CREATING SPACE

In barely one generation, we’ve moved from exulting in time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them—often in order to make more time.

The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.

—Pico Iyer

The transformational leadership organization the Leadership Learning Community has hosted a number of events called simply “Creating Space”. The hope behind each of these events—and indeed, behind LLC and many organizations like it looking at social justice and sustainability from a new perspective—is to create a meaningful opportunity for reflection and sharing ways of working more effectively to create change.

As many of us return from the holiday season and from end-of-year breaks, there’s often the feeling of the entire year unfolding before us, of new and continuing projects looming. I’ve spoken to several clients and colleagues over the past week and they’ve shared how overwhelmed they already feel just two or three weeks into the new year.

We need to pay attention to the spaces between meetings, calls, and events on our calendars as equal opportunities to advance our work—and not simply as time to grind away in front of our computers. Where can we schedule time in our day to reflect on what we are learning in our work, to pose questions—to ourselves and to co-workers—about how to improve our performance, or to just take a walk and get a breath of fresh air (rather than eat lunch at our desks again)?

I’m a big proponent of sabbaticals from our work and our technology as part of our work—and I have written about this several times over the past years. A recent article by Pico Iyer, from which the above quote is drawn, points to a growing trend of people trying to escape the technologies that have made us reachable all the time.

Space allows us to take a break, and to see more clearly. I’ve seen too many plans and projects fall victim to unrealistic expectations or too little time consulting with colleagues and partners—and if we want to create the kind of change many of us care so deeply about, we can’t afford to do this. So we need to go slower than we’d like, even though the issues we face are urgent.

When I first started DIG IN, my inaugural post began with a Deena Metzger quote I just shared with a friend while on a hike this past weekend:

There are those who are trying to set fire to the world.

We are in danger.

There is only time to act slowly.

There is no time not to love.

No matter how important our work it (and it all is), we can undermine our efforts by not creating the space necessary to truly understand the best ways to move forward and work together. “No is the New Yes”, a blog post by Tony Schwartz in the HBR blog, points to the importance of setting boundaries and slowing down to our productivity, and suggests some practices to assist with this. I’ve also written about this in a previous post on The Power of No.

In my work, I’ve seen “slowing down” not as a detriment, but as one of the most important factors preceding critical breakthroughs—whether in communities organizing the grassroots for change, in groups  working on their own communication and conflict-resolution, or for coalitions working together around policy reform.

My hope for you in the year to come is for success in your work and to be fulfilled in whatever it is you have wished for—and I’d also invite you to join me in the challenging yet vital practice of creating space as a step toward creating the change you’d like to see in the world.

 

FEATURED RESOURCE: Structuring Leadership

The Building Movement Project recently released a new paper entitled Structuring Leadership where they look at new ways of sharing and distributing leadership in organizations.

Among the foundational practices they identify to create alternative leadership structures are trust, values, learning and time. The idea of time, they point out, is not just the patience required to create change but also the dedication to making space within the organization for transformation to occur.

 

FEATURED POEM: Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda

 

Keeping Quiet

 

Now we will count to twelve

and we will all keep still

For once on the face of the earth,

let’s not speak in any language;

let’s stop for a second,

and not move our arms so much.

 

It would be an exotic moment

without rush, without engines;

we would all be together

in a sudden strangeness.

 

Fishermen in the cold sea

would not harm whales

and the man gathering salt

would not look at his hurt hands.

 

Those who prepare green wars,

wars with gas, wars with fire,

victories with no survivors,

would put on clean clothes

and walk about with their brothers

in the shade, doing nothing.

 

What I want should not be confused

with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about.

 

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with

death.

 

Perhaps the earth can teach us

as when everything seems dead in winter

and later proves to be alive.

 

Now I’ll count up to twelve

and you keep quiet and I will go.

 

—Pablo Neruda

From OCCUPATION to RESTORATION

Restoration recognizes that once lands have been “disturbed”—worked, lived on, meddled with, developed—they require human intervention and care. We must build landscapes that heal, connect and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and with the natural world: places that welcome and enclose, whose breaks and edges are never without meaning. We urgently need people living on the land, caring for it, working out an idea of nature that includes human culture and human livelihood.

—Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature

There are many opportunities to begin a conversation, and different ways that we can direct our attention. This year has exemplified another opening in the conversation around the kind of society we want to cultivate.

