Practices of liquid leadership

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Practices of Liquid Leadership

Rindert de Groot

Master’s Thesis, Joint Degree in Entrepreneurship under supervision of dr. Neil Aaron Thompson

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Statement of Originality

This document is written by Rindert K. de Groot, student no. 9417982 who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.

I, Rindert de Groot, declare that the text and the work presented in this

document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the

text and its references have been used in creating it.

The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision

of completion of the work, not for the contents.

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1. Introduction

The dominance of academic view on leadership in terms of leaders and followers (Hersey & Blanchard, 1988) and on generalised competences for leaders (Bolden & Gosling, 2006) should be concern to practitioners and academics alike. In positioning the leader within this dichotomy, studies that give evidence that leadership may be seen as the capacity of teams (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004), and views that leadership is shared (Pearce & Conger, 2003) or distributed (Harris & Spillane, 2008) are neglected. Also, such managerial approaches to not do justice to the view that management deals with the status quo, and leadership with change (Kotter, 1990). This, in turn, is problematic in a society that has been described as liquid, in which ‘change is the only permanence’ (Bauman, 2000).

In leadership research, a promising new academic perspective is emerging: a practice-based view. As yet, only few steps have been taken to research leadership within this school of thought. Noteworthy are a forceful challenge to the competence paradigm (Carroll, Levy, & Richmond, 2008) and the introduction of a lens to study leadership dynamics at schools in practice terms (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004). There is a great opportunity for more research, as the application of practice-based theories and methods to understand social dynamics within organisations is revelatory and multi-faceted (Nicolini, 2012). It is not surprising therefore that within the social constructionist field, Weick (1993) proposes a shift from decision making to sensemaking: such a reframing is helpful in dealing with the unexpected.

Much work in this field remains to be done, and this study is a contribution to this work. This paper will describe and analyse a set of various interrelated practices in which leadership and leadership development are implicated, asking the following question: how can practices and joint sensemaking pertinent to leadership help inform and possibly improve leadership development?

As a start-up entrepreneur and aspiring leadership development practitioner myself, I have engaged in an enactive research (Johannisson, 2011) with accounts of narratives, discourses, and sensemaking as they emerged during the study. In order to do this, I have used auto-ethnographically and ethnographically inspired methods.

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First, I add evidence that leadership is a social phenomenon as stated by practice-based scholars. It follows that future research on leadership should challenge the idea of an effective leader or competencies of an effective leader, and instead investigate situations and activities in which meaningful direction is given, by whom and why.

Second, I demonstrate that although there is a broad acceptance of the potential for shared leadership as a capacity of teams, as evidenced by the discourse of relevant actors in my field of work, the lived reality of the said actors produces many impediments to fully understand and implement it, due to a conflict with structure, beliefs, and identity.

Third, I show that dynamics of trust and persuasion may play a more prominent role in leadership development practices. This contribution may be helpful to leaders with more traditional, managerial roles to both better understand the dynamics within which their organisation must navigate in, and help them guide their actions in leadership and leadership development.

This study, a master’s degree in Entrepreneurship, is relevant in its domain for two main reasons. First, entrepreneurship research is often understood as ‘studying individuals or groups, acting independently or within organizations, to create new opportunities and to introduce new ideas into the market in different environment conditions’ (Carlsson et al., 2013) – a definition with a proper fit with my own position. In a broader sense, closer to the social constructionist school this paper is indebted to, entrepreneurship concerns ‘efforts to bring about new economic, social, institutional, and cultural environments through the actions of an individual or group of individuals’ (Rindova, Barry, & Ketchen, 2009). This emancipatory lens aimed at releasing the potential for change is warranted for.

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2. Literature review

In this chapter, I will discuss several concepts that are associated with effecting change in the setting of organisations: entrepreneurship, leadership and teamworking. I will give an overview of relevant literature on leadership in order to point out opportunities for further development.

2.1. Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship research is a relatively young, but broad field. Researchers have looked for psychological traits helpful to start a business. Frese and Gielnik (2014), in a

meta-analysis, found that self-efficacy, need for achievement, and entrepreneurial orientation are most associated to entrepreneurship. Other research showed that entrepreneurs are rather generalists than specialists (Lazear, 2005). Staying within the domain of the company, but focusing instead on the processes within the company, Ireland, Hitt, Camp, and Sexton (2001) classify actions of the company as either entrepreneurial or strategic, and look for ways to integrate these two in order to create wealth.

Several authors do not limit entrepreneurship to starting new ventures, but identify it as an emancipatory force, as do Rindova, Barry, and Ketchen (2009). They see

entrepreneurship in a positive light which open up opportunities for change:

‘We define entrepreneurial as efforts to bring about new economic, social,

institutional, and cultural environments through the actions of an individual or group of individuals. Thus, we view entrepreneuring as an emancipatory process with broad change potential.’

In the eyes of some authors, however, the making of new worlds does not necessarily lead to positive results, as it may lead to both oppression and to emancipation (Verduijn, Dey, Tedmanson, & Essers, 2014).

For the better or the worse, entrepreneurship may thus be seen as a method or process of world-making, as it is described in the influential work of Sarasvathy (2012). She holds that as the scientific method is suitable at explaining the world, another method must be used to bring about new ones through the mechanism of non-predictive control. In her

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view, this is the method that many actually use (Sarasvathy, 2001). Effectuation is

distinguished from its opposite, causation, in several respects. Effectuation uses available means as a starting point, while causation works from a clear goal. In effectuation,

entrepreneurs will work from the principle of affordable loss, while in causation, the risk is calculated. Uncertainty is embraced in effectuation and avoided in causation. The method of effectuation can be applied to far wider context than entrepreneurship alone: it might even be a proper method to educate young children how to deal with the world (Sarasvathy & Venkataraman, 2011).

It is tempting to equate the (general) method of entrepreneurship with effectuation, or to exclusively associate world-making with it. However, some authors propose that in many cases, a mix is used, or another process altogether. Bricolage, e.g., is an

entrepreneurial process with very limited means (Fisher, 2012). Mindful deviation,

described usually in the context of technology companies (Agogué, Lundqvist, & Middleton, 2015) is a method in which a plan is made, but in which the participants keep an open eye to changing contexts, and may adapt the plan accordingly. Based on structuration theory, it has been proposed that entrepreneurs and their social systems co-evolve; entrepreneurial ventures are thus seen ‘as recursive processes that evolve as the entrepreneur interfaces with the sources of opportunity and engages in the venturing process’ (Sarason, Dean, & Dillard, 2006).

The need for organisations to adapt to changing circumstances is often described in terms of entrepreneurial innovation. Garud, Gehman, & Giuliani (2014) propose, adding to the same constitutive tradition as Sarason et al., that a narrative perspective is useful to examine entrepreneurial innovation, considering it as an ‘ongoing process involving embedded actors who contextualise innovation through performative efforts’. Agency is thus translated through social and material networks.

