Chris Maxwell

Background

About Chris Maxwell

I have been fascinated by how people behave in groups for more than 20 years. This fascination has fuelled a career facilitating organisational groups, two start-up businesses, and ultimately a PhD thesis on the complex dynamics of leadership teams. Why leadership teams? You could argue we live in the “leadership era”, captivated by the potential power of “leaders” in sports, politics, business and other organisations. But I do not think that the way we currently talk about organisational leadership sets people up for success. I strongly believe we could – and should – talk about and work with leaders in a different, less fantastical, more helpful way. Schumacher’s (1977, p. 1) “A Guide for the Perplexed” sums up my feelings: “All through school and university I had been given maps which failed to show the many things I could see right in front of my eyes. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete… It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of my maps.” These “maps” we are given – in formal university degrees, in corporate learning, in books, and informal discourse and social media – all overly privilege the role, the scope and ultimately the power of the “leader”. This is an enormous burden to place on people who have been placed “in charge”, but are rarely “in control”. Leadership needs a new “map”, one which accounts for complex, uncertain human dynamics, incorporates local context and nuance, and reduces the emphasis on what scholars term Great Man Theory. Through my career I’ve developed something of a mission to try to provide just such a new map. It’s a foundational principle of Hours – a business I started with Marcus Crow to work directly with organisational groups and leaders. It is the summary output of my PhD thesis. And it is the driving idea behind our second start-up business – Pod & Hive – in which we build complex and fun learning simulations and games for organisational groups. If you’re interested in discovering a new way to understand organisational dynamics, if you want to improve the way your leadership team works, if you need something different, cool and fun for your next conference or offsite please drop me a private message – I’d love to hear from you. And if you just want to chat about complexity, about space physics, about games and gaming, about music (playing or listening), or about what wicketkeeping and goalkeeping have in common, we don’t always have to talk about work:)