As we transition into a new year, we can take all that has happened in the past months and turn them into a platform for change—not just in the political sense but in a personal one. The Occupy Movement and those who preceded this phenomenon during the Arab Spring and the Wisconsin protests earlier this year have gained the world’s attention and again raised the issue of the significant gap between those who have resources and power and those who do not.

What we do about this fact—as a culture, in our communities, and as individuals—is up to us. As countries in the Middle East continue to experience the upheavals that accompany significant transition, we need to examine and act on ways in which we can move from occupation to restoration—from calling attention to injustice to proposing and participating in solutions that address the challenges we face.

As Alexander Wilson’s quote attests, we have created a “disturbed” landscape and must take responsibility for restoring it—not only through creating alternative policies and practices but in the way we live our lives on a daily basis. How do we embed the ideals of a more equitable, humane, and sustainable society in our work, in our interactions with others, in our economic relationships?

I have long been a fan of Langston Hughes’ powerful poem “Let America Be America Again” in which he yearns for the ideals upon which this country was founded and laments the fact that we have never been truly able to live into those ideals. The research and advocacy organization PolicyLink has recently released a framing paper entitled “America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model”. Their analysis and recommendations are compelling as always, and policy reform and innovative investment are among the tools we must use to “let America be America again”.

We can point to history and to our current crises as justifications for any apathy or cynicism that we might feel about generating lasting change. And we also have an opportunity—and it can be a very individual one—to carry with us some commitment about one way in which we will participate in positive transformation. Whether it is what we decide to eat or buy, or where we invest our money, or how we engage in our communities and relate with our neighbors and friends, or even the kind of work we decide to do, we can each “occupy ourselves” and play a small but significant role in remaining faithful to the ideals we hold.

The activist and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy talks about three dimensions of the Great Turning, the period of time we are now experiencing as we transition from an industrial growth society to another (and hopefully more humane and sustainable) culture. We must pursue holding actions that keep current damage at bay (and the Occupy movement is an example of this), but we also must move to provide analysis and create structural alternatives (PolicyLink’s work mentioned above is part of building this bridge) and we need to promote and nurtures shifts in consciousness (from the way we relate to each other to the way in which we perceive the world) which allow for new systems to emerge.

Keeping the ideals of “occupation” alive while moving to an ethic and practice of “restoration” for our communities, cultures and landscapes is a vital part of this shift.

 

FEATURED RESOURCE: Navigating Change

One aspect of moving from occupation to restoration is to embed the practices of “extreme democracy” practiced by many Occupy camps in the broader culture.

I was recently invited to present a webinar on facilitating effective community and coalition meetings to Smart Growth America’s Sustainable Communities Network.

That webinar, entitled Navigating Change, is now available along with supporting materials.

ON BEING LOST

How will you know the nature of that which is totally unknown to you?

–Plato, from Meno

We’ve seemingly mastered the art of avoiding uncertainty. Not that we can escape its grasp-but we do our best to mediate its effect on our lives.

From technology that can tell us where we are in the world (even in the “middle of nowhere”) and plans that map out our individual or organizational trajectories, to algorithms that help us game the stock market or offer how we might adapt to climate change, we long for predictability.

And yet, we can’t fully manage to elude the feeling of being fundamentally lost.

Particularly over the last few years, we’ve been buffeted by challenges of an ongoing financial crisis, a nuclear catastrophe triggered by the tsunami in Japan, spreading protests across the Arab world and now more broadly as dissatisfaction with the global economic system grows. Beyond her profound reflections in the book  A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the author and activist Rebecca Solnit has recently offered a beautifully written, dizzying, and hopeful paean about the forces and events now shaping our world.

These and other manifestations of having lost our way raise deep questions about how we might navigate this collective wilderness of our own making. However painful crisis and catastrophe may be, individually or culturally, they present real opportunity, and compel us to examine (and in many cases abandon) the directions we’ve been moving which no longer work.

A recent Times/CBS poll revealed that only 9% of US citizens feel that Congress is capable of moving the country in the right direction. Statistics portray increasing inequality, where the top one percent earn a significantly greater proportion of our national income than the bottom 50%. But it’s not percentages and polls that illustrate how lost we are-it’s the frustration exemplified by the Occupy protests and the Tea Party; it’s the feeling we might have moving through our days and questioning the impact we create through our work, or what might come about to spark real change.