Finding out how this translation takes place can e.g. be done by zooming in from the structure of a group of actors, then mapping where genuine interaction takes place and then discovering the core themes of the interaction (Peverelli & Verduyn, 2012, p. 153). Social network theory can help: it opens op fine-grained techniques to discover powerful relations within groups, that sometimes run counter-intuitively, such as Granovetter’s (1973) with its famous finding that weak ties (e.g. acquaintances from work) are more suitable for new opportunities than strong ties (e.g. family). Subsequent research reveals

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that a mix of strong and weak ties can help entrepreneurship in various contexts (Hoang & Antoncic, 2003). Especially powerful are links within a network that provide brokerage: the interfacing between parts of a broader social network (Burt, 2004).

2.2. Intrapreneurship

The myriad academic views on entrepreneurship presented so far indicate that entrepreneurship is not confined to establishing new companies.

A relatively new term that is used for entrepreneurial activities within companies, and the persons who engage in them, is intrapreneurship. The term was coined by Pinchot (1985), who holds that the intrapreneur, who wants to change an organisation from within with his entrepreneurial attitude, must be ‘ready to be fired at all times’, but also has make sure to covet a sponsor higher up the hierarchy. The concept of intrapreneurship has been established within the entrepreneurship domain, both an activity for individuals and as a strategy or process for organisations, and has to be distinguished from organisational learning and organisational innovation (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2003). It may be beneficial for larger companies, as well as for small and medium-sized enterprises (Antoncic & Hisrich, 2001). Ireland, Covin and Curatko (2009) look at the phenomenon from the perspective of corporate strategizing, viewing individual cognitions and external environmental conditions are antecedents. In a similar conceptual vein, personal learning, organisational learning, and intrapreneurship have been found to be associated (Molina & Callahan, 2009).

2.3. Views on leadership

Leadership is often described as a role of specific people in formal roles carrying out specific functions in organisations. Busenitz and Barney (1997) looked at decision-making heuristics and found differences between those of entrepreneurs and of managers within large organizations. When the difference between management and leadership is discussed, this is often done by defining management as dealing with the status quo, and leadership with change (Kotter, 1990). Weick (1993) proposes a shift from decision making to sensemaking when looking at efforts of organisations to work their way out of serious problems: ‘People try to make the world things rationally accountable to themselves and others.’ Unexpected

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situations, in this view, don’t not make enough sense to people who are not willing or able enough to learn.

James MacGregor Burns (2010, p. 425) distinguishes transactional and

transformational leadership. The former is about bargains and has model values as its monitors (honesty, responsibility, the honouring of commitments), the latter is change-oriented and is concerned with end-values such as liberty, justice, and equality. Burns’ approach is value-driven, but singles out the leader: it focuses on the leader’s moral responsibility to followers, as well as his or her competence to inspire these followers emotionally. In quantitative research, transformational leadership has been found to be an antecedent of organisational learning, as well as of organisational innovation (García-Morales, Llorens-Montes, & Verdú-Jover, 2006).

For Heifetz et al. (2009), leadership is the role to deal with change. The authors make the distinction between technical problems and adaptive problems; the first being problems that can be solved by on the short term with traditional means. Adaptive problems must be solved by changing the priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties of the people involved. One of the problems Heifetz et al. see is that many organisations will try (in vain) to deal with adaptive problems the technical way by applying ‘quick fixes’ to them.

2.4. Competences

Leadership models often focus on either individual competences (the leader’s competences in dealing with followers), or organisational competences, or both (Carroll et al., 2008).

Giles (2016), in a paper in the Harvard Business Review, found a top-ten of leadership competencies relevant for leaders clustered in five areas (see Figure 1).

In the same journal, Gerzema (2013) published the results of a research in which first 32,000 people were questioned to rank the top-10 leadership competencies, and another 32,000 to label them feminine or masculine. Eight competencies labelled feminine make it to the top-10: expressive, plans for future, reasonable, loyal, flexible, patient, intuitive, and

collaborative. Only decisive (third place) and resilient (eighth) are the competencies associated with masculinity in the list.

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Figure 1: leadership competencies (Giles, 2016)

Comparing Gerzema (2016) and Giles (2013), one sees that the former lists individual characteristics, and the latter also includes specific activities of the leader. Others have described leadership in terms of roles, e.g. leadership roles in developing services (Sölvell, 2018). Gupta, MacMillan, and Suri (2004) define several entrepreneurial leadership: absorbing uncertainty, framing the challenge, and clearing the path.

2.5. Situational leadership

Another, still highly influential model of leadership devised in the 1970s, is situational leadership (Hersey & Blanchard, 1988). In this model, four situational modalities of the follower maturity (R1 through R4) are each associated with a suitable leadership style (Q1 through Q4). E.g., when followers are as yet unable/uncapable to perform the task, but they are willing and/or confident (S1), the leader’s job is to explain his/her decisions, and provide opportunity for clarification (Q2, a combination of task behaviour and supportive

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Figure 2. Leadership model in situational leadership. Adapted from Schermerhorn (1997)

This model of situational leadership brings some dynamism to leadership. For the individual leader, this provides guidance, e.g. seen from a context of goal-directed behaviour

(Gollwitzer, 1999).

In a recent article, Goleman (2000), who has popularised the term EQ (emotional quotient, next to the familiar IQ), takes a situational stance in an exploration of several leadership styles. Goleman holds that it is possible to learn how to apply these styles and to know when to switch between them. Thus, he does not associate specific styles with

personality traits. Six styles, according to the author, have an influence on the climate of the team: coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching. The coercive and pacesetting styles negatively impact team climate; the others positively.

2.6. Flat leadership in teams

Day, Gronn, and Salas (2004), using an IMOI (inputs, mediators, outcomes, inputs)

framework, describe leadership as an outcome of teamwork and team learning, providing resources for change and higher performance, as a complement to leadership as input to team processes and performance. In other words, they position a new conceptualisation of

R4 R3 R2 R1 Able and willing or confident Able but unwilling or insecure Unable but willing or confident Unable and unwilling or insecure

HIGH Follower Maturity LOW

HIGH HIGH LOW Suppo rt iv e Re lat ion s hip Be h av iou r Task Behaviour D i r e c t i v e Share ideas and facilitate in making decisions

Explain your decisions and provide opportunity for clarification Provide specific instructions and closely supervise performance Turn over responsibility for decisions and implementation Q3 Q2 Q4 Q1 Low rel.

Low task High taskLow rel.

High task High rel. High rel.

