From Dialogue to Action
One of the questions directed at me during a recent United Nations panel discussion was, “What have you learned from your leadership journey so far?”. If you’ve been around me long enough, you can guess what my response was – that no single institution or sector or charismatic leader can meet the scale of today’s challenges. But knowing this is not enough. The gap we are trying to close isn’t just technical, it’s adaptive. It’s not only about tools or strategies, but about values, relationships, and the courage to navigate uncertainty together. How we partner, or fail to, shapes whether systems evolve or entrench. Real meaningful change is not delivered, it’s co-created in dialogue, engagement, and ultimately in action. It takes a community, strengthened by innovative partnerships, to drive and sustain transformational change.
Why Innovative Partnerships Matter Now
We’re halfway to 2030, and the Sustainable Development Goals are lagging. We are navigating a world of polycrisis; overlapping challenges of public health, climate, economic inequality, and governance. These aren’t single-issue problems. They are deeply interconnected, and they resist siloed, linear solutions. Our default responses, more data, more funding, more technical fixes, are necessary, but profoundly insufficient. They treat the symptoms, not the source. What holds us back are not gaps in information or resources, but the deeper systemic patterns, behaviors, and power dynamics that keep us circling the familiar, rather than moving forward.
Traditional leadership – built on hierarchy, control, and the myth of the lone visionary- cannot carry us through the complexity of this moment. It isolates power, narrows perspective, and too often reinforces the very systems we seek to change. But no one leads alone. Not truly. That’s why we need a shift, not at the margins, but at the core of how we lead and live together. This is where transformative partnerships come in. Not token alliances or inspirational statements of intent, but relationships rooted in Ubuntu – a deep recognition that we are all in this together. Innovative partnerships that redistribute power, center the voices long excluded, and make space for shared learning, vulnerability, and emergence. Because real change doesn’t come from the top down. It grows from the ground up through courageous connection, collective imagination, and the steady work of building together what none of us can build alone.
Relational partnerships are not optional. They provide the crucial infrastructure on which true systems change is possible.
Case in Point: Public Health Transformation in Practice
Over the past several years, Adaptive Change Advisors (ACA) has had the honor of working alongside global, regional, national, and local public health systems. During the pandemic, we focused our efforts on supporting teams on the African continent (in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, Uganda, and Sierra Leone etc). In the wake of COVID-19, our partners were not just dealing with the virus; they were navigating institutional breakdowns, political mistrust, and deep community rifts.
The technical solutions, such as policy frameworks, protocols, were insufficient at best to respond to the crisis, but the urgency to act was undeniable, even in the midst of no clear solutions or experts to solve the adaptive problems posed by COVID-19. Through a combination of different forms of accompaniment, Adaptive Leadership Practice Labs (ALL), coaching, training, and stakeholder engagement, we supported community-based health leaders to build community coalitions that rebuilt systems through partnerships.
In Kenya and Tanzania, a particularly compelling shift unfolded:
- A fragmented health information system was reimagined through cross-sector dialogue
- Frontline workers, youth leaders, ministry officials, and funders came together to redesign formal processes and disrupt traditional power dynamics that centred donor and funder agendas over community needs
- What emerged were real-time disease surveillance systems and information systems, co-designed and owned by all actors
Yes, this unlocked new funding, but more importantly, it restored trust, reconnected siloed actors, and redefined what leadership looked like. This is what happens when people stop waiting for permission and start stepping into leadership moments.
What Makes a Partnership Innovative? Five Leadership Practices
Here are five concrete ways leaders can start building the kind of partnerships that move systems:
- Start with Shared Learning, Not Shared Outputs: When we eat together, we become a community
- Before jumping into co-design, invest in sense-making together. Create space for partners to share what they see, feel, and fear. Start with questions, not solutions.
- Name Power Dynamics Early: Identify the elephants
- All partnerships involve power. The most damaging ones pretend they don’t. Be explicit about who holds what kind of power (financial, cultural, positional) and how it will be negotiated or shared.
- Fund the Process, Not Just the Project: Don’t avoid the messy stuff
- Systems change requires trust, shared purpose, focus on the aspiration, iteration, and time. That means resourcing the in-between: the convenings, the conflict navigation, the deep listening. Without this, partnerships remain performative.
- Make the Invisible decision making Visible: Those closest to the problem have the solution
- Often, the people closest to the challenge are furthest from decision-making. In every setting, ask: Who is not in the room, and why? Bring in frontline voices, informal leaders, and community-based wisdom as co-creators, not tokens.
- Adapt in Real Time: Dance on the edge
- Use adaptive tools like stakeholder mapping and adaptive experimentation practices to continually assess what’s emerging. Be willing to pivot. Leadership is not static, and neither are partnerships.
From Collaboration to Co-Creation
It’s tempting to treat partnerships as technical or transactional, drafted on paper, driven by deliverables. But true partnerships are adaptive and relational. They are where values become visible, where trust is tested, and where transformation either takes root or withers.
Collaboration often stops at alignment: shared goals, coordinated efforts, polite consensus. But co-creation asks more. It demands shared power, mutual accountability, and the courage to learn together in real time. It moves us beyond agreement into joint ownership. Beyond consultation into collective authorship. It’s not just working side by side, it’s building something neither could create alone.
At the panel, one insight that resonated deeply was this: the future of leadership is shared. We need leaders who don’t just direct from the front, but make and hold space for others. Leaders who stay connected through tension and uncertainty. Who understand that real transformation doesn’t come through authority alone, but through aligning, organizing, and mobilizing people to act from a place of shared purpose.
We need fewer lone heroes and more engaged communities. Because systems change doesn’t start with a strategy – It starts with how we show up for one another. And how willing we are to co-create the future, together.
The Invitation into innovative partnerships
So I leave you with some questions to ponder:
- What challenge are you facing that cannot be solved from inside your silo?
- What kind of partnership would stretch — not shrink — your leadership?
- What will it take for you to lead beyond control, into co-creation?
If we are to meet the urgency of this leadership moment, we must move beyond collaboration. We must build adaptive and transformative partnerships that reflect the world we want to shape. A world we all know is possible.
Let’s build a community that leads – Together.
This article was inspired by a talk given at the UN 2.0 Week Transformative spaces event on Jun13 June 2025