Leadership by subjectives: a communications strategy for emergent personal and organisational transformation

Strategic leadership is understood in this thesis to operate through the interaction of 'personal' and 'impersonal' communications between stakeholders in an organisational learning context. The thesis illustrates the impact of these 'emergent' and 'structured' 'forms of text' on strategic performance, competence and delivery. It explores the complex-dynamic consequences for the areas of Innovation (pertaining to knowledge leadership), Social Architecture (pertaining to human resource development) and Reputation (pertaining to the strategic management of organisational behaviour and information). Communications are interpreted from a neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) perspective, which the thesis calls Nanopsychology (NLPS). The focus is on how persons' self-reference can influence strategic change through leadership in action. This person-centric focus contrasts with modernist forms of intervention such as Management by Objectives (MBO), hence the title 'Leadership by Subjectives' (LBS). The thesis draws on current management literature on the strategic leadership of organisational behaviour to critique MBO as a modernist meta-discourse. It argues that the modernist 'meta-text' frames human decision-making within a singular, 'massively modular', serial solution for transforming organizations and the people in them. Instead, the thesis employs a post-modern understanding of information in the New Economy by applying a Complexity perspective to explore the impact of the 'post-human condition' on work-based learning relationships. Within a modernist evolutionary paradigm, research is conducted either a-priori (or deductively) or a-posteriori (or inductively). The thesis considers that such approaches fail to transcend and/or include effective strategies to address the issue of subjectivity as a form of emergent information. It develops a practicemethod- theory iterative approach which is based around a process of 'abductive discovery' called Q Methodology. Three case studies are presented which illustrate how to apply Non-parametric statistics, Emergent-Participative Strategy and Q Factor Analysis as forms of Psychographic (as opposed to psychometric) research. The objective is to explore how to assist learners, change consultants, corporate managers, and national policy makers, as well as academics and other participants to add value to the ethical, social and financial 'triple bottom line' by paying attention to how their emergent communications structure information. The 'Q' thesis is a Technology Futures Analysis (TFA) method which applies a number of meta-frameworks drawn from relationship, counselling and evolutionary psychology, to interpret subjective data as communicative information. By conceptually integrating the frameworks as methods for TFA, it shows how it is possible to 'pattern' a multi-level 'synchronicity in action' between Human Capital, Identity, Relationships, Learning and Knowledge. The thesis concludes that MBO may be an efficient organisational strategy for behavioral control in organisations. However it cannot work, without an in-depth understanding of the effect upon the triple bottom line of the complex-dynamic interaction between a changing economy, human relationships and personal identity.