Leadership as practice meets knowledge as flow: Emerging perspectives for leaders in knowledge‐intensive organizations

• Date: 01 February 2018
• Published date: 01 February 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1699
• Author: Alice E. MacGillivray

SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER

Leadership as practice meets knowledge as flow: Emerging

perspectives for leaders in knowledge‐intensive organizations

Alice E. MacGillivray

Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara,

California, USA

Correspondence

Alice E. MacGillivray, Fielding Graduate

University, 2020 De La Vina St, Santa Barbara,

CA 93105, USA.

Email: alice@4km.net

The goal of this paper is to help leaders in all parts of knowledge‐intensive organizations (KIOs)

rethink leadership and knowledge to enhance creative potential. KIO contexts are dynamic, and

their work is steeped in social complexity. Global trends impact organizational norms; cross‐

cultural interactions surface value dilemmas; and constant change elevates the value of agility

over stability. Traditional ways of viewing leadership and knowledge can accentuate stability.

By reframing leadership and knowledge generation and sharing as natural parts of knowledge‐

intensive practices, leaders can enhance creativity and agility. Rather than associating leadership

with powerful individuals, it can be seen as distributed or an emergent property of collaborative

knowledge work. Embedded in this more dynamic and fluid view of knowledge‐intensive work is

the assumption that governance needs to focus on networks, communication, and trust. This

paper presents new ideas to guide leadership in complex, KIOs. Case studies illustrate how these

new perspectives can lead to enhanced creative potential.

1|FROM ENTITIES TO RELATIONSHIPS

This special issue focuses on important and under‐explored intersec-

tions, including knowledge‐intensive work and leadership. The ways

in which we understand knowledge, leadership, and power influence

how we act in knowledge‐intensive organizations (KIOs) and with

knowledge‐intensive work in general. Public affairs work is classically

knowledge‐intensive, because it includes elements such as communi-

cation for different audiences, issues management where diverse

values often clash, and work with competing priorities such as business

goals and social and environmental justice. KIO work is complex for

many reasons. It always involves human and cultural elements and

social complexity. KIO leaders deal increasingly with global trends,

intercultural relations, diverse values, and different ways of under-

standing. Constant change elevates the value of agility over stability.

In KIOs, there are drawbacks to conflating leadership with individuals

and knowledge with storable information. In the last 20 years, new

ways of thinking about leadership and knowledge have emerged in

ways that complement each other. These converging evolutions can

help KIO leaders—including public affairs professionals—facilitate crea-

tive potential in their organizations.

2|ANOTEONPROCESS

It is important to describe how this scholar–practitioner paper was

created. It is not the result of a particular study, framed by a

problem statement and research question. The author has studied

KIOs and worked with leaders in such organizations. In these roles,

she has noticed trends such as increasingly complex work. As a

researcher, she explored how leaders worked with complexity and

has learned with and from other scholar–practitioners who work

with complex systems. Most of this research has been inductive:

observing people in action; hearing their stories; examining suc-

cesses and struggles; and looking for themes and patterns. As a con-

sultant, she has helped KIO practitioners try different approaches to

develop confidence, practices, and mindsets that can help them be

successful in what some call volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambig-

uous environments.

This paper draws on this experience: a slow, inductive ethnogra-

phy of sorts. What patterns are emerging? Which are relevant to

leaders in KIOs? The goal of this paper is to present these ideas—some

of which may be unfamiliar to KIO leaders—in the hope that they help

leaders understand complexity and develop creative potential in their

organizations.

The paper begins with roots of common perceptions of leadership

and knowledge. It then explores ways in which complexity thinking

has influenced perceptions, particularly in relation to leadership

throughout organizational networks, and knowledge intertwined with

human networks and processes. The author describes how new views

of leadership and knowledge are converging and complementing each

other in ways that can help KIOs. Several studies illustrate how these

shifts affect practice. Ideas for further research and leadership prac-

tices are listed.

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1699

J Public Affairs. 2018;18:e1699.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1699

Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of10