Organizations, communities and societies are faced with ever more complex challenges such as public health problems. Attempts to address such challenges require involvement of various actors ranging from state and regional authorities to non-governmental organizations and individuals. Additionally, many of those that are delivering social care services are with different professional backgrounds and belong to different departments. Such partnerships create ground for complex relationships between the actors involved in each project. As a result, such actors find themselves in complex and volatile contexts where the questions of who, when and where to take the lead are, often, ambiguous. Leadership is an integral part of any organization’s practices (Schedlitzki et al.,2023). However, theories of leadership have primarily focused on boosting individual leaders’ successes within systems, thus curtaining the relational aspects of leadership. Like Uhl-Bien(2021a), we understand leadership as a co-creation. Yet, the knowledge on the necessary competence to manage such projects and what enables cooperation and adaptability is limited. Thus, our overall aim is to further the understanding of how co-creative leadership can enable interconnectivity and adaptability in complex systems.

The context for this presentation is a new project on competency supply in social care services. A general shortage of different kinds of professionals has urged the municipality in a medium sized town in Sweden to create cross departmental projects which seek to explore new ways of managing staff shortage issues. Through follow-up research in the form of process evaluations, our focus is on how the project affects the larger system in which it is part of. Our research will be exploratory, and informed by complex system perspectives, such as complexity leadership theory (Uhl-Bien etal., 2007; Uhl-Bien, 2021b), generative emergence (Lichtenstein, 2014; 2021) and complex systems perspective (McGill, 2021), on the one hand, and co-creative leadership perspectives (Denis et al., 2012; Kjellström et al., 2020), on the other.

Our ambition is to address the following research questions:

1. How a cross department project evolves over time and how what happens can be illustrated and explained based on theories of complexity?
2. If and how a co-creative leadership is used, and why and how certain approaches to leadership allow adaptive responses, while others hinder them?
3. How continuous improvement is integrated in the management of the project?
4. How is leadership developed in daily practice throughout the project?

We will utilize a mixed methods approach, and, as a first step, use shadowing of project meetings (Czarniawska, 2007). Through shadowing, we aim to “be there” when the practices occur, and to see first-hand what, and how it, happens. This would allow us to notice things that our study objects do not necessarily think of sharing during a regular interview. The shadowing process will start in September 2023, and we plan to have a learning seminar with all parties involved in November 2023, where our initial observations are shared with researchers and municipality professionals. Our goal for the conference is to present our early findings and discuss future avenues of this project which is under way.