning before school, placing a plastic container on my head, and bringing it home, filled, so we could drink, wash and cook. In school, there was no running water, flushing toilets, or even electricity for proper lighting. There were similar conditions in the village health clinic. Diseases spread easily. I would see people carried to the hospital, and then carried back, having died on the way. I could not understand how anyone could let this happen.”
Vida decided there and then that when she grew up, she would help change things for people in Ghana.
Vida Duti at All Systems Connect symposium
02
FROM FAILURE TO
TRANSFORMATION
In the early 2000s, twenty years after Vida’s childhood experiences, almost nothing had changed in water, sanitation and hygiene. People focused on physical systems – pipes and pumps and treatment works. They didn’t see the rest of the system: the operators, regulators and policymakers. At any one time, around 30% of pumps in Africa weren’t functioning.
The goal was to build things, not serve people. And this type of failure wasn’t unique to water and sanitation.
In water and sanitation, the seemingly simple task of making clean water flow from a tap, or removing and dealing with faeces, is anything but. Behind it lies a system that involves institutions, infrastructure, regulation, planning, finance, monitoring, finance, learning and adaptation, and human nature (political will, user behaviours). And each aspect needs strengthening to achieve safe water and sanitation for all.
Even in the countries that appear to have cracked the complex dance of people and money and physical systems needed to make drinking water and toilet effluent safe , a lack of systems leadership results in things going badly wrong – such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, USA.
Similarly - ‘the complex dance … physical systems needed to make drinking water and toilet effluent safe’
Since then, we’ve made remarkable progress. Vida, our colleagues at IRC, and a growing family of like-minded systems thinkers, across many sectors and disciplines have grown our understanding of systems and how to strengthen all their parts, or ‘building blocks’ as we sometimes call them.
We’ve gone from what I often think of as systems blindness to systems thinking to systems strengthening and change. In doing so, we’ve transformed outcomes for individuals, communities and our world.
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Yet we’re still a long way from where we need to be.
of the targets for the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are currently on track to be achieved by 2030.
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To achieve SDG 6, clean water and sanitation for all, we’ll need to make progress four times faster than we are now. And this is a basic human right, recognised as such by the UN General Assembly as far back as 2010.
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Systems strengthening alone won’t be enough.
03
ACROSS PUBLIC SERVICES:
ALL SYSTEMS MUST CONNECT
To move faster, we need systems leaders – people like you, and I – to firstly recognise the complexity and interconnectedness of our systems, and their challenges. This applies whether we're working within schools (education systems), hospitals (health systems), roads, railways and buses (transport systems) or other systems. Not to mention the underlying earth and climate systems on which all of these depend.
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Take water and sanitation. Access to electricity transforms economies and people’s lives – it also makes water and sanitation services cheaper and more sustainable to deliver.
Hospitals reduce sickness and allow people to live more productive lives – reliable water and sanitation in hospitals reduces infection and saves lives. Safe water and sanitation means many never have to visit a hospital.
Functioning ecosystems reduce the costs of treating domestic water; human overuse and pollution harm ecosystems and increases those same costs.
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All of these are social justice issues. A lack of safe water and sanitation services is both a symptom and a cause of poverty, and a reflection of our grotesquely unequal world. People without them will often also lack access to healthcare, education, power and other vital services. The countries they live in face major economic challenges, low employment, and weaker governance and food security. In the Global South, this failure of systems is also rooted in colonial legacies.
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So, we need to work not only within, but across sectors and disciplines and throughout the building blocks of those systems: building relationships and aligning our strategies.
The skills, behaviours and actions that enable this work to build coalitions are central to systems leadership. They’re also at the heart of solving the most pressing problems of our time.
We’ve organised a series of conferences dedicated to systems thinking and practice, such as All Systems Go (2019), All Systems Go Africa (2022) and, along with our One For All partners, All Systems Connect (2023).
