In my previous Blog on The Complex Systems Leadership Process© I’ve been thinking that it would be better to name it The Complexity Leadership Process© since it really is not a system as in systems thinking.

The Complexity Leadership Process is another name for Self-Organizing Leadership©. These are adjustments to my thinking relating to these ideas.

This Blog is focused on my new book, The Process Enneagram©: Essays on Theory and Practice. I am the editor for this book that was just published by Emergent Publications. It can be purchased directly from their website.

This book grew out of the call for papers for the Special Issue of Emergence: Complexity and Organization, Volume 15, Number 1, March 2013 on The Process Enneagram. In that call for papers I received 9 papers from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. Since we could only publish four of them in the Special Issue of Emergence, for space reasons, Kurt Richardson, Director of Emergent Publications suggested that we publish all 9 papers in a book.

The book begins with a brief Introduction by me of the Process Enneagram. The 9 essays include two of an historical and theoretical nature by Tony Blake and Cameron Richards, one describing the use of the Process Enneagram at a Managing and Engineering Complex Situations Workshop to help a group of engineers get a better sense of the complexity paradigm and one paper is about using the Process Enneagram with groups of people in industrial organizations helping them to address their complex issues. There are two papers describing the use of the Process Enneagram with graduate students to help one class design their classroom experience for the semester and the other class to get a better understanding among a class of engineers of the flow of technology developments over the last few years from the perspective of complexity. Another describes the use of the Process Enneagram in helping to develop more cohesive, effective teams over a three-year period. Another paper correlates the energy flows in the Process Enneagram with those in an ancient Chinese cosmological, leadership model. The last paper uses a card trick by a famous magician to illustrate how one feels while moving through the work of the Process Enneagram.

These widely ranging essays open up a broad scope of richness in The Process Enneagram helping people to see and learn more about it from these widely ranging perspectives.

Sometimes I have referred to the Process Enneagram as a tool, but this is misleading in that it is not something like a wrench. I see it more and more as a series of nested processes that help guide important conversations and reveal the patterns and processes that are running within the organization. In using the Process Enneagram with people deeper understanding and better communications develop.

The importance of the Process Enneagram is in its use to help people work with complex, wicked problems, build the social connections they need and build the emotional energy and commitment to do their work.

One area where I have used The Process Enneagram is with people in organizations to help them improve their understanding of all their safety issues and develop a living, strategic plan for them to use going forward to sustain their work. Using The Process Enneagram is the first step in the Complex Leadership Process helping the people to get clear, focused, coherent and energized. As people develop and use The Process Enneagram they experience two levels of transformation. One is their own personal transformation and the other one is the transformation of the organization.

When the leaders from across the organization develop their strategic safety plan, and engaged in the transformations, they can take it to all the others in the organization to share and further develop it. If people are willing to be open to learning and growing The Process Enneagram always works in amazing ways.

In the previous blog I describe the Complexity Leadership Process and you can see the important role at the start of the work that it plays.