Context and background
We live in a world that is increasingly interconnected, where different issues intersect, and where, as individuals, we often find ourselves entangled with problems we are trying to address. Every action we take, starting from what we choose to eat for breakfast to what transport we use to get to our place of work, from what technology we use to stay connected through the day, to what brand of sneakers we wear for our fitness routine, we are an active participant in deciding how we engage with fundamental global issues like carbon emission, ecological imbalance, and human rights violation.
Traditional problem-solving assumes someone is in control. A facilitator enters with expertise, applies specific methodologies, and drives improvement. The logic is seductive in its simplicity: identify the problem, implement the solution, measure the outcome.
But here's what complexity studies teach us: systemic outcomes are emergent. They arise from countless individual agents acting with intentional and, even, non-intentional purposes. No single facilitator, however skilled, exercises direct control over such outcomes.
Think about climate change. We all know the consequences of our lifestyles. Political leaders understand how their policies affect the environment. Industries recognise the catastrophic impact of their operations. To counter climate change as a problem external to us, we create intergovernmental agreements, governments set regulations, companies trade carbon credits, NGOs run awareness campaigns, and researchers propose systemic approaches.
Yet the climate change does not recede… it has today escalated to a state of what many call, climate emergency!
The challenge is – we're still operating under the illusion that external agents — policymakers, industry leaders, activists — can engineer specific outcomes through their direct intervention. However, the reality is messier – it demands a different kind of leadership that eschews traditional leader-follower dichotomies and espouses shared agency as the fuel for change.
Leadership isn't a position. It is a social process.
Differences surface, oppositions arise, but it is through these turbulences that members are mobilised towards a common alignment and shared visions, making leadership something that emerges rather than something that's imposed.
This is messy work. It requires engaging with complex realities and bringing about collective collaboration across multiple, often conflicting, interests. It demands what we might call systemic leadership.
Systemic leadership represents a fundamental shift. The focus moves from the individual to the collective. From control to emergence. From hierarchy to network. This requires leaders to do something uncomfortable: de-center themselves!
Systemic leaders must embrace viewpoints from stakeholders who hold contrarian perspectives. They face difficult truths about present reality and learn to use the tension between vision and reality to inspire genuinely new approaches. When differences and conflicts arise — and they always do — systemic leaders build reciprocal interactions. They rise above personal clashes and narrow viewpoints to facilitate constructive conflict.
The core capabilities are clear: collaboration, bringing people together, holding space for emergence. Leadership becomes an interactive, collaborative, dynamic process. Not a solo performance.
But here's the foundation that makes all of this possible: systems thinking.
You cannot practice systemic leadership without understanding systems. Systems thinking teaches us to see patterns instead of isolated events and recognise feedback loops instead of linear cause-and-effect occurances. To understand that intervening in one part of a system creates ripples — intended and unintended — throughout the whole.
It reveals why our grand challenges — climate change, data colonisation, nuclear threats, poverty, migration, hunger, species extinction — cannot be addressed in isolation. They're interconnected. They're emergent properties of global systems that span economics, politics, culture, and ecology.
To navigate such realities, we need collective leadership capacity that is more conscious. Leaders who can hold the complexity without reducing it. Who can see the whole while honouring the parts. Who understand that they are not outside the system trying to fix it, but inside the system, part of its emergence.
Emergent design and systems thinking: the CSLP.
Creating CSLP programming on Systemic Leadership is itself an exercise in systemic thinking and emergent design. The challenge was to build the capacity of scholars - accounting for the diversity of their experiences, disciplines, and prior-knowledge - to create a programme that allows genuine engagement with systems thinking and systems change for young leaders pursuing diverse degrees at Oxford.
Rhodes Scholars come from extraordinarily varied backgrounds. Their knowledge systems differ as much as the disciplines they pursue. Engineering, literature, public policy, medicine, economics, arts — each brings its own lens, its own vocabulary, its own assumptions about how the world works.
