Observations about self-organizing leadership roles

Anne Stadler: South African, North American, European and now an India loving yoga instructor + leadership thought leader transforming student lives @ SOIL shares her inspiring leadership evolution realities in today's modern world

My culture’s habits of leadership are drawn from an experience of organizations that value hierarchy and heroic cultural myths. Most of the organizations in our public life have a pyramidal structure that came into being as the organization’s entrepreneurial period gave way to the need for stability. In such a structure, roles are defined and rigidly codified; new possibilities struggle to emerge; power is centralized rather than distributed. Change is experienced as threatening, a struggle, and destructive—to be avoided. Order and control are maintained at all costs.

Is this way of leadership sustainable? What can we learn from natural self-organizing systems that sustain themselves?

In the forest on the way to Second Beach near La Push:
I follow a path that winds among ancient trees and giant stumps. Roots upended in grotesque shapes shelter shallow caves. A cedar looms beside the trail with some of its great branches upraised to embrace both the heavens and the earth. Its roots stand tall as I am, embracing a ghostly nurse log that provided sustenance for its seed a hundred years ago.

Everything grows. Everything finds a niche. The rocks communicate an impression of permanence. The trees give impression of solidity and strength. But uncertainty is the condition of life. The tipped up root bases twenty feet across show how vulnerable these giants are to torrential storms. Mushroom spores remind us of unseen forces at work. Life and death is everywhere. Death gives rise to more life. Only my belief in the permanence of the present moment gives me the illusion of certainty.

As I observe the disorderly order of the forest, I reflect that contrary to my experience with corporate life and such organizations, there are many roles in self-organizing leadership. The one you express freely and congruently is the one that matches in any given moment, your evolutionary need and the evolutionary need of the group. Arnold Mindell calls this being a “time-spirit” in the group. The informal structure--the way things get done-- of any lively group reflects this. Someone shows up as the healer, someone as the teacher, someone as the joker, the mother, etc. and whoever is appropriate for that moment helps that individual and the group thrive and evolve.

Several experiences of living in an open space organization have shown me that when stewardship is vested a circle of leaders, the appropriate leaders emerge at the right time to help the group discover and do the practical work for which it came together. We saw this in Spirited Work, a seven year open space learning community of practice, 1998—2005, (see www.Sunyatagroup.ws, Archived Articles) and in the recent emergence of the Journalism That Matters Pacific Northwest Collaboratory (www.jtmpnw.org)

It is important to know and observe the place we live in, even as we are trying to sort out the human relationships to get work done. The place itself is a vital mirror and guide for how we live well and sustainably.
In organizations that are not aligned with the underlying flow of self-organizing, emergence is characterized by struggle, chaos, conflict, and imposed order. An organization that uses the co-creative practices I’ve identified earlier experiences ease and creative flow.

Disturbance is a navigational signal that the group or individual is out of synch with the underlying processes of Self-organizing. Thus disturbance becomes an invitation for remembering the calling and correcting the course.
My working hypothesis:

In a self-organizing world, sustainable organizations are impermanent, provisional opportunities for creation and practical activity: “collaboratories”, places of experimentation, co-creation and community. We can sustain our joyful participation in the complexity of our living Universe by experimenting with simple practices of co-creation in order to live well, wherever we live, with whomever we attract.

- Anne Stadler - www.soilindia.net