Renowned author and complexity thinker Jennifer Garvey Berger, co-founder of Cultivating Leadership, joins us in this episode to explore how organisations can evolve by unlocking the mental traps that limit adaptive capacity.
She helps us reframe leadership as a practice that fosters engagement and thriving amid uncertainty, and guides us through why individual development is essential to creating truly functional and effective collectives.
She highlights gaps in organisations that often overlook the importance of actively attending to a team’s health, which harms the relationships and connections that hold systems together.
She shares a future-focused insight, stating that “organisations are not merely serving markets, but constantly co-creating them,” redefining the deep implications for how organisations define their purpose, value, and long-term responsibility.
This episode offers a powerful and timely reflection that embraces a more ecological and co-creative approach to organizing. Tune in.

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.

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) 00:00 Leadership in Complexity: Purpose, Failure & Conflict - intro
(01:55) Introducing Jennifer Garvey Berger
(03:45) The Polarities in Leadership
(06:48) A new mindset at the Leadership Level
(08:54) Personal Pattern and Complex Ecosystems
(13:03) Operationalising individual and collective patterns
(16:49) The boundaries of leadership in an organization
(19:05) The “How” and the “What” to Addressing Complexity
(25:21) Organizational Readiness for Handling Complexity
(28:08) Are Purpose-Driven Markets the Future?
(42:37) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/garvey-jennifer 

Episode recorded on Jun 03, 2025

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Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music

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

We use to say that leading multi-stakeholder collaboration is an ”art”. But how can we describe the competencies and skills that are required in multi-stakeholder collaboration? What are the differences compared to more "traditional" leadership skills that we know from leading within an organization?

We discuss topics like:
- The importance of embracing differences in knowledge, logic, perspectives etc. when meeting between different ”silos”
- How we need a specific understanding of group dynamics that is different from ”traditional” group theories
- How to navigate when working in the ”transitional space” that can be seen as an ”unknown territory” for everyone
- Why we need to talk a lot – for example about how we talk, how we do things, how we learn, how we collaborate, how we interpret what we are doing...
- Sensemaking and mobilization as crucial aspects of success
- The frustration that will occur in order to integrate our differences and create something new
- Trust as a precondition for getting anywhere, and as an ongoing process
- The role of the collaboration leader: Being a facilitator and a system architect
- A crucial reminder when considering the difficulty of multi-stakeholder collaboration: The great importance of being a collaboration leader for solving our worlds complex problems!

3. What are the competencies required in multi-stakeholder collaboration?

Art of Collaborating is a podcast produced by Länka Consulting. Länka was established in 2015 by Anna Zingmark and Karoline Bottheim with the mission to explore and develop the tricky "art" of multi-stakeholder-collaboration. When we meet between organizations, sectors and knowledge areas in order to find solutions for handling complex societal challenges, we need support from practical methods and ways of understanding how to collaborate more efficiently. After years of discussing this topic with experts, researchers and practitioners all over the world, we are quite sure that multi-stakeholder collaboration can be called an advanced "art", a specific way of working, it may even be seen as a specific "community of practice". With our podcast, we want to make this - really necessary - specific way of working accessible to more people who find themselves in complex processes with many stakeholders involved.

Boundaryless helps global customers with Business Strategy and Organization Design for the age of Ecosystems.
We do it by creating openly accessible frameworks and by supporting a community of organizations, institutions, and individuals through workshops, training, and consulting services. 

In this space we host all our audio recordings, including the Boundaryless Conversations podcast, a show focused on exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous. 

We used to be online at platformdesigntoolkit.com... now find us on our new website: www.boundaryless.io!

Email: hello@boundaryless.io

New tracks tagged #ComplexityLeadership