1. Strategic HR Review
Emerald Article: Learning to lead the knowledgeable organization:
developing leadership agility
Jane McKenzie, Paul Aitken
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To cite this document: Jane McKenzie, Paul Aitken, (2012),"Learning to lead the knowledgeable organization: developing leadership
agility", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 11 Iss: 6 pp. 329 - 334
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Jane McKenzie, Paul Aitken, (2012),"Learning to lead the knowledgeable organization: developing leadership agility", Strategic HR
Review, Vol. 11 Iss: 6 pp. 329 - 334
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14754391211264794
Jane McKenzie, Paul Aitken, (2012),"Learning to lead the knowledgeable organization: developing leadership agility", Strategic HR
Review, Vol. 11 Iss: 6 pp. 329 - 334
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14754391211264794
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2. Learning to lead the knowledgeable
organization: developing leadership agility
Jane McKenzie and Paul Aitken
Abstract
Purpose – This paper seeks to identify how leadership can positively influence knowledge work and to
explore which leadership practices need to be developed to support organisational learning and agility
in the face of continuous change.
Design/methodology/approach – The thinking combines a long history of leadership and change
management advice and 12 years of knowledge management research with the insights from a
collaborative research project involving 14 large organisations that are members of the Henley KM
Forum.
Findings – The result is a framework of 12 leadership agility practices specifically focused on creating
conducive conditions for knowledge sharing, learning, engagement and collaboration.
Practical implications – Those responsible for leadership development in the knowledgeable
organisation could use this as a well-grounded starting point for designing learning programs. Leaders
in key roles can use it as a gauge for self-assessment to identify development needs or reflect on how to
change their approach when things are not working.
Originality/value – The 12 practices are complementary and mutually supportive. They focus on
remedying potential causes of ‘‘dis-ease’’ in learning and change, caused by the most frequently
occurring conflicts and tensions in organisational life.
Keywords Managing knowledge, Leadership development, Paradox and tension,
Organizational learning, Organizational change, Leadership agility
Paper type Research paper
M
ore knowledge has been generated in the past 50 years than in the previous
50,000. The pace continues unabated. Often the past is no longer an accurate
predictor of the future, so it takes ever more individual and organisational learning
to deliver intelligent responses to evolving customer, shareholder and stakeholder
expectations.
As knowledge has become more crucial to sustainable business advantage, flatter
structures and dispersed operations allow know-how to be applied closer to the point of
impact. Reducing hierarchy frees individuals to use their knowledge more responsively,
while geographical dispersion gives better access to specialist expertise wherever it exists.
But diversity and fragmentation makes handing change complex and unsettling.
The solution to this conundrum relies heavily on the quality of distributed leadership; the
judgment and agility of leaders in sensing, communicating and coordinating in ways that
carry others with them. While knowledge management can provide many tools and
techniques that help, KM teams are small so tend to operate indirectly through influence.
Leadership at line and project management level often has more immediate day-to-day
impact on the climate for knowledge and learning in teams, projects and functional activities,
but not all prioritise the necessary leadership capabilities. They have to be skilled at
knowledge sharing, collaboration and engagement, as well as mitigating the dark side of
DOI 10.1108/14754391211264794 VOL. 11 NO. 6 2012, pp. 329-334, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1475-4398 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEW j PAGE 329
Jane McKenzie is Professor
of Management Knowledge
and Learning at Henley
Business School, Henley on
Thames, UK. Paul Aitken is
Leadership and
Organizational
Development Adviser,
Educator and Founder of
Mastering Leadership
Agility, Minehead, UK.
This work was carried out in
conjunction with members of
the Henley Knowledge
Management Forum based at
Henley Business School of the
University of Reading.

3. change – the resistance, fear, knowledge hoarding, and potential detachment that occur
when people feel excluded or powerless to shape the process or outcome.
