The discovery of Superperformance introduces a shockingly simple, reliable approach to optimizing performance. This discovery identifies a steady state, a sweet spot described by complexity scientists as the location of maximum fitness in a system. This location refers to a balance point precariously perched between order and chaos. It is more of a continuously shifting space than a static location: a dynamic, energetic, catalytic space. It is the place where all new ideas, change and self-organization emerge. All of Superperformance occurs in this space – and what’s more, any system can be tuned to this higher level of organizational consciousness and operational performance.

This is why Agile is the new normal. Navigating in this zone is called surfing the edge of chaos. Here the tension between order and disorder is at the highest level possible. Too much chaos will marginalize or dilute an idea or project. Too much order is likewise unhealthy, giving rise to rigidity and stasis. Work groups, project communities, and entire organizations can leverage the edge of chaos to maximize performance and to find a way forward in these uncertain times. People in organizations are beginning to see that this disequilibrium is effective and important to organizational survival. Within this fitness state, people and projects self-organize and work achieves a flow state punctuated by agility, novelty and innovation. It may seem incredible or illogical, but superperformance is tied to tolerating and even encouraging this persistent disequilibrium.

This 21^st Century approach reinvents management and leadership and advocates for a shift away from a Machine View to an Organism View of organization. It is being applied by an increasing number of project teams, organizations, and communities to produce unprecedented customer outcomes, operational excellence, breakthrough innovation, joy in work, and shareholder return on investment.

Dave Guerra’s post in response to Chinese Scholar Sheng Zhao query on the Leadership Scholars Network, from the Academy of Management Listserve.

Sheng Zhao: “I am curious about emergence of leadership studies in the US. Looking back on the history, managers and management are the focal topics, but about two decades ago (as far as I know), leaders and leadership began to come into the front stage. What is the reason for the trend? Is it that management studies reach its end of the rope?  Or the social, technological and economical changes bewilder us and we need more direction (which way to go) than management?”

Dave Guerra: “In my opinion it all has to do with the growing revelation that what we losing our mechanistic tethering and moving toward an organic one. Organizations are alive, and as I shared with a young Chinese doctoral student, all of management and even mechanistically-based leadership theory are headed back to the future – to Bohr’s complementarity principle – to Yin and Yang. Our newtonian models have failed us – on the whole management science, much less practice, has been slow to adopt the major scientific discoveries of the last century, especially the last forty or so years. If quantum mechanics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics are true, then we should be able to appreciate them in a most ordinary and self-evident way.

After a life’s work of practical inquiry in the field, it has been my shocking discovery that there is indeed a pattern of harnessing opposites, tangible and intangible, that is the sweet spot of optimization. This is why servant leadership is the only leadership that works – because of the emergence of intrinsic motivation that it provokes – but it is also true that the control of outcomes – through statistical predictability, to quote Deming, is the only management that works – process management, that is. To my mind, if this is true, then there must be some underlying first order principle, some natural law, that is at work here. There is. It is the principle of complementarity, and it tells me we need a life science not a machine science to guide the next generation of organizational theory and practice.

Hence the current rage in leadership studies makes perfect sense, given the actual coming of age of Drucker’s knowledge economy, but my prediction is that ultimately we will find the truth is in the middle. Management and leadership must be treated as equivalent and complementary hemispheres, not separate and distinct provinces. They need eachother for completion. As Deming put it, “To manage, one must lead.”

So hence my message to my young Chinese inquisitor about “management and leadership” in the west, look backwards, from whence you came, to the harmony of yin and yang, because that is where we are headed. That’s my opinion and why ‘complexity leadership’ and ‘biology management’ are the best lens to inform us.

This is very exciting and in my experience at the front, very new.”

Dave Guerra

Sheng Zhao: “I admire greatly that a westerner can understand Yin Yan, and connect it with complexity. In fact many Chinese do not understand the deep meaning of Yin Yan. I find complexity, Yin Yan, and Budhism devle into a  similar worldview in the deep. I raised the question why the leadership studies rise in the US is out of my curiosity that the management studies in China are moving from leadership focus to manager focus, countering US’ trend.  I want to find out why they evolve differently.

Thank you for your insightful comments, and others for their contribution. All the questions, ideas, and opinions on the list help a little brain on the other side of the earth to vibrate more reasonably.”

Sheng Zhao