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horizontal, flat leadership in a feedback loop next to existing, possibly more hierarchically oriented forms of leadership. In their dynamic model, team learning is the antecedent for leadership capacity within teams (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Team leadership cycle (Day et al., 2004, p. 862)

Day et al. make reference to an earlier model by Zaccaro, Rittman, and Marks (2001) who define leadership as an input to team competence. Their lens of ‘functional leadership’ allows for the leader to take on any role, and carry out any function, that is not yet being handled adequately by the group. There are four dimensions of the leader’s behaviour: searching and structuring information, using information for problem solving, managing personnel resources and managing material resources).

Day et al. name several strategies that can be used to train and develop the team, some of which have both a team and an individual dimension: e.g. cross training

(performing other team members’ roles), self-guided correction training (self-monitoring and self-categorising of behaviour), and scenario-based team training.

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2.7. Shared and distributed leadership

In his influential work on the evolution of organisations, Laloux (2014) describes how modern (in his colour coding ‘cyan’) organisations evolve in which self-management replaces the traditional management pyramid of the preceding (orange) model, and in which workers participate from the wholeness of their being in the organisation, which itself can be seen as a living organism. Leadership has thus been drastically decentralised. The transition from ‘orange’ to ‘cyan’ can be compared to Heimans’ and Timms’ stance on power (2018), in which ‘old power’ is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven, and ‘new power’ is the power of many; it is participatory, open, peer-driven, and often leaderless.

Shared leadership, according to Pearce and Conger (2003), requires a reframing of leadership: rather than the traditional understanding of leadership as a downward influence on subordinates, shared leadership is broadly distributed among individuals, and is defined by the authors as a ‘dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in work groups in which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group goals’ (2003, p. 286).

Distributed leadership, a concept which is sometimes used interchangeably with shared leadership, e.g. by Day et al. (2004), has been around for some 20 years. In an early desk review (Bennett, Wise, Woods, & Harvey, 2003), distributed leadership is proposed to highlight leadership as an emergent property of a group or network of interacting

individuals, suggesting an openness of the boundaries of leadership, and the distribution of expertise across many (rather than just a few) people.

A recent meta-analysis (Tian, Risku, & Collin, 2016) proceeds on the findings of the earlier desk review. The authors propose a working definition of distributed leadership, in order to focus both application and research of distributed leadership:

‘This article proposes that distributed leadership be defined and studied in terms of leadership as a process that comprises both organisational and individual scopes; the former regards leadership as a resource and the latter as an agency. Both resource and agency are considered to emerge and exist at all organisational levels’ (Tian et al., 2016, p. 156).

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2.8. Team effectiveness

What is it the leaders (in the traditional sense as bosses, or with leadership evenly shared) try and accomplish? Surely, in some way or another, leadership should contribute to the effectiveness of the team. What factors come into play? Salas, Stagle, and Burke (2004) note that after 25 years of research into team effectiveness, many theories and frameworks now exist, but that researchers urgently need to get out of the lab and ‘into the wild’. They also note that practitioners and researchers need to understand much more about the

composition, development and management of teams.

Salas, Sims, and Burke (2005) come up with a Big Five: five core components that promote team effectiveness: team leadership, mutual performance monitoring, backup behaviour, adaptability, and team orientation; supported by coordinating mechanisms: shared mental modes, closed-loop communication, and mutual trust. Team leadership is defined as the ‘ability to direct and coordinate the activities of other team members, assess team performance, assign tasks, develop team knowledge, skills, and abilities, motivate team members, plan and organize, and establish a positive atmosphere’. Team orientation, the only ‘attitudinal’ factor of the Big Five, encompasses the propensity of team members to take others’ behaviour into account, and the belief in the importance of team goals over individual members’ goals.

Extensive research into the same domain has been done by Google on this issue, codenamed ‘Aristotle’. Although no academic sources report on their work, the involvement of a huge number of specialists from several backgrounds (statisticians, organisational psychologists, sociologists and engineers) is impressive, and the results were widely published in the press (Duhigg, 2016). The research team inductively looked for patterns that could explain why one team is more effective than the other. Understanding and influencing group norms, both explicit and implicit, was the way to make change (‘raising a team’s collective IQ’). The groups varied much. Both groups with a strong leader and groups with distributed leadership could be effective. The research time came up with a Big Five of their own. As one of their researchers report (Rozovsky, 2015):

1. Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?

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3. Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? 4. Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for

each of us?

5. Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters? The first factor proved to be essential, the precondition for all of the others (Duhigg, 2016). A pattern emerged in which groups with ‘equal conversational turn-taking’ (each person talking roughly the same amount of time), and groups with a high ‘social sensitivity’, were most effective. The ‘social’ factor stood out as an enabler. In other words, optimising for peak individual efficiency is not the way forward to optimise the team’s performance, but rather the ‘social’ elements to teamwork.

Both social factors amount, according to Google’s researchers, to what Amy Edmondson (1999) has dubbed psychological safety, a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. ‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’ In her empirical study, Edmondson finds that learning behaviour mediates between team psychological safety and team performance.

In later research, Edmondson, Kramer, and Cook (2004) elaborate on the concept, and distinguish it from interpersonal trust. Psychological safety is about the

micro-behavioural decisions by individuals, a continuous ‘tacit calculus’ as to the question if their behaviour will cause them to be hurt, embarrassed or criticised. The significant level of interpersonal risk taken is a prerequisite of a high level of organisational learning. The leader should be available and approachable, explicitly invite input and feedback, and be a role-model of openness and fallibility. Trust (by lowering transaction costs) and respect within a horizontal group promote its psychological safety.

Trust as a concept does not need to be based on lowering of transaction costs alone: it may find its basis in ‘prosocial motivation’ which enhances the effect of intrinsic

motivation in allowing for creativity, by such mechanisms as perspective taking (Grant & Berry, 2011).

In a qualitative evaluation, Khodyakov (2007) analyses the relationship between trust and control in the creative process of the conductor-less Orpheus orchestra. Control, Khodyakov argues, may reduce organisational risk, but can only do so effectively if the

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outcomes are measurable and behaviours predictable. If not, trust must come first. Khodyakov understands trust as positive expectations about others’ behaviour facing uncertainty, arising from goodwill and competence. He describes it as a process as well, in which decision making takes place:

‘Each musician is constantly faced with the dilemma of whether he or she should persuade the orchestra to follow his or her suggestion or defer to the group’s interpretation of the music.’

Khodyakov describes trust in action in a specific context of a highly creative team as continuous, reciprocal persuasion. In order for such process to work, both the process of listening and of feedback is essential. As to listening, it has been demonstrated that it may have a positive effect on a person’s ability to influence others (Ames, Maissen, & Brockner, 2012).

