Modern leaders conduct their working lives in complicated, ever-changing settings and have the unenviable challenge of making that disorder meaningful and understandable for others.

Yet just at the time when leaders should be helping others to make sense of that complexity they are pressurised into focusing upon the quantitative, mechanistic elements of their job that do nothing to help others to understand the ‘big picture’.

In essence this is the challenge facing leaders. For the tendency is to seek to ‘persuade’ others by providing the ‘hard’ information about processes, targets, outcomes, budgets, systems and structures, and expect people to get behind this because it presents the facts.

In the 1970’s, the celebrated organisational theorist, Professor James G March first introduced the idea of leadership as being a balance between two alternative perspectives, namely plumbing and poetry.

Plumbing represents the ‘hard’ information and concrete nature of operational issues that can dominate our thinking in organisations. On the other hand, poetry is language at its most condensed and most potent. It captures our emotions, and taps into our feelings, our imagination and our passions.

Now it would not do to work in a place where a leader’s behaviour was located at the extreme poetry end of the spectrum – for nothing would ever get done. Yet we do not appear to have the same reticence to slip towards the extreme of the plumbing end of the continuum, and be pleased with our ‘busyness’ and focus on the ‘business’

I am not arguing here that your next work bulletin should be written in verse and seek to reduce employees to tears. But I am suggesting that leaders begin to consider those elements that make people’s working lives worthwhile and meaningful.

It is not so much writing or speaking as a poet – but ‘thinking’ as a poet that can liberate leaders and their colleagues from the tedium of ‘counting trees’.

Thinking like a poet forces leaders to look at a complex problem or environment and then distil that down into something that people can begin to have empathy for, and understand.

It’s often this lack of empathy that prevents people from collectively getting behind the mission of the organisation – especially if that mission is only really understood and owned by the senior leaders.

The poet is also seeking to make connections for others and in so doing helps them to see how the subject matter relates to their own lives. In this way thinking like a poet helps you to think like an original systems thinker.

The other advantage from thinking like a poet is that it stimulates and encourages creative thinking. The requirement to see connections, and to extract the essence of something releases a way of thinking that is a significant departure from the simply quantitative and mechanistic perspective, which so dominates modern organisations.

These imaginative abilities can help leaders to stimulate entrepreneurial and imaginative behaviour in their organisation, and help to create unexpected solutions where the mechanistic process has singularly failed to make progress

Poetry can also help to give our lives beauty and meaning. A challenge in organisations can be to keep ourselves and our colleagues invested with wonder and purpose, especially when the focus can so often be on the mundane and the ordinary.

So in conclusion, ask yourself whether or not people in your organisation are imbued with a sense of wonder and purpose – if they aren’t – then perhaps your leader need to set down her or his tools and nudge themselves towards the poetry end of their practice.