Identifying practices for agile leadership
The Henley KM Forum and Mastering Leadership Agility Ltd conducted research with 14
large organisations to outline a framework of 12 leadership practices that bring together
change management capability with good practice in facilitating learning and knowledge
management. Using this to guide the design of leadership development activities could help
organisations make better use of their knowledge and speed up organisational learning.
Various assessment tools and a simulation are available to support the development
process.
Developing more agile leaders who can navigate complexity should lead to more agile
organisations, better adapted to survive, thrive and renew in a turbulent world.
What is leadership agility?
Experts argue that leadership involves ‘‘embracing inconsistencies’’ (Tushman et al., 2011;
Nonaka and Takeuchi, 2011). Similarly, the well-respected organisational researcher Karl
Weick (2001) says that wisdom is a paradoxical process that involves living in persistent
tension between knowing and doubting. To make sense of complex circumstances, leaders
are effectively weighing up the balance of known to unknown, and assessing the risk of
action and inaction. They then communicate their understanding to others, renegotiate the
balance and co-ordinate appropriate action to adapt and make change stick. It’s hard to
acknowledge the possible consequences of ‘‘known unknowns’’ without igniting fear or
disconcerting doubts about what could happen next. Yet, overconfidence in limited
knowledge is also very risky. Rash and ill-informed action often produces the right answer to
the wrong problem, as banking crises have shown. Doubt is a good insurance: Yet if leaders
doubt too much and overestimate the potential significance of ‘‘unknown unknowns’’,
overcautious behaviour brings progress to a standstill. It usually requires many different
perspectives to grasp the full dimensions of complex problems.
Dialogue and negotiation help. We only need to reflect on the current Eurozone crisis to see
how conflicted positions can make leaders look indecisive, ambivalent and weak.
Organising business is as complex; leaders face interrelated tensions so the balance of
knowing and doubting gets harder to handle. Leaders need agility to navigate diverse and
fragmented organisations, whilst sustaining some sense of stability and coherence in an
ever-changing world.
An advanced capability to handle tension
Agile leaders are skilled at handling tensions caused by apparently conflicting
requirements; for example, reconciling local needs with collective interests, negotiating
differences in individual and organisational performance priorities, and deciding when
sources of past success need to be unlearned, because the knowledge of what worked
historically is no longer relevant.
Tension can be healthy. It arises naturally when people with the best intentions wrestle with
choices from different knowledge bases and values. Their differences can be a stimulus to
creative thinking and new innovation. Alternatively, they can degenerate into disagreement
and dissatisfaction. That creates ‘‘dis-ease’’ when left unmanaged. So managing tensions is
a leadership priority.
It can be an uncomfortable position to be in (McKenzie et al., 2009) because it involves
harnessing uncertainty, ambiguity and conflicting desires for stability and change in a
positive way. Such unsettling conditions easily degenerate into conflict, politics and
confusion leaving others feeling uncomfortable, de-motivated and resistant to learning and
change. Leaders usually avoid that by decisive action, which cuts off involvement,
knowledge sharing, learning and collaboration. It takes experience, development and
PAGE 330jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWjVOL. 11 NO. 6 2012

4. practice to work towards more inclusive solutions that are representative of the diversity of
interests and fulfil multiple priorities of various groups of stakeholders.
Keeping knowledge and change side by side
By mapping the most common sources of organisational dis-ease to 12 mutually supportive
leadership practices we offer a foundation for designing development experiences that
engender agility. The more people use these practices both individually and together, the
more likely work will feel like a place where knowledge sharing, learning, engagement and
collaboration sit at the heart of the organisational experience.
Ten practices tackle the most frequently occurring tensions that persist in all organisations
(Smith and Lewis, 2011). The first is to understand and articulate how personal values colour
thinking, communication, decision making and action, and the last is about how people
become resilient when they can flexibly apply all 11 practices in leading others.
Personal values tacitly colour all responses to difference, affecting how we interact and the
decisions we make. What’s hidden is easily misinterpreted. Agile leaders make their values
explicit and are open to discussing how they shape on personal, team and organisational
responses.