Every moment of feeling lost and adrift opens a window to creativity, a chance to reshape our approach to good governance, economic opportunity, and building healthier communities.

Achieving these things-building more sustainability into economic, social, political and environmental systems under stress-will require that we both become more comfortable with being lost AND choose responsible and wildly inventive ways of reacting to this feeling that create, rather than forestall, opportunities to find our way forward.

The years ahead may indeed be a confusing, turbulent and mountainous time. But as we explore this new and challenging territory, the most powerful tools we can use are already emerging-systems approaches to rethinking problems, building shared leadership, supporting collaboration, promoting equitable policies, increasing connectivity and communication, and promoting innovation that helps re-imagine and re-design our communities and our country.

AWAKE in the WILD

All things good are wild and free.

–Henry David Thoreau

Summer often affords us the opportunity to escape, to get outside and step away from our routines and familiar paths through the day. As we work to change the world in positive ways, in whatever form that takes, it’s vital to pause as well.

There’s a saying that “we learn to ski in the summer and swim in the winter”—time away doesn’t only allow us the opportunity to recharge but it internalizes new practices and perspectives, allowing us to return to our work with renewed energy and focus.

Creating a more sustainable society begins with sustaining ourselves. There is a quality of summer that allows access to a supportive vitality and wildness. Whether in the garden with sunflowers and tomatoes growing to science-fiction proportions, along a river or at the beach, or in an alpine meadow graced by flowers, summer inspires a feeling of freedom and expansiveness modeled by nature as the year’s growth peaks.

A connection with the wildness in nature, even for a short time, can be relaxing and also can help us as we return to our work. How is it that we pace ourselves and continue to take time away—even if this means a few hours or a day here and there? Where can we re-focus and set time aside to move the productivity of our year into building resources and planning for the year ahead? What do we need to learn or do differently to make our work more effective and align with the vision we’ve laid out for ourselves and our organizations?

Asking such questions after a connection with what is wild in nature may also allow us to see those places in ourselves or in our work which we have neglected or which need more attention.

On the heels of a destructive experience like the wildness of a hurricane, we can think in very different ways about we are individually, organizationally, or culturally prepared for chaos, and how we transform the fabric of our communities to adapt appropriately.

In a less acute but equally powerful example, we spend much of our day with our experience mediated by technology and disconnected from the natural world. Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods documents the challenges of “nature deficit disorder” and while particularly focused on the impact this has on children, we all experience the separation from nature and wildness differently, as detailed in the growing field of ecopsychology.

While technology can provide the infrastructure to be more productive, it can also separate us further from both nature and other people, altering our expectations regarding communication with others and the speed at which change occurs.  

As nature reminds us, and as the Vietnamese Zen monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has written: “The real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on the earth.”

MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

—Gandhi

The practice of sustainability and social change relies upon our willingness and ability to make the invisible visible. Whether we are opening the opportunity for voices to be heard that are too often silenced, or providing alternative models for how our organizations and communities might look, we must uphold the unspoken and unseen to allow the potential of a new era to emerge.

There are always dynamics that go unacknowledged in groups which, if addressed skillfully, can allow breakthroughs which can be transformative. The opportunities held in surfacing conflicts or simply verbalizing patterns that go habitually unaddressed can often be the first courageous step in leading change.

In many instances, not only do our organizations and communities effectively render people and issues invisible, but this is supported by new technologies such as e-mail and smart phones which can create gaps in communication despite claims of connection because they separate us from the visible and the present. Sherry Turkle of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self asks: “What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent?”

It is not only in our interactions that we have the opportunity to make the invisible visible. In our communities, there are numerous individuals who too often are treated as the invisible among us and we must be vigilant in holding up the voices and the rights for those who have not had the same access to housing, services, healthy food, education and economic opportunity.

The environmental educator and innovator David Orr, among countless other architects and designers, has brought attention to the idea of the “pedagogy of architecture”—what our buildings teach us by the way they are built. Unfortunately, these lessons from our buildings, our communities, our landscapes often go unheeded unless we pay attention and take the time to make the invisible visible.