Whether team diversity stimulates the effectiveness performance of teams, does not follow from the research listed so far. It is said to be a hotly debated topic without as yet a clear outcome (van Gelderen, 2017). Homogenous teams might induce immediate trust and understanding, since the members are more alike; heterogenous teams can bring a wider set of resources to the team. From cybernetics, the Law of Requisite Variety has been devised that prescribe that bodies must be as diverse as their environment (Ashby, 1957, p. 206). For teams, the implication is that in order to meet external challenges, the team must internally comprise just such a diversity. Reality is more complicated than this rule of thumb. It is useful to look at different forms of diversity. Harrison and Klein (2007) make a

distinction between three different types of diversity: separation, variety, and disparity. The authors review the hypothesis that team effectiveness is at its highest with minimal to moderate separation, high variety and minimal to moderate disparity. Thus, there is some conflict (separation) which stimulates that team members don’t take their position or information for granted, a high diversity in the input that team members bring to the team (variety), and differences of power (disparity) that may bring a team out of deadlock in urgent cases. A specific problem concerning the link between leadership and team diversity is that leaders are more likely to positively rate members which are similar to them, and that they can be stuck in their first impressions because they process information selectively

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(Levi, 2014, p. 675). This may lead to groupthink (failing to recognise alternatives due to the homogenous composition of a team) or group-polarisation (taking more extreme decisions than the individuals would have done) (van Gelderen, 2017).

2.9. Practice theory

The ‘practice turn’ (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001) describes how the social

sciences, and several related disciplines, have taken on the study of practices. No longer, say the proponents (often from the constructionist school of thought) is either individual

behaviour or structure leading. Instead, practices are ‘non-individualist’: social life consists of a ‘nexus’ of human practices that must be sliced up to the smallest practice, and then bundled again (Schatzki, 2005).

Practice theory has been applied to work and organisation (Nicolini, 2012). Recently, an agenda for research into entrepreneurship as a practice (EAP) was launched (Thompson, Gartner, & Teague, 2017), and Johannisson (2011) called for a practice theory on

entrepreneuring.

Some first steps have been taken to also define leadership as a practice, challenging the competency paradigm (Carroll et al., 2008). In the context of distributed leadership at a school, Spillane, Halverson, and Diamond (2004) argue that leadership research too often stresses the micro- and macro-leadership behaviours and styles, and that instead,

leadership should be seen as ‘the activities engaged in by leaders, in interaction with others in particular contexts around specific tasks’. In their conceptual model, leadership can best be understood as a practice distributed over leaders, followers, and their situation.

2.10. Gaps and problems

In this section, I will first address the problematic conceptualisation of leadership and related concepts. Second, I will go into the problem that much of the literature offers generalised insights, which offer little guidance to academics and practitioners alike. I will then discuss the overarching problem with the research: not enough is zoomed in on what leadership genuinely means in the everyday lived realities of people engaging in leadership or leadership development.

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2.10.1. Conceptual problems

First, we will go into the various conceptualisations of leadership, leaders, followers, managing, and entrepreneurship.

The concepts of leadership contradict one another. Hersey and Blanchard (1988) assume a dichotomy of the leader and the follower, and speak directly to the former in terms of managing the latter. Leadership as seen by Heifetz et al. (2009), as well as by Burns (2010), does not deny this dichotomy, but provide one of their own, between a standard type of leadership and one more advanced that is suitable to solve complex problems, adaptive leadership and transformational leadership respectively. Hersey and Blanchard’s (1988) apparent equation of leadership with management is problematic because the desired actions of the leader in their model are based solely on the capacities and

motivations of the followers, whereas the environment is static. Situational leadership thus fails to address that ‘leadership is about change’ (Kotter, 1990). Heifetz et al. (2009) and Burns (2010) do not deny this, but their dichotomies might underestimate that some problems combine the need to preserve the status quo (keeping the company afloat, e.g.), and dealing with change.

All three lines of thought are problematic for another conceptual reason. By

providing a ‘handbook’ to leaders who want to be effective, they neglect the possibility that meaningful leadership might exist as a social phenomenon, as a capacity of teams as

evidenced by Day et al. (2004) or as a practice, as do Carroll et al. (2008). Reversely, the latter authors seem to fail to grasp the reality that many people call themselves leaders (they go, e.g., to leadership seminars) and are seen as such by people within or without their organisation, and that many those have formal roles (as evidenced, e.g. by their job title or status of entrepreneur) that enforce this identification.

In other words: leadership in literature is often reduced to a role performed by a leader who is recognised as such, or an intangible driver of team efficacy or team

effectiveness. These forms of ‘bottom-up leadership’ and ‘top-down leadership’ are poorly connected. This link needs to be strengthened. There are various questions to address. How does leadership as a social phenomenon link conceptually with formal hierarchy? And more importantly, how strong must definitions need to be, in order not to miss the bigger

picture? A concept that provides a link between bottom-up and top-down leadership, is intrapreneurship. In literature, however this concept is itself mostly described either from

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the individual or the company perspective. How real-life intrapreneuring processes or the behaviours of individual intrapreneurs are linked to various interpretations of leadership, is insufficiently researched.

2.10.2. Generalised approaches

We will now turn to the second area of gaps and problems: the stress on generalised approaches.

The competency framework is used widely in leadership science and leadership development programme, but may ‘breed conformity to a standardized and unfocused leadership model’ (Carroll et al., 2008). Bolden and Gosling (2006) have called the ‘myopic stress’ on competences a ‘repeating refrain that continues to offer an illusory promise to rationalize and simplify the processes of selecting, measuring and developing leaders, yet only reflects a fragment of the complexity that is leadership’, for it is reductionist, disregards situation, individuals or task, is oriented towards past and present rather than the future, lacks a stress on subtle interaction, and as a result, has led to a mechanistic approach to education. They argue for a more discursive approach instead.

The rather mechanistic approach to leadership favoured by e.g. Hersey & Blanchard (1988), is indicative of a solid means-end logic (Chia, 2004) that reduces the power of their model to be helpful in a real context. Apart from unhelpfully viewing the environment as static, as stated above, the model is problematic for two more reasons. Firstly, it is firmly based on the dichotomy of the leader and the follower, and will therefore describe

leadership in instances of worker self-management as a benevolent absence of the leader. Secondly, it informs the leader of individual preferred actions as an outcome, thus

neglecting the social nature of leadership. Thirdly, there is no distinction of the type of challenge the leader is facing.

In contrast, Buckingham (2012), commenting on existing leadership development programmes, argues that ‘in the age of the algorithm’, looking for such standardised approaches it outdated. He answers the following question affirmatively:

A best-practice model exists. Once we discover it and turn it into a formula, development is just a matter of bringing you in line with that formula.

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But could it be otherwise? Should leadership development instead be tailored to individuals?

By being largely based on best practices of the past, generalised lessons for the future may lack usefulness, especially in rapidly changing environments. When a practitioner takes part in a leadership development programme based on theory of Heifetz et al. (2009), he or she take the instructions at value, but interprets them in the relevant context. It is exactly that process, arguably a central element in the actual process of leadership, that the theory fails to properly address. Similarly, Hersey & Blanchard’s (1988) relies heavily on the individual who makes a choice based on a given situation. It cannot deal with situations which emerge as a social process in which the leader is actively taking part, and may change accordingly: it just lacks the subtlety.