Four basic sources of dis-ease and suitable leadership responses
When people work together, the following four questions create fundamental differences that
affect how productive their knowledge contributions will be:
1. Who am I in relation to the organisation I belong to? Reputation defines who we are for
others. What individuals and organisations are known for is increasingly a discriminator in
career and business success. How personal behaviour plays out individually and
collectively in organisational and private life is a vital aspect of authenticity, and a
foundation for the trust and credibility needed to inspire followers. Leaders represent
collective reputation when they interface with others inside and outside the business.
Leading change can put people in places that stretch their capabilities and challenge
their status and credibility (for example, can they be wrong?). Sometimes they face moral
and ethical decisions that confront personal identity and values. Such situations have
implications for their continued belonging. Agile leaders know how to stay true to who
they are – the values, knowledge and expertise core to their own personal identity and to
others they represent – whilst meeting the evolving needs of the group and organisation
to which they belong. They model the culture they want at all times.
2. How do we organise for dynamic order? In situations of scarcity and volatility, structures,
systems and processes bring order and efficiency to activities. They impose boundaries,
provide operating guidelines and good practice principles, and prevent wastage and
reinventing the wheel. Taken too far or used politically, procedures become rigid and
constraining. People also need freedom to apply judgment and respond flexibly to
changing circumstances. Agile leadership defines appropriate boundaries for balancing
order and flexibility. Agile leaders manage risk by enabling others to access and share the
broad range of business knowledge needed to make informed decisions locally and
globally. For example, closely connecting the senior management team to client facing
delivery teams and external ‘‘thought’’ leaders brings more relevant thinking to bear on
problems. They use competitive and collaborative structures to develop and refine different
capabilities and improve results. They strive to integrate knowledge, experience, insights
and ideas from across the organisation to increase the range of possible responses.
‘‘ Leaders need agility to navigate diverse and fragmented
organisations. ’’
VOL. 11 NO. 6 2012 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWjPAGE 331

5. 3. What does it take to integrate different areas of knowledge and values for distinctive and
peak performance? Organisational performance comes from combining knowledge into
products and services that deliver value. To turn knowledge into financial and stakeholder
value, people have to work effectively across mental, physical and cultural boundaries.
Leadership plays a vital bridging role facilitating connections and smoothing out
inconsistencies at the interfaces. Doing it well requires sensitivity to the values and norms
guiding behaviour in sub units, communities and national cultures, and harnessing that
diversity and uniting people behind a coherent set of objectives and purpose. Agile
leadership needs a high degree of cross-cultural competence.
4. When is it right to rely on existing knowledge and when is learning afresh required? When
existing know-how brought current success, it is tempting for both individual and
organisation to imagine it will always be so. It is vital to recognise when external change
will render current knowledge obsolete and plan for updating capabilities both through
new learning and by encouraging unlearning of outdated assumptions. It may require
reframing the way teams and groups consider problems. Often it means questioning and
challenging bandwagons and the relevance of knowledge to context. Agile leaders are
always mindful of the strategic contribution of current knowledge relative to future
knowledge. They actively learn and help others learn, by engaging in open, frank and
reflective conversations before arriving at critical decisions, assess the ongoing value of
their experience and remain open to alternative perspectives.
To maintain a sense of belonging, dynamic capabilities, distinctive and peak performance
and continuous learning, agile leaders stay true to personal purpose and values whilst role
modelling for others. They also use systems, processes and operating principles to access,
use and refresh the range of business capabilities, so people engage present and future
needs based on the most up to date and relevant knowledge.
Supplemented by six further leadership remedies
The following six additional leadership requirements emerge because the tensions
associated with belonging, organising, performing and learning interact with one another to
compound the anxieties surrounding change.