There are numerous “invisibles” that we must embrace and make real if we are to create lasting change. Marge Piercy implores that we “Weave real connections. Create real nodes. Build real houses.” In his poem “Keeping Quiet”, Pablo Neruda writes: “Perhaps the earth can teach us, as when everything seems dead in winter and later proves to be alive.”

In the work of creating a better world—whether that is in our home, within our workplace or community, or through broader efforts—there are hidden but very real possibilities waiting to be discovered.

Reflections on Collective Impact

Do you ever imagine what it would be like if we actually were all “the change we wish to see in the world”?

This week, at a conference on Collective Impact at Stanford University, I participated with others in learning about and exploring a practice that might help bring us closer to affecting both the organizational and large-scale change we seek.

Given the challenges we face, the concept of collective impact lays out a call to action and a set of principles that help those interested in sustainability and social change work more effectively across sectoral and organizational boundaries.

This isn’t something that is new, or that hasn’t been available to us all along—but its expression and the number of people hungry for new approaches for creating transformational change merits attention.

John Kania of FSG began the day with an overview of some principles. He and FSG founder Mark Kramer, published a recent article regarding collective impact, which is exemplified by:

1. MEANING: A shared vision and common agenda
2. METRICS: Cooperatively defined baseline and outcome measures
3. MUTUALITY: Collaborative attitude and benefit that supports goals
4. MESSAGING: Continuous communications internally and externally are critical
5. MANAGEMENT: A “backbone” organization or set of roles is essential

The helpful (or irritating) alliteration is mine, and one more important element I’ll add which grounds a collective impact approach is MINDSET.

Kania mentioned three main mindset shifts that we need to embrace in order for a collective impact approach to be effective:

• Moving from technical to adaptive solutions—there’s no quick fix and we don’t know what we will face given more complex challenges and relationships. We need to allow for emergent discussions and problem-solving as we work together on large-scale change.

• Replacing “silver bullet” with “silver buckshot” approaches—there is no one solution (and particularly no one model that can be adapted for different scenarios); we need to experiment with multiple approaches adapted to issue and place, and not be afraid to miss the target with much of what we try.

• Shifting from taking credit to building credibility—in a theme echoed throughout the day, the idea of humility and mutual gains asks that we work together on the mission, not on building our organizational reputation.

John’s keynote was followed by two stories from the field, starting off with the energetic Jeff Edmonson of Cincinnati’s Strive Partnership, which has successfully brought together a whole range of actors in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Area to focus on “cradle to career” support and education opportunities for children and youth. They’ve also inspired similar efforts in a handful of other cities and regions around the country including Houston, Portland, OR, Richmond, VA and here in the SF Bay Area.

Jeff’s major lessons learned included:

• Build shared vision and responsibility by “making it a movement” rather than getting bogged down in minutiae of organizational structure and governance, and through “shared accountability, differentiated responsibility” to guarantee commitment and clarify each organization’s role.

• Use evidence-based decision making starting with whatever baseline data you have—it’s easier to start with something (even if flawed), than to have no way to measure your progress from the beginning.

• Take collaborative action by agreeing on common language, understanding that capacity of participating groups matters, and re-affirming clear roles and goals.

• Invest in sustainability through setting up a culture and a group of supporting organizations and practices, and realize that in terms of funding “one size DOES NOT fit all”: they found that aligned funding, rather than creating a pooled fund for this work was more effective in supporting collaboration.

Howard Shapiro of Mars, Inc. then provided a very different, but equally inspiring story based on his experience focused on balancing economic development, agricultural productivity, and conservation in the cacao fields of Cote d’Ivoire. He emphasized the distinction that he makes in moving beyond supporting environmental, economic and social benefits to incorporating cultural and ecological perspectives in this work.

In the conversation that followed the morning sessions, these issues came to bear in exploring the cultural barriers we have—internationally and in communities here in the US—to doing such work. Although collaborative efforts are gaining ground in the non-profit community, collective impact asks that we move beyond collaboration in working together effectively over the long-term.

While many organizations focus on working in and with communities, the social sector still is challenged by working in community with other groups to achieve large-scale impact. Though this is shifting in some places, funder priorities and the timeline for available funding or expected results also affect the ability to work in different ways, and we are just beginning to explore the potential of working in a cross-sectoral fashion.

