Network Leadership : Promoting a Healthier World through the Power of Networks

This Element shows the digital era's disruptions influence a paradigm shift in leadership, requiring leaders to adapt to network dynamics. This involves focusing on connections, energy flow, and awareness. This shift will accelerate in the coming years and encourage leaders to embrace a new WISE world of stability and emergence.

A ''paradigm shift'' is currently taking place in leadership. Despite the considerable and influential body of existing theory, leaders were not prepared for the continuous disruptions of the digital era. What happens and how it happens depends on networks. The newly emerging science of networks opens an entirely new horizon on how to lead people, design organizations, and make sense of complex social environments. To be effective, leadership needs to assimilate and adapt to the dynamics of networks. This implies a focus on the quality of connections, how energy and information flow through these connections, and the development of a heightened awareness for the whole. Based on the undeniable logic of networks, the shift in organizational structures which has already taken place will only accelerate in the years to come. Network leadership invites leaders to leave the VUCA world behind and embrace a new WISE world of stability and emergence.