Stepping: Stepping up, stepping back, stepping down and, “ouch” the misstep!

Lately, I find myself smiling at the use of the word “stepping.”  The second day of Creating Space, I stepped out of my house excited about the day.  In fact, my head was already half way there, leaving my body to navigate on auto pilot.  As usual, I was loaded down with my laptop, enough clothing for any imaginable changes in weather and a purse that you could live out of for days.  Racing down the driveway, I took a flying spill.  Although I am told it’s quite difficult to break a knee cap I had enough momentum to do the job.  I was excited and rushing to get to Creating Space - I never did - and instead spent the duration in the hospital. 

It’s the first time I had to miss Creating Space and, of course, it was extremely disappointing, although the morphine drip did take the edge off the irony of lousy timing.  I was never worried that my absence might have any negative impact on Creating Space, at least no more so than the loss of any enthusiastic participant.  I had this peace of mind because of a different type of “stepping.”  At a recent learning lab on learning communities someone used the term ”stepping up and stepping back” as an important way of being together in a collaborative learning space.  This term was described as an awareness of knowing when to step back in order to make room for the contributions of others and knowing when to step forward when you have an important contribution to make.

This past year when we held our first Creating Space Design Team meeting we were a small group of six people.  I decided to step down from the Design Team in order to make room for more diversity in age and ethnicity, and also to make more room for new approaches on the design of Creating Space.  I assumed we would keep the team small for the sake of efficiency and that some people would need to step off if we wanted to diversify the composition of who was at the table. We put out an invitation to the entire community and 20 some responses from people who wished to join the Design Team. Eugene Eric Kim, a member of the Creating Space Design Team and LLC Board member, made a radical recommendation that we take anyone who wanted to participate.  Many of the folks were new to Creating Space, insuring fresh perspectives would contribute to the design.  I always thought that less was more, but I have great confidence in Eugene and went with the idea.  I also felt that in a group of 20 plus it was possible to remain involved in a way that allowed for stepping up and stepping back to support the collective authority of the team.  Consider this a long winded explanation of why, despite the misstep that sent me to the hospital, I had no worries about Creating Space. 

Collective leadership requires all of us to be aware of how we create room for others to step up.  In organizations with strong collective teams and more flattened hierarchies, transitions and the stepping down of Executive Directors might also be more seamless.  After all, you never know where that next step might land you.  Okay, enough about “stepping” for now.