Shadow Art Leadership - A characteristic of Disruption-Fit Organisations

In my article The Disruption-Fit© Maturity Scale, I mention 8 integrities for organizations to become "Disruption-Fit". Four of them are dedicated to build strategic agility and the next four focus on building organisational fluidity.

Amongst the latter one's, we find the ability of leadership to enable and catalyse: I call it the Elevation Integrity through "Shadow Art Leadership".

Shadow art, where performers individually and collectively create shapes with their bodies, illustrates what, in my opinion, leadership should look like in polycrisis times :

Structural Elements (The Frame):

• The frame provides the scope - The organisational intention and governance provide the framework that makes everyone’s leadership visible.
• The leaders use the main light source to illuminate all - So leadership emerges from who people genuinely are, not from titles.

Development Elements (Making Leaders)

• The leaders orchestrate the secondary light sources to illuminate each person's unique contribution and potential.
• Leaders use mirrors to see and refine their own shadows - Modelling the continuous self-development they cultivate in others.

Emergent Elements (The Performance)

• Each person creates their unique shape - Everyone contributes their distinctive leadership “form” based on their natural capabilities and expertise.
• Together they tell a cohesive story - Individual leadership contributions combine to create the organisational narrative and outcomes, they create the magic.
• Constantly moving and adapting - Leadership shapes evolve as people grow, situations change, and new expertise develops.

This theatre metaphor reveals an approach that captures something traditional leadership terminology often misses:

The Artistry of Leadership

Leadership becomes an art form where each person uses their authentic self and competencies (body) to create something beautiful and meaningful. The cleaner creates their leadership “shadow” by bringing facility excellence, the developer through technical innovation, etc.

An art form is not an attribute, it is a process. Similarly leadership is not an attribute, it is a process of intentional and multidimensional elevation, where the leaders aim at:

1. Elevating the mission and vision to generate collective energy.
2. Elevating others so they continuously seek to become their best selves.
3. Elevating self in a constant quest for mastery.

With such an approach, distinguishing managers and leaders becomes irrelevant.

The Collaborative Performance

Unlike purely hierarchical models where one or few persons direct, Shadow Art Leadership requires everyone to be both artist and part of a coordinated whole - leading in their area while supporting the overall performance. There is a strong mindfulness that each person’s shadow/leadership is essential to the complete story.

The Dynamic Nature

The “moving” aspect perfectly captures how leadership is never static - it flows, adapts, grows, and changes as people develop new capabilities and organisational needs evolve.

The Beauty of Interconnection

Individual shadows can overlap, interact, and enhance each other - showing how different types of leadership can complement and strengthen one another rather than compete.

This metaphor reframes leadership from:

• Static positions → Dynamic artistry.
• Distribution from above → Creation from within.
• Competition for authority → Collaboration in performance.
• One-size-fits-all → Unique individual expression.
• Management control → Individual responsibility and ownership.

The Organisational Principles

In a Shadow Art Leadership organisation:

• Everyone is an artist creating their unique leadership contribution. Curiosity is promoted as DNA.
• The organisational purpose is co-designed, deeply understood and serves as the light that makes all leadership visible.
• Hierarchy provides the screen - the structure that allows everyone's leadership to express in a coordinated way.
• The vision is co-designed, the goals decided collectively.
• The story is co-invented, and then emerges collectively - organisational success comes from everyone’s leadership contributions.
• Individual mastery and collective performance are mutually reinforcing innovation.
• Adaptations happen along the way, all the time. Everyone adapts, backs each other up to deliver the shapes and story.
• Beauty lies in the diversity - different leadership “shapes” create richness and depth.
• Continuous movement reflects growth, adaptation, evolution, and a form of flow, because mastery and trust allow intuition and innovation to flourish.

