This thesis explores the challenges that leaders and leadership face in a context of polycrisis. It concludes that leadership under such conditions cannot be understood as episodic crisis response or stabilising intervention, but as a fragile, relational, digitally mediated, and power-laden practice unfolding across disrupted space-time. Polycrisis is theorised not merely as context, but as a constitutive condition that reshapes embodiment, visibility, temporality, and language itself.
The study is based on a sample of 60 organisational actors, including senior leaders and personal assistants (PAs), across public and private sectors between 2021 and 2024. The research employed a multimethod design combining interpretive and digital ethnography, autoethnography, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, survey, journaling, and poetic inquiry, where ‘writing differently’ becomes a methodological and ethical stance. It advances “methodology-as-process”, as it shifts from investigating a bounded problem to living within a research mystery, treating self, context and others as living clues.
As leaders appear suspended between hyper-connected abstraction and the enduring need for relational care, theoretically, the thesis extends Leadership-as-Practice and crisis leadership scholarship by integrating complexity through the grammar of polycrisis. The study identifies the phenomenon of a “digitally augmented leader,” who experiences enhanced cognitive capacity through digital tools while also facing increased dependency, vulnerability, and a narrowing of interpretive perspectives.
Empirically, the research reveals how leadership becomes a boundary-making linguistic category that organises visibility and marginality. This exposes a persistent gap between distributed leadership practice and singular leadership recognition, challenging the field to reconsider the language and imaginaries that anchor leadership theory.
A further original contribution is the establishment of Poetry-in-Crisis, where poetry is theorised not as metaphor, but as a liminal, reflexive and embodied leadership practice.
This work will be of value to leadership scholars, organisational researchers, and practitioners navigating complexity and sustained uncertainty, as well as doctoral researchers seeking rigorous yet creative approaches to studying leadership in situ.
