Holistic Leadership and Governance Dynamics

And there’s another piece of this puzzle here: Because of the way our societies are set up, we tend to think of leadership as individual or, at best, exerted by teams. I want to suggest that we deconstruct leadership into a function and that function is to provide guidance or direction in moving in a particular direction. And from that perspective a road provides leadership. People don’t drive up on the sidewalk – at least they’re not supposed to; the road provides leadership. Stories lead people. For example, they go into careers… “Career”! That word – that meme – is a guideline about how you’re supposed to live your life. But notice that people in indigenous societies don’t have “careers”. That logic doesn’t fit their way of life; they have a different framework. But to know that the narratives we tell ourselves and the infrastructure that we have, the advertisements we see – these are all forms of leadership. And we can recognize when things are leading us astray and when things are providing us good leadership, to look at whether it is life-serving or not.

And there are individual leaders, some of whom micromanage and direct things – which is sometimes necessary but largely is a waste of time. Because things are going to change so fast that whatever you’re micromanaging and planning is likely to become irrelevant, and people are responding in different ways, usually not exactly on the same page as what you’re trying to micro-manage….

So you want to understand to what extent you can lead the system to lead itself. To what extent can you work yourself out of a job as an individual leader by transforming and building in the needed narratives, the infrastructure, the capacities that enable the system to lead itself? That’s an important inquiry for you as an individual leader. You can be inspiring, of course. That’s fine, too, as part of all these different modes of leadership. But there is a particular role of setting things up so that the system can lead itself. That’s your primary job from a holistic perspective.

It is like the ideal parent is there to enable their kid to become an adult who can lead themselves – and whatever direction you provide is, ideally, giving them that capacity. That’s the archetypal role of a parent.

Then there’s governance. We tend to assign governance to institutions. But there’s self-governance – you govern yourself, you control yourself. There’s a sense of control attached to governance. But with self-governance, collective self-governance, people are deciding how they are going to make things work out among themselves and as a collective seeking to fulfill their aspirations as a community or as a group – to what extent are you able to do that, or to help them do that?

Leadership and governance are presented here together in this pattern. They’re both forms of guidance. And to have “the whole” capable of rising up into its own leadership and governance, that’s what individual leadership (leaders and governors) and governing institutions are supposed do, according to this pattern.

We went from kings to democracies in order to get away from overly powerful leaders. The founders said that democracy is a government of laws, not people – that we are creating institutional authority to replace individual authority.

And now we are trying to replace all-powerful institutions with living systems and the interactions of living systems as the source of how living systems function.

There’s an interesting model by Jim Rough who created Dynamic Facilitation, which is one of our featured methodologies in this pattern language. He also created the Wisdom Council as a particular democratic or political application of that method. He has a theoretical model which consists of a triangle, a circle and a square. The triangle represents the leader on top telling everybody what to do. The square represents an institution we have set up to govern us: It can be the square of a government building or the square of the Constitution or a law on a piece of paper. It’s a sense of a box that we’re in and we can create that box or choose somebody else to create the box, but the box is leading us – it’s a Thing. And then there’s the circle, which Jim is using to represent conversation. So to what extent is the conversation leading us? To what extent is the constructed object of a law or institution leading us? And to what extent is some powerful individual leader leading us?

And this pattern is nudging us towards the circle as much as possible.

Now let’s look at these different things that are listed in the pattern heart:

Fractals are like different structures or patterns that show up at different levels over and over again. If you go to different levels of scale or different dimensions of an issue or system, you need to be aware that dynamics that show up at the top of an organization often show up all through the organization. That can be true of racism dynamics, assumptions about leadership and power, mutual support… all these things show up throughout. That’s a natural phenomenon

Networks relates to how this system or organization or community is made up of nodes that are connected to each other and interacting and doing stuff together and to each other. The web metaphor – that’s what’s going on. It can be useful to look in such networks for where to intervene that will ripple out through the networks rather trying to drop a big safe on the whole thing or blow it up or push it in a particular direction… It’s more like seeing a system or situation more in terms of acupuncture points, or like the nervous system of a situation, or like an ecosystem. You are intervening in particular points that will ripple out, that will have ripple effects.

Distributed functionality means many people doing many of the needed functions – lots of duplication and redundancy and complementarity. One of the principles of permaculture is having any function being covered by more than one entity and every entity able to do multiple functions. That’s a formula for resilience. If you have that distributed functionality and one piece a system goes down, other pieces can pick it up. They’ve found out that your brain is like that. Whole sections can be taken out or damaged and your brain can often regain most of its former functionality. There is a story of a kid that lost half his brain and one side of his brain was able to pick up all the functions that were lost from the other side. There’s lots of examples of that sort of thing in nature. So you as a holistic leader or governor – or a system that you are setting up – should enable the system, or group, or community, or situation your are dealing with to find its own way in a way that uses all of its diversity creatively. That’s the essence of holistic leadership and governance

So that’s holistic leadership and governance. We’re trying to show in the pattern’s picture different forms of conversation and individual leadership and taking leadership from natural systems – the dynamics of evolution and nature are great sources of insight about leadership and governance dynamics – and the middle is showing the larger population – people in a group, people a situation – who are The People and how are they woven together. And that’s all being sensed into by all these people who are doing this organizing, who you see around the edges.