We need different forms of organization to help bridge these challenges, including and understanding that a long-term, systems-oriented approach outlined by a collective impact framework is essential. In any ecosystem it is the strength and diversity of the connections that matters as much as the contribution of any one element of the system.

The afternoon panels provided more context for how non-profits and funders could scale their impact more effectively and profiled effective organizations and philanthropic efforts.

In a panel on scaling non-profit impact, scholar Jane Wei-Skillern made the observation that organizations with significant success tend to rely more on leveraging external networks that pursuing a traditional organizational growth strategy.

The tension between building effective organizations and building effective networks also was highlighted, with an observation that while scaling individual groups can share models and provide incentive for others to innovate, the arrangement of strong organizations in relationships ultimately created greater opportunity for impact.

Other important questions raised touched upon topics worthy of entire conferences or workshops of their own, such as:

• How does my behavior need to change to work collectively?

• What is the nature of the changing social compact, and whose responsibility is it?

• How do we re-orient what we reward in our work, so we can focus on mission success and serving as a node in a larger ecology, rather than valuing organizational success and acting as a hub?

A final panel for the day was comprised of funders from around the region and the country touching upon their role in fostering and participating in collective impact. A key question that was raised involved how funders’ roles need to change given this new approach—how can they act (and be seen) more as partners than simply patrons? While no clear answers to this ongoing challenge emerged, it is clear from both panelists and the range of funders present in the room that collective impact holds great promise—not simply for bolstering a social return on investment but as a new way of doing business than can add value to promising practices being used by individual organizations in the field.

The concept of collective impact is not new, but we still have a long way to go in honing the practice of working together to leverage large-scale social change. In the process, we need to be extremely sensitive to issues of capacity and equity while breaking through organizational and sectoral boundaries, and continually confront our own assumptions about what is possible.

Kania and Kramer’s work on collective impact is laudable in focusing our attention on how we can be more effective in promoting true and lasting social transformation. Interestingly, the experience of learning more about and discussing this concept with others could have benefitted from more of a “collective impact” approach in design—while we did get opportunities for small group conversation, we spent much of the day in plenary listening to speakers and panels on the topic, rather than exploring the issue in a more interactive forum. Kramer’s closing comments also rang true as he observed—despite wonderful presentations from funders, social sector collaboratives, and even a major multi-national corporation—that we could have explored the importance and practice of cross-sectoral work in more detail.

Beyond the opportunity to scale our impact, it seemed to me that the most important lessons that emerge from this work speak to the imperative to transform our relationships individually and organizationally in order to create change, and that in leveraging existing resources we create the new structures we need without having to build new organizations.

The number of people attracted to this topic made me hopeful for seeing a shift in the ways we work together more effectively in the coming years, and for what might result.

DIG IN’s work often focuses on the question of how our behavior needs to change in order to work collectively in a meaningful way in order to affect social transformation. My next post will focus on the individual and organizational skills required to work collaboratively, and some guidelines for how to catalyze, initiate, and sustain collaborative efforts for long-term collective impact.

BEGINNING AGAIN

It is never too late to be who you might have been.

—George Eliot

There is tremendous possibility in every moment.

In our culture, it’s very easy to get caught in the endless flow of doing things, fulfilling requests, keeping up with what’s happening in the world. It’s not just in the arena of social change and sustainability that people find themselves “putting out fires” all day. But although this is often asked of us, it doesn’t allow us to ask if we are making a difference.

Amidst the rush, there is always an opportunity to begin again.

What is it that we are committed to? What changes do we want to see in ourselves or in the world? An exercise I often share with individuals and groups involves visualizing the nature of any effort as both the acorn and the oak. The potential is held in us both as a seed with the imprint of what will become, and the full realization of what is possible, and this is applicable to individual changes, shifts in our workplace, or in large-scale community building or policy campaigns.

Any change—in our lives, in our organizations, in our communities, in our culture—requires that we step away from what we are doing now and initiate a new pattern. Elizabeth Janeway once wrote that “social change happens when enough changes.” Change requires coming back to our commitments and remembering what matters on a daily basis. Change requires a true commitment to change.

It is all too easy for events in our lives—both large and small—to distract us from what is really important, or to feel that expediency requires that we live out of alignment with our values.

True sustainability demands attention to our own sustainability, to working at a depth that we feel is worthy of our efforts, to always be questioning if what we are doing is effective. And if it isn’t, to find novel ways to create the impact we’d like to see.