04
Wicked global problems
require a
shift in mindset
The world is facing challenges on a scale we’ve never seen before. A worsening climate crisis, poverty and inequality, competition for scarce resources, the breakdown of health and other systems, the rise of authoritarian political leaders and geopolitical instability. Add to that the wrenching effects of population growth (in some countries, doubling in less than a generation) and rapid urbanisation.
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These are ‘wicked’ problems. They’re tough to solve because they’re interconnected, and are affected by technical, social, political, and environmental factors. They are not even universally accepted as problems (look at climate and vaccine skepticism). They’re also complex, and adaptive – constantly changing in unpredictable ways. Simple solutions have failed, and there’s often no consensus on the problem or its causes. As the World Economic Forum stated: “The world today is at a critical inflection point. The sheer number of ongoing crises calls for bold collective action.”
I am convinced that leadership-as-usual will not save our planet. It will take a new way of thinking, acting and being. It will take systems leadership: a philosophy and set of skills, behaviours and actions that are defining leadership of public services in the 21st century. We now need systems leadership to be adopted at scale, and at every level of every system.
On 30 January, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 an international Public Health Emergency.
This was an announcement intended to trigger a systems leadership response. Instead, it sparked chaos.
05
What is systems leadership?
It’s easy to be cynical about leadership theories. Agile leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership, participative leadership, feminist leadership—systems leadership embraces all of these. It’s an approach that deals in complexity and accepts uncertainty and multiple points of view. That sees interconnections, looks beyond the interests of a single organisation or profession. It’s about being willing to take the risk of addressing problems that are bigger than us and our individual mandates.
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If I was to try to describe it simply, I might say this:
Systems leadership is a set of skills, behaviours and actions that any individual or organisation can use to catalyse, enable and support the processes of systems-level change to address the complex challenges of our time. It is the ability to embrace and engage with the complex systems that shape the challenge, and to connect and mobilise the necessary collective action, often using new or different ways of working.  
And systems leaders can be found in communities, government, service providers, financial institutions – they can be anyone involved in or affected by services.
06
There are many ways to be a systems leader
At the beginning of our journey towards the Presidential Compact, Vida realised what was required of her: to ensure that everyone recognised the complexity of the challenge ahead and understood the multiple systems that needed to align.
“I began to think of the wider system,” she remembers. “You can’t talk about sustainability without addressing the fundamental factors of why systems don’t work. Financing, monitoring, institutions; systems of health, economic development, and beyond, all need to align. So, I started to think, who could be our allies?”
“My colleagues in the Ministry of Sanitation and Water Resources created a core group to work on the Compact: representatives from their Ministry, the National Development Planning Commission, the SDG desk at the Office of the President, UNICEF, CONIWAS (Coalition of NGOs in Water and Sanitation) and Sanitation and Water for All. They also made links with others including other government ministries – there were eight in total – the World Bank and the United Nations.”
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“These processes aren’t linear. They require navigation of complex institutional landscapes and relationships. It took the systems leadership of the Ministry led by the Minister to connect everyone and to bring the Compact to the attention of the President.”
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The way that you enact systems leadership depends on where you are in the system – for example, whether you’re a decision-maker like the President or those in his ministries, or an influencer like Vida (sometimes described as ‘systems whisperers’).
Christiana Figueres
Christiana Figueres led negotiations for the most important climate agreement in history involving 195 governments - The Paris Accord. Just one of many emerging examples of systems leadership.
07
How can you become a systems leader
The journey to leading systems transformation is as much personal as it is structural.
A good place to start is to see this as a series of discoveries about one’s own leadership, and the complex problem that you’re dealing with. A report by Harvard Kennedy School’s Corporate Responsibility Initiative described these as ‘aha’ moments that give us clues to the thinking and behaviours that are needed.
Our experience is that these ‘aha’ moments tend to be around:
1
Seeing the system
and understanding how all parts of a system are interconnected and interact with each other.
2
Realising the complexity
and interconnectedness of the problem, and that no one entity holds the responsibility for the problem or the solution.
3
Recognising
who has a role to play and the ability to create, or block, change. These include people traditionally viewed as being from a ‘different’ system.
