The Pleiades

A systems lens for navigating disorder, opposition, and organizational change.

Organizations will pass through periods when familiar ways of working no longer serve what lies ahead, yet the future has not fully taken shape. These moments can feel uncertain, disruptive, and difficult to interpret.

This perspective is informed by the Andean understanding of the Pleiades (Qollqa) cycle—a period of disappearance, uncertainty, and return. For generations, these celestial cycles helped Andean communities recognize seasonal transitions, informing agriculture, governance, and collective life while acknowledging that periods of uncertainty are often a necessary part of renewal.

In my advisory work, this perspective offers a different way of understanding organizational transition. Rather than interpreting uncertainty as failure or disorder, it encourages leaders to remain steady, observe carefully, and resist the pressure to resolve every ambiguity too quickly. Some of the most important work of leadership is creating the conditions for what is emerging to become visible.

For modern leaders, this perspective reminds us that not every period of uncertainty requires an immediate solution. Sometimes leadership is less about having the answer and more about creating the stability, trust, and discernment needed for the next direction to emerge with greater clarity.

  • This lens helps leaders recognize when disorder is not simply dysfunction, but a signal that roles, expectations, power, or structure are being renegotiated.

    In these moments, rushing to restore order too quickly can suppress important information. Leaving the system without structure can create harm. The work is to create enough containment for the transition to reveal what must change.

    This is especially useful in conflict, leadership transition, partnership strain, restructuring, innovation cycles, and moments when a team has outgrown its previous way of working.

  • Conflict and opposition
    When disagreement reveals unresolved power dynamics, unclear authority, or competing responsibilities.

    Leadership transition
    When a founder, executive, board, or team is moving between an old order and a new one.

    Reorganization
    When roles, resources, decision rights, or reporting lines need to be rearranged.

    Innovation and strategy cycles
    When teams need room to experiment before a new direction becomes clear.

    Cross-system partnerships
    When institutions, funders, communities, and local leaders are working from different assumptions about time, authority, trust, and responsibility.

  • Leaders often mistake chaos for failure. But in many transitions, disorder is the visible sign that an old arrangement is loosening and a new one has not yet taken form.

    Handled poorly, this period can become confusion, mistrust, factionalism, or burnout. Held well, it can surface hidden dynamics, clarify responsibility, redistribute power, and prepare the organization for a more viable next stage.

    This lens helps leaders stay steady in the in-between — neither forcing premature resolution nor allowing disorder to become destructive.