Leaders need behavioural and cognitive complexity to be able to respond effectively to organisational needs.
Behavioural complexity identifies a person’s capacity to cope with “the interplay of a volatile, complex, and potentially ambiguous environment” (Satish, 1997).
Cognitive complexity is founded on the “number of dimensions used by individuals to perceive environmental stimuli”, and integration, “the complexity of rules used by individuals in organising the differentiated dimensions” (Wang & Chan, 1995). However, although these are necessary components of leadership they are not sufficient. One must also have the capacity to understand the categorical foundations of knowledge systems and the context in which this foundation derives its meaning, or “common sense”. To practice this acuity, a leader needs reflexivity and agency. Reflexivity is a capacity to transcend the here and now.
To be able to step outside these ideological structures requires considerable ability, an ability that we claim strongly characterises wise leadership. Malan and Kriger (1998: 246) acknowledge such a characteristic when they say that a major executive challenge is “to filter and interpret the noise from within their own organizations and determine the salient points on which to act”. So, leaders should filter the enormous amount of knowledge present in organisational discourse. Such knowledge may often be simply data and information, and all knowledge is ideologically invested in some way. Those uncomfortable with the notion of ideology would, nonetheless, accept the proposition that all knowledge makes sense only within an assumed episteme and the appropriate ontological structures that accompany it.
Rabinow (2005) explained discursive diachronicity in this way:
"from time to time, and always in time, new forms emerge that catalyze previously existing actors, things, temporalities, or spatialities into a new mode of existence, a new assemblage, one that makes things work in a different manner and produces and instantiates new capacities. A form/event makes many other things more or less suddenly conceivable".