4
Questioning
the effectiveness of traditional problem-solving models that assume clear solutions.
5
Noticing
and cultivating the skills, behaviours and attributes that we need to develop in ourselves and others.
Leveraging
xxx
6
Finding leverage points
that can trigger major change. Looking beyond surface solutions to engage with deeper dynamics like culture and mindsets.
How might we activate that journey of discovery? Leaders describe it as a journey of constant collaboration and learning: adapting their behaviours and actions in response to the situations they’re facing.
So, for example, to really ‘see the system’, we also need to see beyond typical boundaries or ingrained habits of who we listen to. We need to recognise that no one entity holds the responsibility for the problem or the solution.
You might begin by attending events and discussing issues and topics outside of your usual focus. You might then start with small, collaborative activities, that may not make substantial change initially, but will allow you to build trust and experience, and reveal opportunities for deeper leverage points for change.
To ‘question the effectiveness of traditional problem-solving' we need to challenge linear cause-and-effect thinking, be open to stepping outside of our comfort zones, and venture into areas where we may not feel like experts. As Donella Meadows, one of the world’s foremost systems analysts has said: “There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves … to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery.”
You might begin by designing initiatives as adaptive experiments rather than rigid plans, so that you can be flexible and responsive. This also helps you to be opportunistic when you spot a leverage point emerging – whether that’s in policy advocacy, budget influencing, or cultural moments where you can help reshape norms.
NOW
IS THE TIME TO LEAD DIFFERENTLY
Vida and our partners’ willingness to embrace complexity and work across systems isn’t just an exercise in collective action or encouraging people to take a systems approach:
“All of that happened,” she continues. “But a different mindset is needed when you’re working with different, often siloed systems, where there isn’t yet a shared understanding of the problem. We were looking for leverage points in the system – places where a small change can make a big impact. That might be simply ‘sowing seeds’ or encouraging people to act in a more determined way. As strategic advisor Bryan Lindsley describes, we were looking for ways to shift incentives, then waiting for the ripples to cascade. It’s because of systems leadership that more than 10 countries are now on track to develop Presidential Compacts on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene.”
As Vida and I have looked back on the work in Ghana, we've recognised that, in a world that currently seems lacking in hope, we’ve chosen ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’, as Gramsci put it. Vida remembers a moment in the President’s office when that shone through:
“We arranged an official signing of the Compact in the Office of the President, with people from the core group. After the signing, the Minister said ‘Vida thank you. On the day you came to my office and spoke about a Presidential Compact, I thought, this is the kind of leadership we need to nurture. But now we have more work to do in taking the compact beyond signing to implementation. We need more systems leaders at all levels to achieve this’.”
Confronted with seemingly constant and interrelated crises, it is easy to be overwhelmed and cynical. To assume that the interconnected and wicked problems that we face are unsolvable. They are not. Despite the challenges, we as humanity are making real progress. We are ending poverty. We are improving quality and length of life. Not evenly enough, not quickly enough, but we are making progress. There is no reason why we can't come out of these crises in a much stronger place. That, however, calls for each of us to think differently, act differently, and truly drive change.
It's time to lead differently.
In loving memory of
Dr. Kodjo Essiem Mensah-Abrampa
systems leader and dedicated civil servant.
About the author
Dr. Patrick Moriarty is IRC's Chief Executive Officer. A Civil Engineer by first degree and Water Resource Management expert by main experience, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary work on water service delivery and local water governance. Patrick has over twenty years experience of a broad range of issues around water, its management and its use in improving human well-being , predominantly in Africa and South Asia.
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Patrick has been with IRC since 2000, and has held several leadership positions; as head of knowledge development; IRC's country director in Ghana; and Director of one of the IRC's major projects-Triple-S.
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Patrick's main area of interest is in how IRC can ignite and support sector-wide change that brings improved services (and more sustainable water resource use) to all. He finds the most professional satisfaction working in the messy interface between policy, applied research and practice.