#123 – Leadership in Complexity: Purpose, Failure & Conflict with Jennifer Garvey Berger

Podcast Notes

Jennifer, widely known for her books “Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps” and “Changing on the Job”, has guided organisations worldwide in revisiting their mindtraps and reshaping traditional leadership.

In this episode, she continues to challenge conventional views of customer-centricity and urges organisations to recognise their role in shaping society and ecosystems, advocating for a purpose that is deeply embedded rather than merely performative.

On a timely note, she reflects on generational shifts in how people relate to work and meaning, alongside the rise of values-led business models that call for designing with longer horizons in mind.

She helps us stay present, emphasising it as essential for preparing for the future, and guides us in visualising and designing what it means to be a complexity-informed leader.

This episode will challenge you and invite you to engage with an all-encompassing future. Tune in and get inspired.

Key highlights

👉 Value in complex systems is co-created and fluid – organisations must shift from simply “serving customer needs” to becoming conscious shapers of society.

👉 Younger generations are increasingly unwilling to invest their life force into organisations that prioritise profit over planetary purpose and human well-being.

👉 Leadership requires working with, not eliminating, conflict.

👉 Escaping cognitive mindtraps (like certainty, control, or simple stories) is essential for leaders navigating complexity and change.

👉 In complexity, defining and enacting value is a collective, recursive process – it’s shaped by individuals, teams, and ecosystems in continuous dialogue.

👉 Purpose in complexity-friendly organisations must be lived and systemic, not just performative; it’s about genuine social contracts and ecosystem stewardship.

👉 True systemic change begins with slowing down, listening differently, and allowing space for emergence.

Topics (chapters):

00:00 Leadership in Complexity: Purpose, Failure & Conflict – intro

01:55 Introducing Jennifer Garvey Berger

03:18 The Polarities in Leadership

06:22 A new mindset at the Leadership Level

08:27 Personal Pattern and Complex Ecosystems

12:36 Operationalising individual and collective patterns

16:22 The boundaries of leadership in an organization

18:38 The “How” and the “What” to Addressing Complexity

24:54 Organizational Readiness for Handling Complexity

27:41 Are Purpose-Driven Markets the Future?

42:09 Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Simone Cicero 

I tried to articulate a little bit the conversation we are having because I think it’s going in a very crucial direction, right? I’m going to come back to some of the topics you mentioned for our listeners so that we can also kind of frame it a little bit. 

So one thing that you said is essentially you have as a complexity-aware organization, a good way to frame it is to both at the personal and organizational level integrate the concepts of conflict and failure. Which is, I think, like a big, big important key, important idea here. 

And that’s sparked an interesting beat for me because lots of the work we do is in transforming organisations from functional and industrial, let’s say, into post-industrial and decentralized, where you have a lot of small units and a lot of contracting between units versus typical management chains, right?

And this is very much about transforming, for example, typically the conflicts you have in functional organisations between two functions into an alignment of interests. So we tend to transform the conflict into what we call tensions. So you try to put these two nodes in the organisation that maybe have to collaborate into a positive tension so that they align their interests and they create this healthy market dynamics right into the organization so that you reduce the depth of the organization, both technical organizational skills and so on. 

It’s an organization that tends to be, let’s more meritocratic. Okay, let’s simplify it like that. And that’s great because I think a lot of the things you mentioned are also related to companies obliterating the idea of failure essentially is a way to obliterate the idea of impermanence in anything you do, right? That if it’s coming to humans, but also maybe failure and restarting a business with new premises because simply the idea you had, it didn’t work, right? It didn’t work for the customer and so on.

So I think the important and interesting thing that you also mentioned is, and where I find a little bit of friction, I would say here, is – when you say organizations that I work with, the ones that are really embracing these are the ones that somehow can identify their direction, their purpose, and I’m good to say this is not in our purpose, not in our direction. 

On the other hand, by the way, I feel like sometimes this idea of purpose may be quite misleading. What do I mean with that? At the end of the day, essentially, organisations exist to serve customer needs. I don’t want to talk about Peter Drucker, but essentially, that’s the idea, at least in a market. Of course, we can think of organisations that have deeper roots into a bioregional system. But these are, at the moment, really I don’t think they exist so far in the world. Maybe Patagonia a little bit, it’s really, you can count it on our hands, on the fingers in our hands. 

So typical organizations exist to serve the market, to deliver a customer value. Sometimes when we have these conversations around progressive organizing, there’s a lot of talking about, you have to treat people like adults, not like kids.

But treating people like adults also means they are accountable to the market, to the customer. So it’s not just about, for example, having the space to take certain decisions in the organisation. It’s also about basically justifying your existence in a complex set of nodes and chains that produce customer value. So that’s where the idea of purpose to me sounds a bit problematic, because people tend to attach purpose with – we are here for the purpose. 

