HORIZONTAL ORGANIZATION AND LEADERSHIP: A GENERATIVE APPROACH FOR AN ETHIC DEVELOPMENT IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS

The growing complexity of our time urgently demands management culture to be innovated,
as more and more effective solutions to organization problems are not found at the top, with
the traditional managerial culture, characterized by systems, procedure and control. Research
shows that 80% of change projects fail or do not reach the expected results and that the
main obstacle is the lack of motivation. This depends on a rationalistic, reductive vision of
people and organization, considered as two independent realities. The paper shows a new way
the organization and workers have to be considered, as two realities that keep evolving with
synergy, in an evolutionary systemic-complex vision. On the basis of this, an approach is
proposed for organizational and people development which create spaces for trasversal
connections and within them generate new processes and competences towards a horizontal,
client oriented organization, where people can also find a place of self-development, thereby
strengthening their responsibility and motivation. It is an action research and action learning
approach developed within a CNR and IMO Foundation research project. It integrates a
method to create a space for connections to generate horizontal processes and of a IMO
methodology for leadership, which permits to generate new more responsible and aware
behaviors, adding to the vertical dimension a horizontal one as well, characterized by dialogue,
interactions and connections between the inner and outer world. This approach creates a new
path for a responsible, ethic and sustainable development: the horizontal organizational and
leadership path.