The cultural anthropologist and organizational behaviorist Angeles Arrien tells us that “change happens in the slow lane”, and that while moving fast might feel like we are getting somewhere, it is finding the opportunities to slow down that may be most instructive.

In his poem “All the True Vows”, David Whyte writes:

All the true vows

are secret vows

the ones we speak out loud

are the ones we break…

Those who do not understand

their destiny will never understand

the friends they have made

nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life the waits

beyond all the others.

We are always asked to revisit such vows in our lives to ensure that we are aligned with our purpose and ensuring our own health as we work on building healthier families, workplaces, and communities. Whether we want to start running again, or change a relationship at work, or plant seeds for long-term success in an initiative, we can in each day, in every moment return to what is most important and begin again.

RESURGENCE

Each time we stand up for an ideal, or act to improve the lot of others, or strike out against injustice, we send forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

—Robert F. Kennedy

Spring reawakens the world, as light slowly increases toward summer’s intensity.  As a season of renewal and possibility, there is a space made for new growth; there is an opportunity to reclaim our commitments.

For many of us, our multi-layered personal and professional lives rarely afford a window of time and space for reflection—a chance to stop producing, to look back on what we have done, and  to gather our strength and creativity for the journey ahead.

But while spring is a time of resurgence, it can also serve as a moment when we pause in our work before starting new projects and moving in new directions. As Pablo Neruda wrote: “Perhaps the earth can teach us, as when everything seems dead in winter and later proves to be alive.”

We can—and we must—take time to assess where we are and what is alive in us before we begin anew.

The work of sustainability and social change is an ancient practice, an evolutionary calling to care for our community, to support others when they may not be able to do so themselves, to steward our place on the earth.

Resurgence is occurring in this time-honored inclination to cultivate positive change. We are in an era where a re-examination of what it means to affect lasting, meaningful transformation in our workplaces and communities can deepen our impact. We are crafting a more resilient and just culture through the ways we connect and collaborate, and by coming to terms with the nature of the work that must be done. We are reshaping our organizations and our communities by thinking and acting in innovative ways. And we are questioning existing norms, attitudes, and structures that may no longer be working to address the healthy development of our communities.

Signs of this resurgence are found in the emergence of new programs and initiatives for shifting our approach to action, such as the Movement Strategy Center’s recent publication “Out of the Spiritual Closet”, and in how we think about leadership, such as RDI’s Ecology of Leadership Program. In Paul Hawken’s work Blessed Unrest, he vividly illustrates how millions of people and organizations around the world engaged in positive, effective community and policy advocacy are creating a new culture of change.

It can even be found in corporations and government entities, through changes in measuring business practices and in new interagency partnerships for sustainable communities. Large institutions are increasingly confronting questions about what it means to embrace ideas of sustainability and social change, from responding to shareholder and customer experiences, to engaging people affected by policy decisions.

Resurgence is multifaceted: it’s an ecological process, a political and cultural phenomenon, and a personal imperative. We have an opportunity to see how we initially became involved in our personal and professional journeys, remembering that these first desires and conditions are critical for maintaining our focus. Even the deviations from our purpose can serve a role, reminding us what is most essential in our work.

Resurgence is a vital practice, reminding us what inspires us to do our work, and making our efforts to affect change more meaningful than ever.

The ECOLOGY of LEADERSHIP

Connections are made slowly

Sometimes they grow underground.

You cannot always tell by looking what is happening.

More than half a tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.

—Marge Piercy

Our perspective on leadership—what it is, who practices it, how it is most effective —fundamentally defines the trajectory we will pursue toward a more sustainable society. Although clear leadership is often identified as an imperative for transformative social change, current practice is still primarily an individual pursuit, often achieved within a traditional hierarchical structure.

But there are new ways emerging to view and practice leadership.

If we look at nature, each element in an ecosystem is imbued with its own characteristics supporting the health of the whole. We usually think of a redwood tree or a mountain lion at the “top” of an ecological pyramid rather than how it authentically serves as a true part of that ecosystem. We are just beginning to understand the complexity inherent in nature and how ecological patterns might teach us to establish healthy relationships in human communities.

