Collective leadership for place: Releasing energy and potential in complex times

This paper explores the development of collective leadership within a complex and contentious place, using recent empirical data from Northern Ireland. Despite extensive scholarship on collective leadership, existing research remains dominated by organisational settings and offers limited insight into place-based, post-conflict contexts. This paper asks how collective leadership can emerge, be organised and sustained in a fragile place. Drawing on Complexity Leadership Theory and viewing a multisectoral Fellowship Programme as a Complex Adaptive System, the study analyses interviews and participant observation data from leaders across political, business, and civic sectors. Findings show that place is both formative and directional in the development of collective leadership; relational dynamics, both personal and structured, are shown as enabling trust-building and cross-sectoral collaboration, and the Fellowship’s design-thinking architecture catalyses adaptive, system-level effects beyond the programme itself. The study contributes to understandings of the significance of place leadership in the emergence and organisation of collective leadership in fragile contexts and demonstrates how relational constellations as a type of a Complex Adaptive System can release energy and potential in complex times and places.