1. Sense making and giving. Organisations in a state of flux are struggling to remain
coherent whilst learning to be different. Inconsistencies between evolving objectives and
direction make them feel messy and chaotic, making it harder for people to understand
where they belong, and identify what learning would contribute. The future can feel
unfathomable, unsettling and unsafe. Agile leaders have a key role to play in
sense-making with respect to the context for change and future development needs; at
the same time they are sense giving for others with respect for legacy and the collectively
perceived value of who we are now.
2. Creating a learning culture. To exploit the known and explore the unknown for innovation,
organisations have to be configured to do two apparently incompatible things at once.
Successfully exploiting existing capabilities requires standardising, continuous
refinement, efficiency repeatability and a focus on detail. Exploring new areas of
knowledge involves doing things differently, disruptive innovation, temporary inefficiency,
experimentation and big picture focus. Each needs different skills, incentives, rewards,
management systems and processes. Leaders are stuck in the middle of implementing
these conflicting requirements, and can only manage them indirectly. Agile leadership
involves creating conditions where learning is integral to all that happens; using group
strength to help individuals embrace novelty, creating a secure place for experiment and
failure, helping people question, and reflecting on how the organisational system is
implicated in supporting and constraining learning.
3. One-to-many dialogue. It is equally important to promote performance against current
targets, just not to the exclusion of ongoing learning. Encouraging performance alongside
learning and development raises the absorptive capacity of the business. Agile leaders
achieve both by facilitating group dialogue that encourages collaborative application of
PAGE 332jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWjVOL. 11 NO. 6 2012

6. theory and learning to daily practice. They support and promote core knowledge
management techniques such as action learning groups, communities of practice, peer
assists and lessons learned processes, which all focus attention on achieving results and
collective learning from one another. These one-to-many dialogue techniques are often
seen as talking shops, but can produce significant improvements in knowledge utilisation.
4. Emotional intelligence. Constantly reconfiguring and re-organising alters vital networks
and disrupts well-established connections between groups and can damage
relationships. Ways of accessing knowledge get lost. People have to find new
narratives and new ways of explaining their purpose and role. Fears and anxieties
undermine willingness to invest in learning. The process of evolving and communicating
change needs sensitive handling to prevent irreparable damage to engagement and the
psychological contract between individual and organisation. A balance of
communication around new opportunities as well as difficult news, an honest
explanation of the compelling need to change combined with a sincere recognition of
how it relates to those impacted is vital. Agile leaders use emotional intelligence
(Goleman et al., 2009) to sense, acknowledge and respond to the prevailing mood and
nurture the climate so that people feel committed to the direction of change. Knowing how
to maintain harmonious yet demanding working relationships requires significant effort.
5. Orchestrating the performance challenge. It is said that what gets measured gets
managed; the challenge is to use measurement to stretch performance without damaging
co-operation and creating a toxic climate of detachment or fierce independence.
Performance management can focus on outcome or process measures. Often the mix
drives counterproductive behaviour. Inconsistencies between outcome measures and the
means of organising to achieve them (i.e. structural capital) can create dissonance, waste
energy and reduce performance. Agile leadership involves monitoring how systems and
processes work together to encourage achievement of high performance outcomes. Agile
leaders create a climate where everyday performance conversations feel normal; where
specificity and frankness about what is and is not working well is welcomed. Feedback
loops are a way to monitor progress towards a goal. Faster more frequent feedback on
relevant but stretching targets helps people refine goals and operating activities and
prepare for changes of which they can feel some ownership. Acceptance of error
combined with continuous assessment of progress through everyday conversations that
are open and specific, stretches people to become the best they can be.
6. One-to-one dialogue. The sixth practice involves one-to-one dialogue in developmental
mode. Agile leaders build others’ resilience, engagement, adaptability and competence
by coaching, mentoring and support in reconciling professional capabilities with
organisational performance requirements. Leaders take responsibility for bringing out the
best in themselves and others combining careful listening and questioning techniques
with insightful feedback. They work to bridge knowledge gaps and differences in
understanding to deliver distinctive organisational results.
