System diplomacy – an alternative to system leadership

<p dir="ltr">Given that public services are recognised to be part of complex adaptive systems, it is increasingly assumed that senior officials need to be trained as system leaders. Indeed, many leadership programmes exist to offer this training. However, there are limits to the system leader model within public management, which are presented here. We argue that the concept of system diplomacy better captures the value pluralism and competing agendas of senior public officials and will be a fruitful line of analysis for future research.