Following is a splendid piece of insight coming from my friend and colleague, Michael Josefowicz, on honing leadership skills in a complex environment.

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For economic development, entrepreneurs and organisational change it’s all the same.

1. Create leaders.
Make them believe they can manage complexity by showing them they can.

2. Create high performance teams.
One person always has a limited view. Often right, sometimes very wrong. Without a high performance team in place that can disagree within a context of trust the chances of getting it very wrong increase radically.

3. Choose a problem that is both solvable and worth solving. Focus on the problem and the constraints of time and money. Leadership and high performance team practice can be learned with any problem.

After that it’s all simple and self sustaining.

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What is most interesting is the direct relationship between leadership skills and problem solving. It would involve developing a wide range of human skills to operate at the level of “unconscious competence” in a complex environment.