Leadership, development and learning mechanisms: System transformation as a balancing act

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance a framework for the exploration of system transformation that includes leadership roles, contextual mess and triggering events, designing and managing sustainable learning mechanisms, managing a variety of balancing acts, creating shared understanding and, transforming shared understanding into action.Design/methodology/approach – A five‐phased longitudinal research of one organization – Kibbutz Shefayim– during 12 years: semi‐structured interviews (60‐120 minutes each) with Kibbutz members representing a wide range of views and experiences in 1993; collecting and reviewing of Kibbutz internal “raw” documents that related to changes that occurred during the past 12 years, and; follow‐up semi structured interviews in 1998, 2001 and 2005. The interviewed members were asked to describe the nature of the changes that had taken place since the previous interview, including reasons, mechanisms, results and impacts.Findings – The findings suggest that leading sys...