Comparing the leadership competences mentioned by Gerzema (2013) and Giles (2016), one must notice that the differences between the two sets are huge. This is partly due to their different methods (Gerzema asked the general population, Giles asked the leaders), but may also indicate a deeper problem with singling out specific characteristics. Together they paint an idealised image of a non-existent leader, who, in Giles’ list, combines ‘having high ethical and moral standards’ with an openness ‘to new ideas and approaches’. These two ‘competences’ can firstly hardly be compared, and secondly, as a series of prescriptions they are a poor input for leadership development training or for rigorous further academic research. At best, they may exemplify the discourse on leadership.

As to the effectiveness of teams and the role of leadership in it, we may look back at the Big Five of core components by Salas et al. (2005) and Google’s Aristotle project

(Rozovsky, 2015) which share a safe environment (‘mutual trust’ in the first case,

‘psychological safety’ in the latter). In the Big Five, team leadership is a separate element, but in real situations, leadership is entangled with the other challenges. The Aristotle project, although we may assume it to be based on too much data to ignore, fails to mention the role of leadership at all.

Likewise, the model of leadership as a capacity of teams proposed by Day et al. (2004) lacks a link between leader resources (knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals), a moderator for the process in which team member resources (input) lead to teamwork, on the one hand, and team leadership capacity on the other. Leadership seems to have

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bifurcated into an individual and a group type. Interestingly, as team leadership capacity (sharedness, skills, abilities) translates into team member resources, social capital is transformed into human capital. One might argue that skills and abilities are meaningless without a social perspective, and therefore that team member resources and team leadership capacity may amount to the same thing.

Zaccaro et al.’s (2001) dimensions of the behaviour of leaders are managerial in nature: leadership’s role in altering the team’s course are not taken into account. Importantly, the work by Day et al. and Zaccaro et al. open up the possibility to look at leadership in terms of dynamic roles, as well as a dynamic capability of teams.

Fiedler (1970), back in the day, thoroughly tried to establish a link between

experience as a supervisor, and organisational efficacy. He found none, and concluded that experience can only be beneficial if the organisation provides ‘appropriate and timely feedback on the consequences of his managerial behaviour and decisions’.

2.10.3. Lack of detail

The third gap in the present theory is the lack of fine-grained detail of what leadership signifies in real-life contexts. There is a need for ‘nitty-gritty’ (Chia, 2004) research. A review of 25 years of research into team effectiveness indicated that researches need to go out ‘into the wild’ more (Salas et al., 2004). They have done so remarkably little in the field of leadership: the research into leadership-as-a-practice thus far seems to be limited to articles by Carroll et al. (2008) and Spillane (2004). Only recently, there has been a call to move towards a practice theory of entrepreneuring (Johannisson, 2011).

The need to engage in real-life, fine-grained research, is illustrated by Gartner (1988) who said that asking ‘who is an entrepreneur’ is posing the wrong question. He points at the study of human behaviour, stating that it is more fruitful in understanding what

entrepreneuring is about than studying character traits. says in order to for

entrepreneurship training and science to have understand entrepreneurship, one must ask many questions on the activities of many people pursuing various goals.

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3. Theoretical framework

In this paper, I use practice theory as the main theoretical framework. Since it studies the nitty-gritty details of processes in their contexts, it will be a useful framework to research leadership strategies as they take place in real life (Carroll et al., 2008).

Several versions of practice theory exist, based on the thinking of, amongst others, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Bourdieu; we could therefore speak of practice theories (Nicolini, 2012). They all share that their lens is primarily on practices, ways of doing things collectively.

3.1. Practices

A practice, as theorised by Schatzki (2005), is an ‘organized, open ended spatial-temporal manifold of actions’: an organised human activity such as cooking a stew or running a shop, which is organised by understanding, rules, and teleo-affective structure. Understanding can be further broken down into practical understanding and general understanding (Nicolini, 2012, p. 165). Practical understanding links actions within a practice through the mutual intelligibility of the participants, in other words: they represent the know-how of the competent members of the practice. General understandings provide the practice with its identity in the form of reflexive understandings. Explicit rules keep the practice together by providing programmes of action that connect activities in the practice (tasks and projects) in complex arrangements. Teleo-affective structure provides purpose and oughtness through instruction, correction and repetition.

Practices are continuously and relationally performed (Thompson et al., 2017, p. 14). This calls for another basic unit analysis than the individual. Nicolini (2011) proposes

therefore to shift the basic unit of analysis in the study of organisational knowledge from individuals and their actions to practices and their relationships. He proposes to do this by ‘taking bundles of real-time practices and their relationships to be the site in which, and through which, knowing manifests itself’. This calls for inductive research with attention to detail.

An individual in practice theory is a ‘homo practicus’: he acts in response to what he thinks makes sense for him to do given his situation (Schatzki, 2016). Sensemaking is a social process, which is much akin to organising in the social constructionist sense, which may be

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understood as the process of reducing equivocality by actors in social interaction for joint performance (Peverelli & Verduyn, 2012, p. 14). As a consequence, sensemaking is ‘about the interplay of action and interpretation rather than the influence of evaluation on choice’ (K. Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Not surprisingly, Weick (2009, p. 49) argued that a person ‘is a better leader when he views himself a sensemaker rather than as the decider’.

In practice theory, relations between people are usually seen as a ‘flat ontology’ (Schatzki, 2016). When using practice theory, we should thus make sure not to turn a blind eye to existing social hierarchies if they are relevant in discourse or of other consequence to the practice.

A way to recursively connect the individual and the institutional, or the subjective and the objective, is Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, an intermediate concept enabling practices that may describe mental dispositions and know-how (Nicolini, 2012, p. 55). 3.2. Knowing

Among practice theorists, some far-reaching views are posited on the ontology of knowing. Nicolini (2011) considers practicing and knowing ontologically equivalent. This has

consequences for learning: it is a mode of participation in the social world (Nicolini, 2012). Practice theory does not, however, provide a clear account when changes (in e.g. habitus) take place and if they are abrupt or incremental. That comes at no surprise: practice theory, leaning heavily on Bourdieu’s thinking, understands reproduction better than it does

transformation (Nicolini, 2012, p. 68). It is usually more concerned with agency than with structure, and will describe it inductively as an emergent phenomenon. However, there are possibilities to bridge the strict gap between agency and structure, e.g. using a Bourdieuan relational perspective (Tatli, Vassilopoulou, Özbilgin, Forson, & Slutskaya, 2014, p. 622). Such an approach might even combine qualitative and quantitative methods.

