collective leadership

Earlier this month, I attended the last Bay Area showing of Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,^[1]” a fictional play inspired by the last moments of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life. It takes place on his last day on earth, as he is battling with the public’s blame and guilt over the death of Larry Payne,^[2] a 16-year old boy who died when a march lead by Dr. King turned violent the week before.  Here Dr. King is portrayed as a real person, who is not only reflecting on his life but also battling with his own demons and eventually accepts his own impending death. In this play, Martin Luther King is arrogant yet insecure. He is an adulterer but definitely a loving family man, a “King” who is undoubtedly devoted to the public’s service, and always very passionate about racial equality. Among these contradictions and passions, the play does not smooth over his humanness but rather highlights it.

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I was flattered to be invited to speak about Collective Leadership at the recent EPIP conference in Chicago since I am a fan of the organization.  I also saw it as an opportunity to get feedback from people who are more hardwired for collective leadership.  Research by the Building Movement Project suggests that younger people are generally more collective in their leadership styles.  In research conducted by LLC for the Annie E. Casey Foundation about why there are not more people of color in leadership of the sector, we heard stories from people who were getting great results by inspiring their teams and were still given feedback that they needed to be stronger leaders, or at least stronger by the normative cultural standards.  The ways in which our culture of individual has become embedded in our models of leadership renders invisible leadership happening all around us in a more collective form.  I wondered if folks from EPIP might shed some light on this so off I went to Chicago.  I would like to extend this conversation to all of you. 

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Presenters: Francisco Guajardo, Dale Nienow, and Miguel Guajardo

Topic: The Community Learning Exchange Story: Connecting the Wisdom and Leadership of Place

Date: Thursday, July 26, 2012 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM PDT
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On Collective Impact... read more »

This article was originally posted on Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) (the webinar powerpoint is available here)

Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them.

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On Collective Leadership... read more »

• Curtis Ogden highlights four key concepts underlying the roots of the Interaction Institute's approach to collective leadership: epistemology, cosmology, ontology, technology.  Epistemology is that it’s not just about what we know, but how we know it – intuitively, intellectually, analytically. Cosmology is looking to the complex living systems and networks as the complicated reality we all live in. Ontology is the idea that each of us is evolving and capable of both learning and unlearning. Finally, technology/methodology is the idea of looking to the practices that create the best conditions for collective leadership. 
• Stowe Boyd discusses concepts from a Sara Horowitz’s talk on mutualism and creates a “mutualist manifesto”.  At the heart of the manifesto is finding common cause and growing mutual associations locally and globally, associations such as coops, unions, and policy organizations. Boyd thinks that associations supporting one another, governance by members, seeking benefits not profits, and cooperating in resource allocation will all make great headway towards directing change in a systemically chaotic world.

This article was originally posted on Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) (the webinar powerpoint is available here)

Last Tuesday, Curtis Ogden and I had the privilege of hosting an LLC webinar on collective leadership.  Much of what we did was point to observable patterns in ways of working together and how these tend to open up possibilities for shared leadership.  The metaphor of tilling the soil is most appropriate precisely because we have run up against the limitations of industrial implementation.  The appropriate response to increasing complexity is one that can get beyond linear causality and into a mindset of ecosystems.

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I had the opportunity to attend the ILA Conference in London last month. In fact, I have attended every ILA conference for the past 10 years with one exception … and I had a doctor’s note.  This year, the closing keynote by Keith Grint, a prolific leadership scholar from the UK, gave me an interesting new frame on leadership. Over the past two years LLC has been writing quite a bit about the need to expand our understanding of leadership as a collective process.  People rightfully remind us that the catalyst and individual role is essential and of course we agree. It's really one of those both/and situations where we need committed individuals, and we need them to connect their efforts with others to achieve more together than any one person, no matter how fabulous, could achieve alone.  Keith’s framework on wicked problems helped to provide more context to the “why” and “when” of collective leadership and pull together some of our thinking about innovation and systemic change.  

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Presenters: Curtis Ogden and Gibran Rivera, Interaction Institute for Social Change

Topic: If You Till It, They Will Come: Nurturing Collective Leadership

Date: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 11:00-12:00 Noon PST (2:00-3:00PM EST)

Much is being made these days of the Occupy Movement and its potential for showing us a new way to lead (we would call it leader-full, not leader-less). Prior to this important civic groundswell, many have been looking at how to create the conditions for emergent and collective leadership to move us in more just and life-affirming directions.  Given the complexity of the issues we face and the diversity of perspectives in our various systems, it has been recognized that we cannot rely on individual, expert, or command-and-control leadership to move us forward.  We must unleash more robust and adaptive collective intelligence.  For almost 20 years, the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) has been building the collaborative capacity of change agents for greater social impact.  In this webinar, IISC Senior Associates Curtis Ogden and Gibran Rivera will explore stories of and practices for creating the conditions to unleash leader-full momentum that embodies and leads to the social change we seek. For additional information check out their blog post, Roots of Collective Leadership and Collective Leadership: Doing and Being.

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Author: Alain Gauthier

I was pleased to receive the expressions of gratitude – as well as a number of questions, during or at the end of the webinar. Since there was only time to address a few of them, I will provide some elements of response here, following the chronological order of the slides I used (which are available on the GTE website http://globaltransformingensemble.org/ under the Videos and Presentations sidebar). I have regrouped some of the questions on the challenges of moving from a hierarchical culture to a shared leadership culture.

Q: Have you developed written principles or guidelines for collective leadership?

A: I wrote an article on collective leadership a few years ago, which became a chapter of the book Leadership is Global – published by the Global Leadership Network (http://www.globalleadershipnetwork.net/about/leadership.php). As indicated in the Resources slide of the presentation (page 37), this article “Developing Collective Leadership” is downloadable from the GTE website under the side bar Writings and Papers. It includes some principles, guidelines, and tools, which apply particularly, well to diverse leadership groups spanning several sectors – private, public, and civil society. At the bottom of the following page, I mention other resources that also propose principles and guidelines.

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