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The article offers an innovative process for collaborating with people you don’t agree with or like or trust .

Based on his experience as a collaboration facilitator in national and regional conflicts and stalemates, the author explains how to achieve success through what he terms “stretch collaboration.”

Stretch collaborations requires participants to take three unconventional approaches.

Unconventional “stretch collaboration” abandons the assumption of control. It gives up unrealistic fantasies of harmony, certainty, and compliance, and instead embraces messy realities of discord, trial and error and co-creation.”

Managers and leaders increasing must collaborate with stakeholders who have opposing interests. This stretch collaboration process offers a way to make progress even in volatile, hostile, high-risk situations.

Since the early 1990s, Generon Consulting has been developing the use of scenario thinking as a tool for effecting societal change. In its civic scenario projects, a group of influential leaders, drawn from a broad range of sectors and organizations, works together to understand what is happening, might happen, and should happen in their city, region, or country. They then act in concert on that shared understanding and vision. This article summarizes its experience with this work to date, the process developed, and the kinds of results produced. Examples are drawn from pioneering projects in two countries that made among the most remarkable democratic transitions of the 1990s: South Africa and Guatemala.

The paper aims to explore themes in Drucker's work which provide messages for current turbulent times. Based on a literature review of both Drucker's work and contemporary studies in the field of complexity theory the paper's aim is to explore turbulence as a feature of levels of agreement for objectives and predictability of outcome. Drucker's concept of management as a social enterprise is seen as central together with his warning that the tools and techniques of management should not obscure its purpose.

The paper provides a literature review and a brief case study. The review identifies that contemporary complexity theory can be used to explore Drucker's work on turbulence. The case study shows how approaches based on dialogue can enable conflicting objectives to be explored and agreed outcomes achieved.

The paper concludes that in turbulent times Drucker's concept of management as a social enterprise forms a core framework that can be used within complex situations to agree objectives through dialogue.

This paper uniquely links Drucker's work with contemporary complexity theory.

This paper aims to describe “transformative scenario planning,” a methodology that enables people trying to change the future collaboratively to transform, rather than adapt to, a situation.

The process centers on constructing scenarios of possible futures for a situation, but takes the well‐established adaptive scenario planning methodology and turns it on its head – to construct scenarios not only to understand the future, but also to influence it.

Transformative scenario planning teams have tackled some of the most important and difficult challenges of our time: health care, economic development, and climate change across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Some of these teams succeeded in changing their situation and others have failed.

The five steps of transformative scenario planning are: convening a team from across the whole system; observing what is happening; constructing stories about what could happen; discovering what can and must be done; and acting to transform the system.

The process centers on constructing scenarios of possible futures for a situation, not only to understand the future, but also to learn how to influence it.

It is proposed that the desirable goal of structuring the organization for leadership development has less to do with formal hierarchical structure than with the informal norms and networks that support organizational systems and processes. In this manner, strategic leaders need to think of themselves as social architects in helping to generate the kinds of normative conditions that facilitate leadership development. In particular, priority concerns for leadership development are issues such as what are the culture and climate for learning and development? and how healthy is the interpersonal context in which the shared work of the organization takes place?

This paper attempts to provide a number of strategic reference points for individuals and organizations seeking a clearer view of the future. These reference points plot a course that starts with the surfacing of underlying philosophies and ends with the melding of foresight with strategy. Underpinning these reference points is the belief in achieving balance between our understanding of “the inner self” and external drivers of change. This paper draws together a number of well‐developed theories and concepts as a way of linking both insight and practice.

The aim of this viewpoint paper is to refine the meaning of “leadership as an art” in the context of wicked (complex) social problems and in the realm of contemporary leadership research and practice.

In this paper we explore the meaning of “leadership as an art,” a concept often alluded to but rarely defined concretely. The authors examine the concept by comparing artistic and scientific knowledge paradigms, identifying descriptors of the “leadership as art” concept appearing in the literature and illustrating key attributes of the “leadership as art” concept with real-world examples.

Leadership as an art is conceptualized as empathetically engaging and normatively uniting people in a vision to promote the common good through collectively formulating an understanding of a complex social problem and its resolution that when courageously and creatively pursued has the potential to make an extraordinary contribution to humanity.

The magnitude and complexity of social problems impact communities on a daily basis, making them worthy of attention. History has demonstrated that practicing leadership as an art from a normative power base has the potential of uniting diverse collectives in creatively resolving wicked social problems for the benefit of the common good.

Although leadership as an art has been discussed in the literature over several decades, the term has not been positioned explicitly within contemporary leadership in the context of resolving complex social problems within social networks.