​This Stewarding Complexity event is hosted by Charley Johnson and Aarn Wennekers. Stewarding Complexity is a private community for boards, CEOs, and organizational leaders who need to step outside formal governance structures and practice making sense of complexity in real time—together.

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​Stewarding Complexity: Session two — From Control to Stewardship

​The central challenge facing boards, executive teams, and senior leaders today is easy to name—and notoriously hard to navigate:

​How do you steward institutions in environments that refuse to hold still?

​How do you lead strategically when political, technological, social, and organizational conditions are constantly shifting beneath your feet?

​Most governance and strategy practices still assume a world that no longer exists. They're built for stability: linear plans, if–then logic, fixed goals, long planning cycles, and tidy impact metrics designed to lock outcomes in place. But leaders today aren't operating in stable systems. They're operating in complex, adaptive environments—where cause and effect are unclear, change is ongoing, and surprises are the norm.

​The result? A growing gap between the reality leaders face and the tools they've been given to lead.

​Our second gathering will focus on how leaders shift from control to stewardship.

​Core theme: Reframing leadership identity under uncertainty

​Prompt questions:

• ​What does leadership look like when control is neither possible nor desirable?

• ​How does stewardship differ from ownership, authority, or management?

• ​What responsibilities remain when outcomes cannot be guaranteed?

​When you can't predict or control what's coming, your job shifts.

​You're no longer responsible for guaranteeing specific outcomes. You're responsible for ensuring the system can learn, adjust, and respond.

​We'll look at what this means in practice: How do you build organizational reflexes? Where do you create space for emergence? What do you let go of to make room for what needs to come next? We'll close with structured time to surface the specific stewardship dilemmas you're facing: Where are you still reaching for control when stewardship is what's needed? What makes it hard to let go? What would need to shift—in you, in your team, in your governance structures—to make stewardship possible?

​This isn't about abandoning responsibility—it's about taking on a different kind of responsibility. One that asks you to tend systems rather than master them, to protect adaptive capacity rather than guarantee outcomes, and to lead with wisdom rather than certainty.

​Join us?