Introducing the Three Leadership Dimensions
Dimension 1: The Leadership Challenge
The first dimension defines a critical purpose of Leadership3. This is to make the unknown known! To do this, we need to discover patterns. Once leaders have established the patterns, proactive and cooactive responses are then possible.
Dimension 2:
Balancing Capacity and Capability
The second dimension takes account of the capacity of the organisation to achieve its purpose and the capabilities of its people to deliver the product or service. Similarly, this ranges from the known capacities and capabilities through to the unknowns
Dimension 3:
Enacting Leadership Style
The third dimension defines a collective leadership style. This ranges from the individual to distributed and ultimately shared leadership. Shared leadership is applied across different disciplines with a common purpose.
What if leadership wasn’t about power, but purpose?
Then leadership transforms into a catalyst for change—igniting vision, inspiring others, and rewriting what it means to lead.
The Anatomy of Leadership3
Head, Heart, and Hands
Leadership3 can be understood not just as a framework, but as a living anatomy of leadership.
Effective leadership emerges when thinking, being, and doing are aligned. Leadership fails when one dominates.
Leadership3: draws on three key anatomical analogies explicitly as the core of leadership3:
🧠 THE HEAD — Sense-Making and Judgement (Context & Understanding)
The Head represents how leaders interpret the world.
❤️ THE HEART — Purpose, Values, and Capacity (Intent & Readiness)
The Heart represents why leadership is exercised and whether it can be sustained.
✋ THE HANDS — Action, Practice, and Influence (Style & Execution)
The Hands represent how leadership is enacted in the world.
Leadership³ as Evolutionary Architecture
As the name suggests, the leadership³ framework represents a range of different levels of trios, the first of which considers the three leadership paradigms. The second level comprises three defining dimensions — Challenge, Capacity, and Collective Style. The trio represents a conscious architecture built beyond our evolutionary foundation. The journey of evolutionary transition is that of:
• Challenge: From reactive (fight or flight) to proactive (reframe and respond)
• Capacity: From inherited instinct to cultivated intelligence and application
• Collective Style: From dominance hierarchies to coactive approaches underpinned by shared, selfless, and generative leadership, thus building on the first trio layer.