Leadership for a Fractured World

CHAPTER 2Diagnostic Boundary Spanning

Discovering Where and How Groups Get Stuck

To exercise leadership as a global change agent, you must engage in diagnostic boundary spanning—analyzing and crossing boundaries to discover features of the complexity of the challenge and to learn where and how groups get stuck. Too often people, thinking they are leading, launch a full-frontal assault without appreciating the human and cultural dimension of the problem and doing sufficient diagnostic work. They focus on solutions prematurely, getting a partial diagnosis at best and generating partial solutions with unintended consequences. If you fail to do initial and ongoing diagnostic work of the group dynamics and the environment, you might falter in your ...