The Evolution of Leadership

Thanks to Improving for inviting me to speak at the recent Improving Edge Summit. It was a great conference dedicated to leadership this year. A topic near and dear to my heart and the focus of my Leading Answers blog.

My talk was on the Evolution of Leadership and featured ideas from my Beyond Agile book about how organizations are moving from Agile’s empowered-teams/Green/values-driven leadership model to Organic/plural/Teal/shared and host-leadership models.

The session was recorded and I will make it available here at www.LeadingAnswers.com when it is available. We had some great attendee suggestions for the true role of leadership and explored how agile’s servant leadership can be augmented with newer shared and host-leadership approaches.

We mapped agile transformations to the Orange to Green shift from Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations book and saw how today’s leading, distributed structure companies such as Haier, Burrtzorg, and Irizar use Host Leadership to create organism/community-based self-managing groups.

Many of today’s problems are too fuzzy, ill-defined, interconnected, and messy to be solved or led by a single person. Instead, they require a pooling of ideas and sharing of leadership responsibilities. We discussed the creation of the COVID vaccine as an example. Host leadership outlines roles and stances to develop environments where people co-create and co-lead the development of solutions for today’s wicked problems.

Improving – thanks for hosting me, it was a blast. Improving Edge attendees – thanks for your insightful participation. Readers here – stay tuned for the recording.

Books

PM Illustrated 2026

Beyond Agile

PMI-ACP Exam Prep

Agile Illustrated

Agile Fundamentals

PMI-ACP Workbook

20 Years of Leading Answers

Twenty years ago today, on August 29, 2006, I published the first posts on LeadingAnswers.com. That sentence makes me feel old. I started the blog to write about leadership and agile project management, share ideas I was experimenting with, and hopefully connect with other people interested in the same things. At the time, agile was still sufficiently new that explaining it to traditional project managers was a large part of the job. My first real article was called “What has Leadership got to do with Agile Project Management?” My argument was that effective agile project management was much closer to leadership than traditional project management. It emphasized people over tasks, empowerment over control, effectiveness over efficiency, and direction over speed.

Leading a Team That’s Part Machine: 4) Agent Orchestration for Project Managers

Today we explore agentic pipelines, loops and recursive self improvement (RSI) via our old friends, PMP Questions. This is article 4 in my AI agents series. Start here for an introduction, see here for an explanation of what constitutes a real agent, and here for a discussion of how I use them and running AI locally. This article gets into how to plan and manage agent work; that’s what “agent orchestration” means. As a project manager, I suspect you already have the thinking skills required. You already know why one person can’t do everything on a project. You staff a project with specialists, engage each of them in the correct piece of scope, and put reviews between the stages that