A unique role for the top

In Shadow Art Leadership organisations, the CEOs and management team members would ask:

• Do we live our values? Humanity, courage, integrity? Are we stepping-up when the teams are struggling.
• How are we doing on psychological safety? Are we sure that everyone feels safe speaking-up on all subject matters, including alerting on changes of context and feedback?
• Are we creating unity ?
• Are we sure that everyone is crystal clear with what we are there for (mission), where we are going (vision), how we do things (values and operating principles), what story we are telling together (strategy) ?
• Are we sure that we have delegated decision-making everywhere we could?
• Are we sure that we create positive tonalities inside and outside the team?
• Are we sure that we are connected with the outside world, that we read it through critical thinking?
• Are we sure that we all learn all the time?
• What unique “shape” does each person’s leadership create?
• How can we best illuminate everyone’s leadership contributions?
• How can we make sure that individual leadership “shadows” best interact and support each other (including the top)?
• Where do we need new leadership shapes to complete our organisational story?
• How can we create new shapes with everyone's evolutions?

Why does Shadow Art Leadership emerge as a response to polycrisis

Today’s world faces what experts call a polycrisis, multiple, interconnected crises that amplify each other and create challenges greater than the sum of their parts. Trade wars intersect with shortages of key components for major industries, climate threats impact energy supply while AI disruption accelerates workforce changes and geopolitical tensions strain global supply chains.

Traditional command-and-control leadership fails in these conditions because centralised decision-making creates bottlenecks when speed matters, no single leader can master all the expertise polycrises demand, and rigid hierarchies delay critical information flow.

Shadow Art Leadership emerges as a response because it mirrors the networked nature of polycrisis challenges themselves. Multiple “shadows” positioned throughout the organisation can respond simultaneously in their domains while maintaining coordination, transforming vulnerability into the distributed resilience that our age of permanent, overlapping global challenges demands.

From disruption-adverse to disruption-fit

In a disruption-adverse organisation, which is the lowest level of the The Disruption Maturity Scale©, decision-making is almost not distributed. The CEO makes strategic decisions as well as very operational calls, intervening in statutory things such as parking space or offices allocations at the Corporate office. Learning is poor as there are no feedback loops in place, and very low psychological safety prevents innovation.

Takeaway

In a disruption-fit organisation, which is the highest level of the The Disruption Maturity Scale©, top leadership provides the enabling frame. It allows the conditions for everyone to express and develop their own leadership, while maintaining a rigorous coherence and coordination. There is a strong psychological security, based on a constantly renewed trust, in particular through an individual and organisational obsession to learn and adapt continuously.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How is this different from Holacracy or other flat organisation trends? This distinction is crucial. Shadow Art Leadership doesn't eliminate hierarchy, but transforms its purpose entirely. It values the competencies of leading an organisation, but as an enabler, catalytic role. In holacracy (or holocracy), hierarchy is essentially replaced with distributed circles. In Shadow Art Leadership, hierarchy serves as the “screen” - the essential structure that allows everyone’s leadership to be visible and coordinated. The CEO and management team don’t disappear; they define the frame, they become the “lighting designers” who ensure everyone’s shadows can be seen and tell a coherent story together. Hierarchy shifts from control and command to illumination and coordination.

Q: Isn’t this just another management fad that will disappear in a few years? We’ve indeed seen many management trends come and go. However, Shadow Art Leadership addresses something fundamentally different. Rather than eliminating existing structures or imposing complex new processes, it transforms the mindset and intent behind how we already work together. It’s built on the reality that people naturally lead from their expertise and authenticity - we’re simply creating conditions for this to flourish systematically rather than randomly.

Q: How does this work at scale? Won’t it create chaos in large organisations? This is where the metaphor’s wisdom really shines. Just as shadow art can work with two people or two hundred, the principles scale because each person only needs to focus on creating their authentic leadership “shadow” while staying aligned with the organisational light source (purpose). The beauty is that complexity doesn’t increase exponentially - each person contributes their piece to the larger story without needing to coordinate with everyone else directly.

Q: What about accountability? Who’s responsible when things go wrong? In Shadow Art Leadership, accountability actually becomes clearer, not muddier. Each person’s “shadow” - their leadership contribution - is visible to everyone. When the organisational story isn’t working, you can see exactly which shadows need adjustment. We see many organisation, whether flat or not, where responsibility gets diffused; here each person owns their specific leadership shape while contributing to the collective performance.

Q: How do you prevent this from becoming just another layer of meetings and processes? The opposite happens. When everyone leads authentically from their expertise, you need fewer meetings because decisions get made by the right people at the right time. The “continuous movement” aspect means learning and adaptations happen organically rather than through formal change management processes.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn