Followership as Systems Literacy with Pedro Portela
Most management schools teach leadership as control. But complex systems don’t respond to control-they respond to attention, adaptation, and the capacity to follow emergence. This means followership isn’t a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It’s a literacy problem: if your identity is built on being the decider, you literally cannot read what’s happening in a complex system. You’re too busy protecting the role.
This session starts there-not with “leaders should listen more,” but with the harder question: what dies when you stop being the person in control? What identity are you defending? And what becomes possible on the other side of that death?
We’ll work with complexity theory, embodied practice, and the real barriers organizations face when they try to shift from hierarchy to distributed leadership. The focus is concrete and relational: what actually has to shift in how you show up, how you listen, how you make decisions together-and what that costs.
Pedro Portela is a mechanical engineer turned systems thinker and co-founder of the School of Systems and Complexity (SSC). After a sabbatical decade exploring systems science, complexity, and peacebuilding-including fieldwork in South Sudan and studies at Schumacher College-he now works at the intersection of complexity theory, social change, and the interior transformation required to live with uncertainty. His background spans aerospace R&D, permaculture design, transpersonal coaching psychology (Alef Trust), and facilitation, informing his conviction that understanding complex systems demands both intellectual rigor and ontological shifts in how we relate to control, identity, and not-knowing.
✨This webinar is part of Alef Trust’s Living Organisations Lab series of live sessions oriented towards transpersonal perspectives that support conscious leadership, systems change, and sustainable impact.