And my answer is not really. You are here for creating customer value. how do you see this already as well in the organizations you work with? Is part of this process of becoming complex aware also a process of becoming aware that behaving like an adult, it means you have to justify your existence, you have to create the means for you to prove it’s not that somebody needs to come to you and serving it to you on a silver plate, right? 

That’s what I wanted to bring into this conversation.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

So if I understand you, the way these things go together is this idea of purpose seems a little detached to you from this idea of kind of serving the market. Like you have to serve the market and whatever your purpose is, if it doesn’t serve the market, you’re kind of screwed as a business because it’s not gonna work. 

And then on the other hand, I’m hearing you say something about being an adult, which is like also taking some responsibility for how you’re showing up. And I can’t tell whether you mean that on the individual level or as an organization has to take responsibility, but you might mean both.

Simone Cicero 

Yeah, I mean, and I see increasingly this convergence. Because if you think about the organisation as a set of smaller nodes, and AI and other technological advancements as pushing this boundary even farther into smaller and smaller and smaller nodes, it’s really about you. 

For example, one fascinating thing I think about AI is that at the end of the day, it’s really a convivial technology. What do I mean with that? It’s an anti alienating technology, right? Because it’s really empowering people to do whatever they want to do. But this pushes the people to really think about what they want to do, what they believe it’s right and important to do. So to some extent, this boundary is, how can I say, it’s shrinking more and more, right? So it’s more about individual or small team responsibilities to basically produce value more than responding to certain purpose. 

So that’s the tension that I think we were discussing.

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

So. I might not understand you well enough, what I understand, I’m going to push against some of what I understand. So this idea about serving markets, complexity tells us that there’s no, that causation comes in kind of loops, right? And you can’t tell where they stop and where they start.

So let’s take a social network company, maybe Facebook or name your own social, name your favourite Instagram, TikTok, name a social networking kind of thing. 

Is their job to create, to serve a market, is their job to create a market, is their job to simply get as many clicks as possible and to just generate revenue in this way, or is their job to bring something into the world that makes the world better? I think these are very different. I think these are very different conceptions of what it is for me to be spending my life force doing. And I think one the things we haven’t talked about right now is

the many generations that are in organizations right now. And I think the younger generations are not that interested in giving their life force to organisations that are dedicated to making money and trashing the planet, for example, or making money and making bad things happen in countries, for example, or making money in a way that creates the conditions for young people to be more depressed and anxious than they’ve ever been in history of the world. 

So I don’t believe that organisations can have as their North Star as something like serving customer needs, because I believe that organisations are constantly creating customer needs. And as they create customer needs, they are also creating society.

And unless they have a purpose that guides some of that creation, I think things get really, well, things have gotten really problematic without an attention to values and purpose. And I don’t mean the kind of crappy values and purpose that are put on posters in like the coffee room. I do mean the Patagonias of the world. 

I do mean organisations that say, I will, I am in the process of engaging in a social contract with the world to make a better world. And I believe that that is more and more the way that complexity-friendly organisations work. 

Because if you trash the very markets that you are trying to make money from, bad things happen. Which we’re seeing evidence of all over the world right now. The rise of the B Corp, the rise of socially responsible organizations, not as a box ticking device, but as like a real North star seems to me to be a part of, first of all, what it takes to capture the imaginations and the attention of the emerging generation who looks at stuff my generation did and says – Are you kidding? Are you actually kidding? You think I’m going to invest my life force in that? I think understanding complexity helps us understand ecosystems better and helps us understand how to contribute to healthy ecosystems which serve all of us. 

Cultivating leadership is a B Corp. This is like, I know a lot about what it takes to be a business person who puts values over financial gain. Several years ago, we gave away the organization. We created a foundation. We gave the organization to that foundation. The foundation spends our profits now. So, so I’m, I’m not kidding when I say that I think this is the way really complexity friendly organisations that understand a long future, engage.

Simone Cicero 

So if you want, I can capture this insight, I think, in a way that I hope fits also your understanding is that complexity means also that you have to be the one that defines the value. 

You as an entrepreneur, as a participant in an organization, you have to be involved in defining what’s valuable for you, why you’re doing this job. And it can be customer value, it can be other types of more embedded values, but at the end of the day, it’s a bargain, you setting your bargain between you setting your values and you executing your work into this kind of closed loop, right? And this closed loop in complexity and with technology empowering all of us, it’s becoming smaller and smaller. The scale of where this circle needs to be closed, this loop needs to be closed, it’s becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. It’s the team, it’s even the individuals sometimes. 

And if you want, my perception is that the industrial organization is scrambling also because it cannot define any more value, as you said, the new generations. It cannot define more these monolithic ideas of value. 

