Leading Change in Close-Knit Communities – The Tasmania Challenge

By Dr. Aiden M.A. Thornton 

“We are a small community. Leading change will typically upset members of your social circle or even family. That makes leadership in Tasmania particularly challenging – but we need it!”

This quote reflects a reality that many Tasmanian leaders know all too well: change isn’t just an organisational process, it’s also a social one.  In tightly woven communities, decisions often have ripple effects. The person you lead today might be your neighbour tomorrow. Critique a system, and you could find yourself at odds with a cousin, a childhood friend, or a well-respected community leader. In these contexts, leadership isn’t just professional.  It’s also relational.

From a complexity leadership perspective, this quote vividly illustrates the powerful interconnectivity that drives complexity. In small systems like Tasmania, the ties between people, sectors, and institutions are dense. It is precisely this interconnectivity, this rich web of relationships, that sustains the system and at the same time, makes leading change particularly difficult.

Complexity as a Product of Interconnectivity

In complexity science, complexity is often understood as the unpredictable behaviour that emerges from the interconnectivity between a system’s elements, between systems themselves, and between systems and their environments (Holland, 1995; von Bertalanffy, 1968; Weinberg, 2001; Gharajedaghi, 1999).  As these interdependencies become denser, systems are more susceptible to demonstrating chaotic behaviour (Helbing, 2013).

In small, close-knit communities, these dynamics are magnified. Social and professional roles often overlap, feedback loops are fast, and reputational impacts travel quickly. Change efforts must constantly navigate a polarity: on one hand, the genuine desire to facilitate change; on the other, the interpersonal cost of disrupting the status quo.

The Human Face of Complexity

Leaders in these contexts face more than policy choices or organisational reforms. They face difficult conversations with people they know well. They must weigh the risk of alienating trusted colleagues, family members, or members of their team.  This is one point of departure between complexity leadership and more traditional models. Rather than seeking top-down control, complexity leadership includes an emphasis on developing nuanced relational skills to navigate messy, real-world conditions.  It’s not just about knowing what to do.  It’s about knowing how to do it with others, even when the path forward is unclear.

As I mentioned in my reflection on Quote 1, we developed a Complexity Leadership Skills Framework based on insights from a Complexity Leadership Lab I facilitated in collaboration with Tasmanian Leaders. You can explore it in Image 1 and Table 1 of my latest white paper (link here). Tasmanian Leaders are currently iterating these skills for future leadership development initiatives.

Many of these skills go far beyond strategy or technical knowledge. They are deeply interpersonal, including:

• Creating Collaborative Spaces: The ability to establish environments where diverse perspectives are welcomed and teamwork thrives. This includes supporting others, cultivating co-created value, effectively participating in collaborative processes, and effectively facilitating collaborative processes that others may participate in.
• Boundary Spanning and Relationship Building: The ability to build bridges across people, relationships, teams, organisations, or sectors by fostering meaningful connections. This involves holding relationships, recognising common goals, and creating partnerships that contribute to a shared purpose.

Of course, it is still an open empirical question whether these skills reliably foster more effective leadership in complex conditions, and this type of research is notoriously challenging to do. That said, there are strong conceptual reasons to believe they are critical for navigating the interpersonal aspects of complexity in tight-knit communities like Tasmania.

More Than Interconnectivity

While interconnectivity is a central driver of complexity, it’s not the only one. Other contributing factors include:

• the specialisation of parts, such as the emergence of niche professions, policy domains, and increasingly differentiated worldviews (e.g., indigenous, theological, modern, classical postmodern, critical social justice, meta modern worldviews); and
• advances in information processing, such as AI and big data; and
• the increasing volatility of the environment, such as what we saw during COVID-19 and in global supply chains.

As external complexity increases, systems often need to adapt accordingly.  This principle is often referred to in the literature as requisite complexity.  This co-evolution of systems and leadership capabilities is something we are exploring through our research program at the ANU Complexity Leadership Lab.

Courage, Accountability, and the Relational Edge

The quote that inspired this reflection ends with a hopeful but urgent note: “…but we need it.”

Indeed, we do.

Leadership in Tasmania, or in any deeply interconnected system, requires strength of character rather than performative bravado. It takes the willingness to disappoint some people in service of a greater good.  It also requires a clear-eyed understanding that complexity rarely comes with simple solutions. As leaders, we must often act amidst ambiguity, balancing competing values, priorities, and relationships. This is hard work, but necessary, nonetheless.

Leading Together

Reimagining leadership for complexity doesn’t require discarding what we know. It requires broadening our lens.

In systems like Tasmania’s, where relationships are closely interwoven, leadership often depends as much on managing interpersonal dynamics as it does on executing strategy. Recognising and working with this balance may allow leaders to move change forward in ways that are both effective and sustainable.