Leadership Styles and System Dynamics: A 1970s Analogy

How leaders can increase system awareness and choose the right style

Recently, I have begun the early stages of a research idea on system dynamics within the international system, which has led me to examine how approaches to political and business leadership have changed over time. Now and then, it is probably a good idea to get behind today’s news headlines and notice longer-term trends to decipher what is cause and what is effect.

A wide sample of the decision-making styles of the top leaders in politics and business can be somewhat indicative of the overall approaches taken by many other leaders operating in the same system from different standpoints. There is benefit to observing top leaders in politics and business because of their tendency to be thought leaders for many others in their area. They set the tone. Effective leadership can sometimes accelerate or delay systemic shifts, particularly if they work in broader coalitions. Just think of what was achieved at Bretton Woods in terms of monetary policy, and how the system shifted dramatically when that coalition weakened and fixed exchange rates gave way to floating regimes.

The trend in leadership style is important because it can help determine how much leverage key personalities have (or don’t have) over the direction of the system they are operating in, and how that changes over time. This is particularly so in our current era where there are growing concerns about the machines taking over and running amok, and the breakdown in open and free trade in the international system.

My interest in leadership tends to focus on political economy and on how the forces of politics and business interact in the international system as it evolves. Leadership styles in politics and business tend to blend into each other because politics and business are interwoven in the international system. Business decision-making and political decision-making often impact each other, so it is no surprise that leaders in both disciplines often borrow style and technique from each other.

We often hear historians say that history tends to rhyme with itself, so it is perhaps useful then to look back to an earlier period that in many ways mirrors our own, to see how leaders navigated some of the most complex political, economic, and corporate challenges of their time, how they leveraged their skill to reshape the part of the system they found themselves in and what those insights could mean for today’s leaders.

There is a bit of subjectivity involved here, but when I look at the international system, I tend to see cycles of familiarity over a period of fifty to say seventy-five years. Over that period of time, there is generational turnover, and the changing of the hegemonic guard is usually well underway. The priorities and challenges of the business community are often a function of the decisions of political leaders. The best strategically resourced corporate leaders are normally best placed to see the wood from the trees and so tend to adapt earlier than most.

If we go back just fifty years, we can already get a glimpse of this historical rhyming at play. I don’t remember the 1970s; I’m too young, but in historical terms that period had characteristics that rhyme with today’s international system. Obviously, it was a less technologically advanced time where people still used telephone operators and phone boxes to communicate and only the largest businesses invested heavily in computer technology. However, the broad trend of oil crises, rising inflation, proxy wars, and the earlier waves of modern globalisation testing leaders’ ability to navigate complexity are similar to the problems leaders navigate today, albeit in more technologically advanced societies. The 1970s were a pivotal time, like our time, that, in retrospect, seems to have marked a turning point in the leadership style of political and business leaders as the world sought to recover from the doldrums of interconnected polycrises.