An asset of practice theory is that it comes with a powerful toolbox to study phenomena bottom-up through discourse, narratives, and performances, allowing the researcher to freely zoom in and out (Nicolini, 2012, p. 217). The Interview to the Double, e.g., originally a Marxist tool, zooms directly in on a professional’s practice, and with that avoids loftiness and wordiness (Nicolini, 2009): it exemplifies how by avoiding the question

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why and focusing on the question how practice theory can make a contribution by providing

usable, fine-grained and relevant information. 3.3. Strategy as a practice

Some research has been done on strategy as a practice, e.g. by Chia (2004), Rouleau (2005), and Samra-Fredericks (2005), zooming in on micro-practices of strategizing. In these studies, strategizing is seen as a form of ‘dwelling’ in the Heideggerian sense, a way of ‘practical coping’ with problems at hand, rather than ‘building’ (Chia & Holt, 2006). Thus, strategy may better be understood as a phenomenon emerging as strategists cope in situ, than as

activities with a clearly set objective.

In her research on strategy as a practice, Samra-Fredericks (2003) minutely

researched micro-practices producing snapshots should be understood in the limited sense that they make: each ‘strip of interaction reproduced here is conceptualised as one layer or “minor move” in a succession shaping or ‘producing’ beliefs, opinions, values, assumptions, feelings, perceptions, meanings and so on.’ These moves then could contribute to the joint sensemaking on organisational problems and rectify them.

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4. Methodology

This study is an enactive, inductive research into practices (Nicolini, 2012) of leadership and leadership development, using auto-ethnographically and ethnographically inspired

methods. As the methodological choices emerged as the research progressed, I will first give an overview of the research process and the sources I used, and then go deeper into the methodology and methods I chose.

4.1. Overview of the research process

This research paper gives an account of three interrelated series of events, in order to analyse them.

First, the development of a leadership development practice, trying to build a new narrative on leadership, in the context of my own company, Studio Zeitgeist, a start-up business-to-business consultancy.

Second, my own quest to be both an informed practitioner in leadership

development, successful entrepreneur and successful candidate for the master’s degree. This I will do by presenting an auto-ethnographically inspired narrative about this quest, and by reflecting on it.

Third, and lastly, this paper has the inspiration to describe leadership, and help forward its development, as it happened around me. The events the team at Studio Zeitgeist, with me as the ‘subject owner’ on leadership, organised for professionals, are recounted in this light. The participants in these events have provided me with insights into the wide domain of leadership and leadership development.

4.2. Timeline, events, people and sources

The timeline with events, people present and sources is given in Table 1.

The timeline is divided into three phases: the first phase in which I operated mainly on my own in developing a model and a training tool, called Liquid Leadership; the second phase in which my colleagues joined me in the effort to develop and test a commercially exploitable leadership development practice; and the third phase in which we took our first steps in delivering it to paying customers.

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Date Event People present,

involved Sources

PHASE 1

April-June 2017 Thinking in the team at Studio Zeitgeist on innovative leadership and adaptive

leadership Yannick, Farid

notes on adaptivity (01) draft(s) of conference (02) April-June 2017 Liquid Leaderhip Model version 1 Marc van Gelderen, _{student coach} assignment 1 (03) _{assignment 2 (04)}

Liquid Leaderhip Model version 2 Marc van Gelderen, _{student coach} assignment 3 (05)

PHASE 2

Game version 1

8-9 September 2017 Ontdekdagen Marineterrein Farid, Tim attendees Ontdekdagen

evaluation of events to client (06)

audio of first event (07) audio of second event (08) summary first event (09) transcription of second event (10)

surveys returned at events (11) surveys returned after events (12)

Liquid Leaderhip Model version 3 Game version 2

10+25 January 2018 Internal game play at Studio

8 February 2018 keynote presentation at Pakhuis De _Zwijger presentation keynote (17)

26 February – 7

March Interviews ESI

Marjolein ten Hoonte Hans Luyckx

Roelof Potters Mike Out Michelle Spaas

transcript of the interviews (18) final presentation Services Industries (19)

7 March 2018 Future Entrepreneur Marco van Gelderen, _{20 honours students}

results survey honours class (20)

results survey Facebook (21) presentation (22)

PHASE 3

18-19 April 2018 Working with IJsfontein: Jan-Willem _{Huisman gets involved} Jan-Willem Huisman Game version 3: non-zero sum version

25 April 2018 Spel spelen met IJsfontein Jan-Willem Huisman, _{Farid, Yannick, Tim} audio recap (23) _{transcript recap (24)} Liquid Leaderhip version 4

2 May 2018 Refugees Forward Tim, Ruud, 8 _attendees notes Tim and Ruud (25)

Game version 4: zero sum version

16 May 2018 Jonge Honden Tim, Ruud, audio of discussion, part 1 (26) audio of discussion, part 2 (27) transcript of discussion (28) 24 May 2018 Play with IJsfontein Hans Luyckx, Esther, Tim, Ruud, Yannick,

Farid

29 May 2018 Internal meeting on the game audio of fragment (29) _{transcript of fragment (30)}

30 May 2018 Semi-structured interviews Yannick, Tim, Ruud, _Willem-Jan

audio Yannick (31) audio Tim (32) audio Ruud 1 (33) audio Ruud 2 (34) audio Willem-Jan (35)

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transcripts (36) Game version 5: first public version

(including ITTD)

12 June 2018 De Baak

presentation (37)

audio of recap group 2 (38) transcript of recap group 2 (39) Mentimeter Excel results (40) Mentimeter PDF results (41)

1 June 2018 Ruud speaking at ABN AMRO Ruud Ruud’s presentation (42)

20 June 2018 IJsfontein first session Ruud, Farid _{Seven participants}

Mentimeter Excel results (43) Mentimeter PDF results (44) ITTD audio (45) game audio (46) evaluation audio (47) ITTD transcript (48) game transcript (49) evaluation transcript (50) talk with Chris audio (51) talk with Chris transcript (52) 23 July 2018 First interview with Farid Farid, me audio interview (53) _{transcript interview (54)}

2 August 2018 Informal talk with Hans Luyckx Hans Luyckx, me notes (55)

2 August 2018 Second interview with Farid Farid, me audio interview (56) _{transcript interview (57)}

Table 1: timeline with events, people present and sources

Throughout the research process, many events took place that provided me with sources to base my research on. These events will be thoroughly described in the narrative presented in the Findings chapter below.

The people that are quoted or otherwise referred to in this study, are the following: - Farid is my colleague at Studio Zeitgeist, the founder of the company.

- Tim, Ruud, Yannick and Willem-Jan are further members of the team, who have joined our company during the course of three years. Tim, Ruud, and Yannick have had an active role in the development of the emerging leadership practice at Studio Zeitgeist.

- dr. Marco van Gelderen tought the Entrepreneurial Skills elective course in which I took part. During the process, a student coach gave feedback on my progress. Marco later invited me to speak for his honours’ class Future Entrepreneur.

