Creating and Leading Adaptive Organisations: The nature and practice of emergent logic

This study examines how leaders enable their organisations to adapt and succeed in complex environments. Through the joint lenses of complexity theory and the cognition and social neuroscience of leadership it focuses on how leadership directly influences the creation and ongoing function of an adaptive organisation. The study includes the comparison of four leaders through embedded case studies as an abductive approach to initial theory building, and the follow up of two of them as a comparative method of analysis, and it generates a substantive theory of leadership cognition called emergent logic. This leadership approach is especially relevant to leading complex human systems in emergent environments, the scenario for the majority of organisations in the present day. This thesis addresses two questions: How do leaders of adaptive organisations think? And what do leaders of adaptive organisations do?