Article Exploring within the ‘black-box’ of leadership to make sense of the performative dynamics of conversation Kosheek Sewchurran , Luciano Zaina and Jennifer McDonogh Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, South Africa Abstract This study emerges from a co-constructed autoethnography by a practitioner and two academic facilitators studying the leadership-as-practice processes within a small-to-medium sized private wealth business. The study set out to explore the performative dynamics of conversation constituted in, and emerging from, socially engaged talk through leadership in the flow of practice, referred to as ‘in-flow-ence’. The study proposes a dynamic metaphor theory that builds on in-flow-ence to capture the complexities of conversation and offer thoughts about ways to reconstitute leadership practice to bring about changes in trajectories of social action. Keywords Leadership, leadership-as-practice, in-flow-ence, conversational travel Introduction This study is an effort to explore what lies inside the ‘black-box’ of leadership process to understand ‘how’ leadership is co-created, ‘how’ it emerges, and ‘how’ it is actually accom- plished (Simpson et al., 2018: 645). The leadership-as-practice (LAP) literature has consol- idated the idea that leadership is not something stable, cohesive, and unambiguous (Alvesson and K€ arreman, 2016; Raelin, 2016b; Simpson, 2016). It has also posed the Corresponding author: Kosheek Sewchurran, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. Email: Kosheek.sewchurran@gsb.uct.ac.za Leadership 0(0) 1–20 ! The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1742715019858884 journals.sagepub.com/home/lea