Systemic Leadership Revisited: Systemicity and Responsibilization for Human Flourishing

Abstract

This paper responds to the ongoing calls for ‘leaders’, ‘leadership’ and modes of ‘leading’ that navigate the unknown that VUCA conditions create. Ecological grant challenges raise fresh concerns to the scale of the ‘Anthropocene’ – human extinction. In this analysis, Anthropocene will be reframed to account for human flourishing. The growing momentum and focus on flourishing has emerged as a response to the ongoing calls for restoring wellbeing and the pursuit of happiness in work and personal life, placing flourishing as the end of leadership. I will elaborate on this thesis to extend accounts of ecosystemic flourishing to also revisit the way Systemic Leadership as a fundamental aspect of flourishing attends to the quality of relationships as a central dimension. I will introduce the notion of systemisity to account for the conditions that underpins modes of connectedness through inter-being and co-creation. The latter offers a fresh perspective on relational, collective and social accounts of leadership because it explicates the relationship between being human, humanity and humanness which refines our understanding of each towards responsibilization which is a mark of humane leadership. Emerging findings from an ethnographic study of PAFOS F.C. will provide empirically informed anecdotal evidence to illustrate the thesis.