What are the implications for leadership and social change movements if we view our work in a more ecological light? Perhaps we might acknowledge that each element of a system has something to contribute, that everyone can be seen as providing leadership.  We might see leadership as less invested in an individual, and more interdependent, existing within a vibrant system of collective relationships. And we might see that the health of any system, the outcome of any enterprise is based on the health of all the constituents in that system.

While the practice of leadership is often seen as results-oriented, in an ecosystem this arises in very different ways and is more cyclical than linear—through the creation of space, light and fertility for younger trees to grow when a large tree falls, or through a collective sense of protection and direction experienced by flocks of geese or schools of fish. In fact, the strongest and most vital systems are able to respond to changing conditions and crises; just as an ecosystem self-adjusts, our most resilient human institutions are able to learn from mistakes, address needs for improvement, correct course, and create a forum for honest exchange that builds upon what works.

Our entire view of leadership—even the word itself and our association with it—requires rethinking within an ecological context if we are to create  dynamic  relationships, and outcomes that advance  a more sustainable, socially just society. Groundbreaking work in the arena of biomimicry has initiated creative thinking and design for the physical elements in our communities, but must evolve to address human relationships. Such a culture will be characterized not by individual force of personality and vision, but by relationships that honor sustainability and social change, built upon values of open exchange, shared vision, inclusion and regeneration.

A NEW ERA

To halt the decline of an ecosystem,

it is necessary to think like an ecosystem.

—Doug Wheeler

It’s time to take action. And in a fundamentally different way.

While countless people are engaged everyday in worthwhile work in making the world a better place, we seem to have come through a decade where there has been more breakdown than progress.

From the impact of terrorism which sparked additional conflict around the globe to the collapse of an economic system which ethically and materially was unable to support itself, the first decade of the 21^st century was more challenging than uplifting for many. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, many had more negative associations with the past decade than any in the last half-century.

While this is understandable, perhaps we can take the upheaval and turbulence as something of a positive sign—or at least as a call for change.

It’s increasingly evident that what worked for some time (or what we thought was working) is no longer viable and we are entering an era of deconstruction and rebuilding—both figuratively and literally—of communities, of regions, perhaps of entire societies. While economic, environmental and social uncertainty have increased and must be addressed, we have been asked to respond to disasters of increased intensity over the past decade—including 9/11, Katrina, Haiti—that require changing our perspective and redesigning many elements of our world.

Addressing challenges presented by our economic system—and by natural disasters where we seemingly have no control—both demand that we retrofit our thinking about the most basic assumptions: how the market works (or doesn’t), how our communities function (or don’t), how prepared we are for a changing global climate (or aren’t).

The recent issue of Metropolis Magazine “What’s Next?” looks at innovative design over the coming decade. A change in mind must be coupled with a change in design—of our economy, our products, our communities. What will foster such a design change is looking at our interactions—our human ecology—in a fundamentally different way. Indeed, as former California Resources Secretary Doug Wheeler shares we need to “think like an ecosystem” and not merely to reverse decline in the ecosystems ‘out there.’

Our personal interactions in the world, our institutional arrangements all fit into a set of ecological relationships that are—in many instances—out of balance. With the welcome growth in the sustainability field, there are challenges to its authenticity including clear questions about how we define sustainability, who is included in that definition, and what actions we must take to make concrete progress across sectors.

A blog from The Ecologist looks at the ethical dimensions of defining sustainability and provides a useful frame for questioning whether ‘sustainability’ is offering a transformative context for change—or just providing a justification to continue in the same ways, substituting some products for others but not changing our relationship to each other or the planet.

Any real change must begin with a deeper understanding of ourselves and our institutions as we engage in a changing world. Whether in wealthy suburban communities, inner cities, or war-torn regions, there are psychological manifestations of our disconnection from our place. The question “Is There An Ecological Unconscious?” raised in a recent article challenges the view that our problems are personal or societal—ecopsychology sees our behavior as intimately linked to our environment.

Seeing such a connection allows us to question our most basic assumptions about our relationships with the landscape and with each other. And it requires—in designing new systems for an emergent culture—that we approach such work in a radically different way. The next episode is a call to action—to continue the work that results in fundamental change on the level of our built environment and our relationship to the natural world. But it also demands that we see our world from a different perspective and adopt new models of leadership so that we can generate lasting change consciously, creatively and collaboratively.