Catalytic leadership concerns the capacity to create movement within systems and to help emerging possibilities acquire form, momentum and reach. The chemical metaphor is useful because a catalyst changes the conditions of a process without becoming its sole author. In leadership practice, catalytic action may involve connecting actors, redirecting attention and resources, opening an institutional possibility, protecting an experiment or acting at a moment when a relatively focused intervention can influence a wider pattern.

Such action requires systemic judgement. Every intervention enters an existing field of relationships, institutions, resources, histories and power. Actions can reinforce the dominant pattern even when their immediate intention is progressive. Catalytic leadership therefore asks not only whether an intervention works, but what it strengthens, what it makes easier to repeat and which future it helps to normalise.

Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons framework provides a useful way of thinking about such transitions. It suggests that three patterns coexist in the present: a dominant system that is losing its capacity to respond to changing conditions; emerging practices that carry the seeds of a different future; and a contested space between them, where innovations may either prolong the existing system or help new patterns take root (Sharpe, 2013). Catalytic leadership operates particularly within this transitional space, attending to which experiments merely improve the existing pattern and which create conditions for a different one.

Courage matters because action in this space cannot wait for certainty. Waddock’s (2015) study of intellectual shamans illustrates how boundary-crossing, sensemaking and a commitment to making a difference can challenge established frames in complex systems. Hope also has a practical role. It is sustained by the capacity to perceive possibilities already forming in the present and to participate in their development without assuming that favourable outcomes are guaranteed.

This connects with Scharmer’s recent distinction between pattern-repeating and pattern-originating agency. Pattern-repeating action applies familiar responses to changing circumstances; pattern-originating agency develops the capacity to sense what is emerging and to act in ways that allow new patterns to take shape (Scharmer, 2026). Catalytic leadership therefore combines initiative with receptivity: it acts, but it also pays attention to what the system is becoming.

Resources form part of this judgement. Time, money, attention, relationships, natural resources and institutional legitimacy are all directed through action. Meadows’ (1999) work on leverage points shows that interventions differ greatly in their capacity to influence systems, with deeper leverage often located in information flows, rules, goals and paradigms. Stewardship therefore involves considering how resources are used and which patterns of resilience and transformation they support.

Resilience is likewise more than the capacity to return to a previous state. Work on climate adaptation distinguishes absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities, drawing attention to whether action enables systems to withstand disturbance, adjust to changing conditions or reorganise more fundamentally (Pelling et al., 2015; Oxfam, 2017). Catalytic leadership may need all three, while remaining attentive to the danger of making harmful arrangements more resilient.

Within the framework, Catalytic corresponds most closely to the IDG dimension of Acting. It brings courage, hope, initiative, resource consciousness and resilience together through one central proposition: leadership can help emerging regenerative possibilities acquire agency, form and momentum.