- Hans Luyckx, Jan-Willem Huisman and Esther work at game developing company IJsfontein, Hans and Jan-Willem as directors, Esther as an intern.

- Five senior executives interviewed were by fellow students and me for an earlier course,

Enterpreneurship in the Services Industry: Marjolein ten Hoonte, director labour market and CSR at Randstad; Hans Luyckx, chief operations officer at IJsfontein; Mike Out, CIO at Guidion; Roelof Potters, CEO at Alliander DGO (an intrapreneurial venture of Alliander, using the Holacracy (HolacracyOne, 2015) concept); and Michelle Spaas, programme manager innovation at Prorail.

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- Chris is a leadership development professional present at the IJsfontein course.

I was able to assemble a rich data set:

- I interviewed my team members for this study: Farid twice, the other team members once. The interviews were transcribed.

- The set of interviews, typed out verbatim, with the senior executives for the ESI course, was reused for this project, as a way to triangulate the findings.

- Many elements of the events on leadership taking place were recorded on audio. They have been transcribed, most of them fully, some selectively. I was able to do this

- The presentations of several keynotes held by me or my colleagues were collected.

- I have collected and used several documents that reflect the development of the leadership practice, such as notes of meetings and internal memos.

- Some of my previous academic papers were used as sources, as they reflect the development of my own thinking about leadership.

- At two moments in the research, groups of people were surveyed: the attendees of the Ontdekdagen try-out (two surveys, both during and after the event), and before the honours’ class, among the students, and among my Facebook friends.

- During the sessions at De Baak and IJsfontein, the Mentimeter was used for a live survey among participants.

4.3. Choice of methodology and methods

Analysis did not start after collecting the data; neither did I make definite methodological choices before collecting any data, or before starting the analysis. Rather, while working with the data, I was actively looking for lenses that would produce non-trivial insights and further the possibilities for theory-building.

It soon emerged that I wanted to do immersive, enactive field research. In the

entrepreneurship domain, Johannisson (2011) argues that practical knowledge (phronesis) is both ontologically and epistemologically connected to entrepreneurship. In other words, a researcher can use practical wisdom to research a set of activities that are practical about ‘getting things done’. As I will describe my own experiences, reflexivity is needed

throughout the process (Anderson, 2006).

The recognition that leadership and leadership development consists of practices leads us to search for a diverse set of practices of various scales, from all-encompassing to

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very small (Nicolini, 2012). The smallest practice suitable for the present research, a micro-practice through with sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005) unfolds, can be a micro-practice as small as a specific routine in conversing on the phone, involving no more than a double interact (Peverelli & Verduyn, 2012). The all-encompassing practice, social life as a whole, can be seen as a nexus of bundled practices that needs unravelling (Nicolini, 2011). It is on the scale in between that practices, and bundles of them, have explanatory power to understand the sensemaking that goes on within and between them (Thompson et al., 2017).

4.4. Doing Qualitative Field Research

In the research of social phenomena, qualitative research is a suitable vehicle to build new theory on a subtle, varied and rich real-life data that does not a priori need to fit into any category (Johnstone, 2007). Edmondson and McManus (2007) argue that in management field research, a proper methodological ‘fit’ links qualitative data with nascent areas of research, in which new concepts need to be developed. The question whether the authors are right in dismissing qualitative research in well-developed research fields, needs no answer: in any case, research on leadership as it unfolds and emerges in practice is very nascent, as my literature review has shown.

Dennis Gioia and his colleagues have developed a methodological framework for applying rigour in inductive research, as an extension to Grounded Theory (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013). The approach rests on semi-structured interviews and calls for coding on three levels: first order coding (informant-centered terms and codes), second-order coding (researcher-centric concepts, themes and dimension), and, if possible, aggregate

dimensions arising from the second-order themes. I have identified such second-order themes. However, a strict application of Gioia’s framework is both unnecessary and

impossible, since I am immersed in the object of research to such an extent as to invalidate a clear distinction between informant-centered and research-centered concepts.

To some extent, the events I research are part of a single case. Does my research exploit, an opportunity ‘to explore a significant phenomenon under rare or extreme circumstances’ (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007)? I think it does. The beginning of a new venture that nevertheless has that much credibility that it is invited to contribute to a significant event (De Baak), is extraordinary. So is the opportunity to analyse the process of

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becoming of a leader (myself, within my organisation) in the context of the becoming of a practical theory of leadership. This provides a change to place the double hermeneutics under the magnifying glass.

4.5. Dailiness and level of detail

A practice-based approach is more suitable to find out about the ‘nitty-gritty details’ (Chia, 2004) of what really happens from day to day, than e.g. more process-oriented approaches. Ethnography holds the same promise: it studies social phenomena in their everyday

contexts (Johnstone, 2007). Many ethnographic studies in the domain of organisation studies ‘tether analysis to the mundane activities of the workplace’ (Llewellyn, 2008)

Three caveats must be mentioned.

First, I will have to keep an eye out for what is not said and what is not done. Chia & Holt (2006) describe from a Heideggerian perspective how familiar objects are effortlessly co-opted into people’s being and doing. Looking for the occurrent mode might help: the breakdown or disturbance of equipmentality (the door won’t open). This is particularly useful for my research, since it narrates the development of at least two specific objects that need to be ‘equipmental’ or useful to the practitioners: the leadership model and the game.

Second, there might be quite a number of different lenses that might be applicable to the case at hand, each yielding different outcomes of a varying usefulness. Rouleau (2005), in her study of strategy-as-a-practice sketches how she uses several methods before finding the one that yields interesting results.

Third, Hunter (2010) describes how to analyse and represent narrative data. On this ‘long and winding road’ the aim is to find many narratives that make sense, rather than one generisable truth.

4.6. Autoethnography

Half a century ago, Hayano (1979) observed that as the colonial era was coming to an end, more and more ethnographers were going to be full members of the cultures they were to describe, rather than detached spectators from above.

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Autoethnography or self-ethnography can make the research genuinely interactive. The self-observation must be explicit and reflexive (Anderson, 2006, p. 375). Anderson, coining ‘analytic autoethnography’ comes up with five criteria. The first criterion is to be a complete member researcher, being both a member of the group under study, and of the ‘social science community’. Specifically, Anderson paints the heuristic image of the

researcher as being a participant in the group’s conversations through which first-order constructs are developed, contested, and sustained. This description fits my research well.

A potential drawback of auto-ethnography is that of intimate familiarity, exemplified in a ‘blindness to common, everyday activities’ (Hayano, 1979). I will have to look out for my own ineffectiveness and blind spots.

An argument supporting auto-ethnography is the special access, which I have: Farid opens the door to an audience that would qualify as ‘leaders’ in the Dutch business,

governmental and NGO spheres. Hayano (1979) stresses the potential advisory capabilities in programs of change and development.

