Leadership is an essential ingredient in successful ILM as well as being a major opportunity point in a landscape.
Leadership is widely regarded as a multi-faceted practice centred on personal mastery, relational influence, and team orchestration.1 Leadership suggests fostering the conditions, and providing the nurture, for people to exercise and expand their capabilities. It references the ability to motivate collective movement. It is important to note that while a ‘leader’ may be an individual, ‘leadership’ need not be confined to a single person.
The corporate sector recognises that leadership is an essential resource for successful corporations, and therefore provides us with many useful adages:
- Leaders share trust.
- Leadership without sincerity isn’t.
- Leaders are people who lead with intent, not explicit instruction.
- Leadership is the art of creating greatness in other people.
- The leader who does not listen will eventually hear silence.
- Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
- A genuine leader does not search for consensus, but moulds it.
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves
Lao Tzu
In our view, successful leaders attract trust because they are consistent and reliable under risk. In addition, leaders emerge rather than being appointed2; they advise or suggest rather than direct; they delegate and mediate. Importantly, leaders bear disproportionate risk to generate group benefits – leaders, for example, are unafraid of experimentation and uncertainty, willing to be wrong (and to admit it), and self-assured in unfamiliar spaces. Above all, leaders dispense and redistribute power constantly – leadership is the opposite of power accumulation. But leaders also provide heading, derived from their jack- or jill-of-all-trades-master-of-none capabilities.
Fox or hedgehog?
The Ancient Greek poet Archilochus is famous for his line about how a hedgehog is good at doing just one thing, whereas a fox is good at doing many things. The idea was pretty obscure for 2,500 years until the philosopher Isaiah Berlin made it mainstream, arguing that great thinkers tend to fall into one camp or the other. Macro vs. micro. Which raises the obvious question: why not be both?
This is basically how military historian John Lewis Gaddis opens his book, On Grand Strategy. But Gaddis flips the question. Not “why not be both?” but “If being both is the obvious play, why do people fail at it so often?” Gaddis draws on the work of the psychologist Philip E. Tetlock, who studied over 21,000 predictions on world politics from experts in universities, government, and think tanks, made between 1988 and 2003. In his book Expert Political Judgment, Tetlock found that who these people were made almost no difference. Background, status, job title, political leanings, optimism, pessimism. None of it mattered.
What mattered was how they thought. And the variable that predicted accuracy was whether they operated like foxes or hedgehogs. And foxes won. Big time. The hedgehogs drilled down on one framework to form their opinions. The foxes stitched together information from diverse sources. They were also more open-minded and less defensive when challenged.
You may think that the Foxes were more popular, but interestingly, the hedgehogs were far more likely to show up on TV and speak at conferences. Turns out, confidence reads well on camera. It just doesn’t predict much. But Gaddis doesn’t stop at ‘be a fox.’ Citing Sun Tzu (the famed Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer), he argues that what great leaders actually do is something harder. They stay in fox mode while they’re gathering, listening, and synthesising. Then, when it’s time to act, they flip. They go full hedgehog. Decisive. Singular. Committed.
For Gaddis, the conclusion is simple: the issue isn’t whether you can be both, or should be both. You must be both. The real skill isn’t living in one mode. It’s the toggle. Knowing when to stay open and when to close the door. When to keep listening and when to move.
With every great collapse of a firm, a battle, or a country, there is a leader who got stuck in one mode and couldn’t find the other.
Derived from: GapingVoid Culture, 2026. Fox or hedgehog? GapingVoid Email February 11 2026: https://www.gapingvoid.com/fox-or-hedgehog/
In our view, most collaboration exhibits leadership – successful collaborative states may have more than one leader. Whatever the case, when you walk into the collaborative sub-state, the leaders will not be immediately obvious, and they are unlikely to announce themselves. Leaders rarely see themselves as leaders, but instead as participants in a collective ambition. The respect that a community holds for them will gradually reveal who they are.
In commoning sub-states, there is another variant of leadership: leadership ecology. This refers to a systemic, emergent leadership. It has three core principles3:
- Interdependence: leadership is relational, embedded in networks that influence both internal dynamics and external ecosystems.
- Emergence: arises from collective actions and feedback, not top-down control, enabling responses to complexity like adaptive challenges.
- Ethical focus: aligns with harmony in nature, systemic ethics, and connectivity across social, environmental, and technological realms
- Hill and Lineback, 2011. ↩︎
- This is important. People appointed to a position hold ‘position power’ – i.e. that power that comes with the position. While a person who has position power may be a leader, it is not because of their position. Good leaders and those holding position power can both be respected, although for very different reasons. Good leaders are respected because of the societal risk the carry, the wisdom they can dispense, and/or the trust they can engender. Position power holder demand respect because they hold positions of authority. ↩︎
- Wielkiewicz and Stelzner, 2005. ↩︎