The pedagogical framework therefore works within a complex system of interacting knowledge and experience to balance multiple needs, expertise, and concerns simultaneously. Play and rigor. Co-learning and structure. Exploration and direction. Gentleness and honesty about difficult realities. A veritable push and pull of multiple flows of ideas, priorities, and challenges as a messy microcosm of systems in the world today.
In the design of the programme, research, and multiple sources of knowledge, were drawn from. This included innovative research and practice from the UK Civil Services through their Policy Lab's work on improving policy through design and people-centred approaches provided crucial insights. Other resources included queer curation at film festivals that offer critical wisdom about holding space for difference, and Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering reinforce the power of intentional facilitation.
Importantly, the programming team, including SPFs, and Scholar Alumni experimented with Systemic — a resource that enables people to experience systems change in intuitive, tactile, and capacious ways to test the design of the an existing system in their environment in three iterative cycles.
The Retreat: theory meets practice
In December 2025, the Rhodes Scholarship Class of 2024 had a 2-day retreat in which the CSLP Programme encouraged participants to explore complex questions about leadership identity, especially during times that demand wisdom amid turbulence and transition. They gathered in small learning pods, each of which was able to hold space for collaboration, difference, and respectful disagreement as they agreed and debated a pressing system in the world that they would like to tackle, keeping sight of the goal: making better futures possible for communities and people worldwide.
Those who participated in learning from different expertise, experiences and positionalities as they inevitably interacted with competing positionalities, as in any complex system, left with seeds of understanding about systems change. More importantly they took with them a sense of the scale of what systemic leadership may look (and feel) like in their work ahead.
Participants didn't just learn concepts. They experienced emergence. They felt the tension between diverse viewpoints. They practiced holding complexity without rushing to resolution. They discovered that their role as future leaders isn't to have all the answers but to create conditions where collective wisdom can emerge. Some of these systems Scholars engaged with included democratic processes, water and renewable energy, Artificial Intelligence in labour rich environments, city development and policies. These drew on their own strengths and disciplinary expertise while balancing the plurality of stakeholders.
One participant reflected that the retreat gave them "room to explore who I am as a leader." Another noted how the exercises revealed patterns they'd never seen before in their own thinking and decision-making. One scholar said - "The systems game made me more aware of how connected people and resources are within a system. We used yarn during our feedback to bring this concept to life. Even though each person held it differently or had more yarn and some less, it was still the same thread, by which we are all bound and illustrates the impact one action can effect on others. It helped me better understand systems thinking as something shaped by relationships and shared responsibility, rather than individual roles alone."
These weren't theoretical insights. They were embodied realisations that will shape how these scholars approach leadership throughout their careers.
The path forward
The world is entering heightened states of transition where the old consensus is breaking down. Leadership itself is becoming more turbulent. New systems are emerging, and we don't yet know what form they'll take.
In such times, programmes like CSLP become crucial. Not because they aspire to explore, rather than solve, but because they build capacity. They hold space for the kind of learning that can't be rushed or engineered. They honour the messiness of real systemic change while providing frameworks that help people navigate complexity without being overwhelmed by it.
We hope that this experience is one that will inform a future engagement with and in systems. What is more important — is whether they'll approach that work with the humility, awareness, and collaborative spirit that systemic leadership demands.
Our hope is that by opening up a shared possibility and experience for them to participate across differences in systems thinking and enabling a safe environment in which to practice systemic leadership, we're preparing them to activate their capacity to become wise catalysts who enable collective wisdom to emerge.
This is a small, but hopeful design, to serve the needs of our complex, interconnected, turbulent world. Not more individual genius. More collective capacity. Not better controllers. Better collaborators. Not people who stand outside systems trying to fix them. People who understand they're part of the system and work from within to enable new possibilities.
This is the essence of CSLP and the work in collaborating with young people as they contribute to the world in their own ways.
