The Leadership Studio responded to a ‘call to action’ issued by the Scottish Leaders Forum in June 2016, which recognised the growing need for more collaborative leadership in the highly complex world of public sector innovation. In particular, there is limited documented knowledge, evidence and experience regarding the techniques and practices that might facilitate the development of collaborative leadership. This project asked, what types of intervention are effective in developing readiness and capacity for collaborative leadership in the context of complex public issues?

The project is underpinned by a studio pedagogy, which emphasises the co-production of hands-on learning-by-doing in real lived contexts, with the following objectives:

To learn from public practice in other jurisdictions that contrast with Scotland;
To learn from the cross-fertilization of ideas in academic and practice domains;
To learn from, and within, a team of Scottish public-sector leaders as their collaborative leadership develops in response to a complex challenge;
To disseminate these learnings across Scotland and internationally through publications and follow-up events.

The project report presents the integrated insights gained from the Leadership Studio. In brief, the project surfaced three interweaving dynamics that underpin the co-productive activities of collaborative leadership:

Dialogue sits at the foundation of all socially engaged action. It is how we come to appreciate alternative perspectives on the world that then allow us to make different choices;

Improvisation is how new meanings and new futures can be drawn out of dialogical processes. It is the creative dynamic that generates the emergent potentials of co-production;

Daring recognises that doing things differently requires courage. To step into an uncertain future inevitably involves taking risks so collaborative leadership needs an enabling environment if it is to flourish.