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5. Findings

The findings of the present paper, by applying the methodological choices and

implementing the methods that fit well with practice theory, follow a pattern of zooming in, zooming out (Nicolini, 2012). The account given in this chapter will first identify the

practices that are relevant for the study, as they provide the framework for further findings. I will then proceed with an auto-ethnographically inspired account of the first phase of the research project as I defined it above, during which I independently created and practiced with a model on leadership, without involvement of members of the team at Studio Zeitgeist.

After that, I will provide a detailed account of the team effort in developing a leadership practice to use for commercial purposes, as an offering of our venture in the start-up phase. I will do so in two sections, dealing with two phases of the project: a phase of development and try-outs (phase 2), and the phase in which we put our first steps on the market (phase 3). It is then time to zoom in, which I will do in subsequent sections.

Finally, I will zoom out in a second auto-ethnographically inspired account to do justice to my role as the lead practitioner at out start-up, as well as a researcher. 5.1. Practices

As the research project progressed and the choice to apply practice theory emerged as an extremely useful, powerful and practical tool to make and give sense to the subject of my research, it was necessary to start to identify and ‘slice up’ practices (Nicolini, 2012). This process (or practice) of doing so was emergent through most of the research project.

An overview of several practices and bundles of practices (leaving out micro-practices) can be seen in Figure 2. These practices will get more colourful in the sections below. At this point, I will give an outline of their nature, their bundling and the main relations between them.

The largest circle represents a bundle of practices pertinent to Studio Zeitgeist. The relevant practitioners within this bundle are not only members of the team, but other people, walking (also literally) in and out of the events at which some of the practices are enacted and articulated. The circle within the circle represents a prime focus of attention of this study, the ‘emerging leadership development practice’. In fact a bundle of practices, but

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for reasons of brevity elsewhere in this paper just called a ‘practice’, is exemplified by various events in which my team-mates and I have implemented ideas and working

methods on leadership and leadership development for audiences of, typically, ten people. At the upper right side there are two intersecting circles representing practices mostly crucial for me personally during the study. At the right side, a more diffuse bundle of practices can be discerned. They are the relevant practices of those very same people walking in and out.

Figure 2. Practices and bundles of practices pertinent to this study

I will now zoom in on particular practices and their interrelations.

The bundle of practices at Studio Zeitgeist comprise four, strongly interrelated practices. ‘Keynote speaking’ is the one with which the company started and kept it afloat financially: my colleague Farid has done this maybe a hundred times over the last years. The ‘weekly meeting’ with all our team members, with its very own dynamic of sensemaking, is used to discuss progress and make common decisions. Very close to this practice is idea co-creation, sometimes part of the weekly meeting (hence the relation shown in the figure). Usually a subset of the team, sometimes with other people present, and using several artefacts to help support its work, develops content and working methods, often with the intersection of both as its main dilemma. This was very much the case in the present study,

bundle of practices in new venturing at Studio Zeitgeist _{writing an academic paper}

personal leadership practice

managing the team

bundle of practices pertinent to ‘leaders’ keynote speaking

engaging in leadership dev’t consulting

idea co-creation weekly meeting

keynote speaking gaming

discussing leadership

ITTD developing ‘vision’

emerging leadership development practice

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during which the team got more and more involved in developing the ‘emerging leadership development practice’. It is linked to this bundle in a relation of ‘parent and child’ – from the processes of enactment, selection and retention within the practice, the leadership development practice emerged (but I hasten to add that this practice has more than just one parent).

Within the emerging leadership development practice, four key constituent and interrelated practices (not linked by lines because they all relate to one another) give rise to a (hopefully) coherent event, or enactment, and by cues exacted from them by involved people in their joint sensemaking, feed back into idea co-creation, which in turn feeds into to a new incarnation of the emerging leadership development, with repercussions for all included practices. ‘Keynote speaking’ within the leadership development practice is mostly my own, here represented separately from the instance in the bundle of practices at the studio with the same name (mostly Farid’s) because to an important event, performing within this practice had to be reinvented, although many of its included smaller practices and micro-practices are the same. ‘Gaming’, with its generic name since it is very much informed by general principles, has been done iteratively in the presence of the board game we have developed, which can be said to dwell in the presence with its own identity. The ITTD is a specific practice of implementing the Interview to the Double technique (Nicolini, 2009), which was enacted several times. ‘Discussing leadership’, to conclude, is done iteratively and recursively at various times during each event.

Through ‘discussing leadership’, with the strongest relation with the ‘world outside’ since the latter constantly permeates through the walls of the event venue, we reach the practices pertinent to our guests, and to some extent others who are not physically present. This bundle sits on a much larger scale than any of the other, and the constituent practices are represented most sketchy. This cannot be otherwise: it is hard to describe any of them in detail in the present paper, since their dynamics and interrelations are discernible only at a distance. There are far more underlying practices than can be drawn, let alone analysed. ‘Managing the team’ and ‘empowering the team’ are mentioned as we will later discuss the conflict and doubt that, as I will demonstrate below, exists between these two practices (or bundles of practices) and the mean narratives the ‘leaders’ present. ‘Leaders’ is between apostrophes because such people have a problematic ontology: they may call themselves a leader, are recognised by others as such, and/or aspire to be or become one. I add that I

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count myself among them, hence the line between the conflict-doubt relationship and the ‘personal leadership practice’.

This brings us to the two intersected ‘personal’ practices (personal only in name, since many more people were involved) that have both unfolded numerous times and kept changing in terms of their articulation, sense-making, and intersubjective dynamics. They are intersected because the personal leadership practice led to the writing of three

academic papers that provided the ‘starting point’ of the second phase of the study at which my team-mates became involved. They are related to the bundle of practices at the studio mostly through idea co-creation, in shaping the events and routines of the emerging leadership development practice. The relationship is mutual: the idea co-creation informed the writing of an academic paper (this one) and caused the personal leadership practice to iterate further.

At this point, I venture to zoom in on one specific practice, the one that existed before the leadership development practice started to emerge, and unfolds to this day in a very advanced way, with Farid as the main practitioner. I used a basic version of the

Interview to the Double technique in order to interview [57] him about delivering keynote addresses, the practice that he masters so well that it has covered the start-up costs of Studio Zeitgeist. The interview technique was helpful in unravelling how Farid, in

relationship with others, engages in sensemaking. I quote verbatim, using conventions in Appendix A.

Rindert: Right. Okay. And the you are going to prepare the keynote, how much time do you actually spend for an average keynote?

Farid: a day

Rindert: a day (.) and (.) is it always a day? Farid: that’s an average.

Rindert: and how much is a day, how much work is that=

Farid: =eight hours.

Rindert: eight hours really (.) and you do them all after each other? Or do you do them on several days?

Practices of liquid leadership