It’s much more about people having to really engage with defining what’s available for them and transforming into a closer loop self existing system of where they give their contribution to generate some amount, some kind of value that works for them. And that’s how I be connected with purpose. So I mean, probably purpose needs to be really pushed to the boundaries of the organization. Everybody needs to find their own purpose in a complex organization.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

I agree. I agree. I think that we are constantly in, each of us individually and all of us collectively are constantly in a co-creative process about what value is. And it shapes us. How do the fires in LA change the way a supply chain company thinks about value? Even if the company has nothing to do with LA exists and it lives in our collective minds and hearts. 

And so the co-creative act of staying aware of what value we’re creating and what value we’re necessarily destroying right? Because you don’t create without destroying what things we’re using up in order to create this value. That thing moves. It’s moving around and it’s moving really fast. You know, how do we think about what AI can produce versus how much water and power it uses? You know, how do you think about what each of us contributes versus what each of us take up?

How do we think about what every organization is doing versus what every organization is harming? I think the thing that’s happening is we can no longer pretend to be ignorant about those things anymore. They are right in front of us all the time. And just because you close your eyes to them does not mean they don’t exist.

Simone Cicero 

Mm-hmm. Yeah Shruthi, I know you have one question, one quick point. It’s a fractal. You know, what you, you, what you, right.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

That’s right. That’s exactly right. I completely agree with you.

Shruthi Prakash

Yeah, no, I was going to say on actually Simone’s point of maybe creating, let’s say that technology like AI, et cetera, is creating the rapid amount of access. I think it’s also important to sort of see the other side, where while there is like a level playing field or an equaliser being created, like it’s important to sort of challenge that as well from internal aspects, like the amount of access that is being created is still power that’s sort of being centrally held. Right. 

So I see that a lot in, people working today as well, that they are willing to sort of challenge organizational structures, their intent a lot more in that aspect, even if the product they create is accessible or creating accessibility, the ownership is a good sort of topic to to keep in mind. 

So Jennifer, thank you firstly for, you know, this super engaging conversation. So towards the end of our podcast, we have a section called as the breadcrumbs where we ask our guests to share some maybe insights into books, other podcasts, maybe your music, anything that inspires you or something that, you know, our guests can pick up on some cues from with regards to the topics that you’re interested in.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Yeah, my temptation when you told me that there was going to be this question at the end, I’ve been thinking about resources. My temptation is to say now that we’ve had this conversation, like go walk in the woods. I think.

I think we know enough. I think the question is, can we access it? Right? I’m reading a brilliant book right now called A Brief History of Intelligence. I’m really enjoying it. You could read that book. It’s cool. 

And the other day, I walking. I live in this big property, a bunch of friends and I live in community in this big property, in the old property in the southwest of France. The other day, as a collective, we took a problem, we were having whatever problem it might be, and then we walked around through the woods and the meadows, wondering what ecosystem, the ecosystem in which we live has to tell us about our problem.

And I learned so much. And so I wonder about maybe the thing I would like to encourage your listeners to do is to slow down and listen more. 

And not listen to the things you normally listen to. You know, sometimes instead of listening to a podcast on a commute, just be, just listen. Instead of walking with a purpose, like walk endlessly. I think that there is an enormous amount of untapped creative potential that is in all of us that we are too busy to notice. And so this is my breadcrumb is go for go for a walk outside and notice how extraordinary nature, even nature in cities, is able to find its way and see what we can learn from that ecosystem that we are such a part of and yet we so often forget that we’re a part of.

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Do you want to add a couple of bits on where people can connect with you or listen to your, you know, read your stuff or maybe new books coming up?

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Sure, right now I’m just starting to work on a book about conflict, which makes sense, right? My books are published so far through Stanford University Press, so you can find all my books there. I have a website, cultivatingleadership.com. 

You can find me on LinkedIn. I put stuff in writing because it helps me think and I have an incredibly beautiful LinkedIn community and other communities around me to think together because my thinking will always be just such a tiny, tiny piece of what the world needs right now. But I’m pretty good at helping people think with me. 

So come, let’s play.

Simone Cicero 

Thank you. And I hope that was the case today as well, right? That we gave us a little piece of the picture. Thank you so much, Jennifer. It was a great chat. I hope you also enjoyed it. I guess so. 

Jennifer Garvey Berger 

Yeah, was great. Thank you. I did. Thank you so much. I have enjoyed our conversation and you’re provoking and very interesting questions. Thank you.

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. Shruthi, thanks again for your participation again.

Shruthi Prakash 

Thank you. Thank you so much, Jennifer. Thanks, Simone.

Simone Cicero

And yeah, of course, our listeners, you can head to boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find Jennifer’s podcast in the homepage and with all the mentions, they are the links that we mentioned during the conversation. And of course, until we speak again, remember to think Boundaryless.