The final step toward mastering leadership agility is constantly to review and learn from the
combination of your own and others’ everyday leadership practice. Concentrate on
removing habits that are no longer fit for purpose, and developing the resilience to intervene
with soft power to rebalance the system through small but catalytic interventions, rather than
blunt and directional authority. It is often the quiet and humble leaders not the heroic and
charismatic leaders that create the most sustainable organisations.
‘‘ The final step toward mastering leadership agility is
constantly to review and learn from the combination of your
own and others’ everyday leadership practice. ’’
VOL. 11 NO. 6 2012 jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWjPAGE 333

7. A foundation for leadership development
Paradoxically, senior executives often complain about a shortage of change leadership
capability in their organisations whilst, at the same time, middle managers and others feel
that opportunities to grow and shine are few and far between. Either there is little time or
budget available for learning, or limited focused investment in on-the-job leadership
development. Integrating the 12 leadership practices into the development menu and
encouraging their practice could help resolve this impasse.
They are learned capabilities. They develop through exposure to and practice in a broad
range of experiences where influencing others is central, careful reflection is guided and
emotional and mental resilience is supported, whilst performance is maintained. It is
possible to fast-track development when self-assessment and focused education
complements on-the-job learning. Anyone involved in producing leadership in groups,
teams and projects, even though they may not formally be designated as ‘‘the’’ leader, can
work on the practices to produce lasting productivity and performance improvement.
References
Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R.E. and McKee, A. (2009), ‘‘Primal leadership’’, Leadership Excellence, Vol. 26,
pp. 9-10.
McKenzie, J., Woolf, N., Van Winkelen, C. and Morgan, C. (2009), ‘‘Cognition in strategic
decision-making: a model of nonconventional thinking capacities for complex situations’’,
Management Decision, Vol. 47 No. 2, pp. 209-32.
Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (2011), ‘‘The wise leader’’, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 89, pp. 58-67.
Smith, W.K. and Lewis, M.W. (2011), ‘‘Towards a theory of paradox: a dynamic equilibrium model of
organizing’’, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 36, pp. 381-403.
Tushman, M.L., Smith, W.K. and Binns, A. (2011), ‘‘The ambidextrous CEO’’, Harvard Business Review,
Vol. 89, pp. 74-80.
Weick, K.E. (2001), Making Sense of the Organization, Blackwell, Oxford.
About the authors
Jane McKenzie is Professor of Management Knowledge and Learning at Henley Business
School and Director of the Henley KM Forum. She has been actively contributing to this
practitioner community since 2000, by working on at least one research project per year. Her
interests can be summed up in one phrase: ‘‘how connections and contradictions affect
knowledge work and learning capacity in organisational life’’. Consequently she is interested
in how organisations develop and how decision makers handle the dilemmas and
contradictions that arise in relationships because of uncertainty and ambiguity. Jane
McKenzie would describe herself as a ‘‘pracademic’’ – happy with the rigour of academic
research but always with an eye to its practical use in improving business practice. Half her
working life was spent in industry and half at Henley Business School. She has written three
books and many papers. Jane McKenzie is the corresponding author and can be contacted
at: jane.mckenzie@henley.reading.ac.uk.
Dr Paul Aitken is an independent leadership and organisational development adviser,
educator, and founder of Mastering Leadership Agility. He combines this with research and
writing on how to develop agile business transition leaders, the business impact of
executives’ personal values, collective leadership, and leadership for performance/worldly
sustainability. His recent book Developing Change Leaders is based on his research. He
works with executives pursuing doctoral, Master’s and DMS programs in various universities,
including Henley Business School, Southampton University, the National University of Ireland,
University of Gloucestershire (Vietnam) and Adjunct Professor at Bond University (Australia).
He has fulfilled a variety of senior HR management/internal consultancy roles in the private
utility and public sectors.
PAGE 334jSTRATEGIC HR REVIEWjVOL. 11 NO. 6 2012
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