What the world needs now: Co-creative leadership

This is the key question in this confusing and challenging time. Of course the world needs many things, but I think there is one essential, core thing that I hope we can all agree on because it is the prerequisite for everything else.

What we need is leadership. By leadership I mean the human initiative necessary to create the changes that will lead us to future we desire.

But what kind of leadership is needed at this particular moment in history? It is interesting to notice how the idea of leadership has changed over time.

• First there was the despot: someone who created change by virtue of overwhelming power and often cruelty.
• Then there was the command and control leader. There was one person and he (always he) told everyone else what to do. This is obviously outdated. President Bush and his administration has tried to reinstate this fundamentalist notion of leadership to disastrous ill effect. It does not work in a world as diverse, complex and interrelated as the one we now live in.
• From there we moved to the notion of a charismatic leader. This was someone who we invested with authority by virtue of their charisma and ability to inspire (or befuddle) us.
• This was followed by the transformational/visionary leader. This someone who who put forth a compelling vision of the future and then persuading, inspiring and sometimes haranguing us to help make it a reality.

But now we have perhaps the most radical change of all, and that is from the notion of leadership coming from an individual to the idea of distributed leadership. This is a reflection of flattening hierarchies, greater empowerment of the individual, and communications technologies that allow people to be responsible for their organization.

However, although we have much of the infrastructure needed to allow for the future to self-organize itself through this distributed leadership (think the internet), we are still missing the social technology necessary to make it happen. Instead we are frustrated, we retreat to familiar communities, we blame other and we polarize. But these are obviously dysfunctional responses to the key challenge we now face which is the co-creation of an unknown future.

The reality is that no one knows where we need to go, or how to get there. There are probably more notions of what the problem is than there are proposed solutions, and there are many proposed solutions!

Bottom line is that there is mass confusion, disagreement and that leads to paralysis or even contrary efforts. What we need is consensus on the path forward. Many people think this is impossible, but I disagree.

I disagree because I know of processes, and have experienced them personally, that can take a diverse group (in fact the more diverse and representative the better) an forge a shared vision of the future that naturally leads to the productive self-organization of efforts to bring them to life. This is because the goal, structure of the problem, and process forward lives in each of the participants allowing them to work together make the future vision a reality.

There are a variety of groups working on these social technologies from different perspectives. But the core components include:

• the recognition that we must trust and engage in a process of discovery because the way forward is not clear
• The use of open ended dialogue (rather than discussion or debate)
• The valuing of diversity and different perspectives, in recognition that no one person has the picture of the whole system and that everyone's perspective is necessary to understand what is happening (like the parable of the blind men and the elephant)
• A phased process that starts with an exploration of "Where are now?", that looks at "How did we get here?," that envisions and dreams "What is possible?", and then end with "What is the way forward?"
• The acknowledgement that we all have blind spots and limited mental models that only capture a portion of reality, and seeking to illuminate these limitations so we can develop an understanding of the whole
• Respective and using the experience of our feelings and sensations to help us identify areas we have consciously or unconsciously avoided exploring. This allows us to learn about our learning, which creates openness.
• The use of private meditation/contemplation to allow us an opportunity to integrate what we are learning and cultivate the openness that allows us to let in what others are telling us

This is not an easy or necessarily fun process, but it is the essential process of forming into a single living organism that is greater the sum of the parts, preserving individuality and choice but integrating it with others. This is a fundamental process of life and self-organization as people like Robert Wright (Nonzero) and Fritjof Capra (The Hidden Connections) describe.

Some people that are hot on the trail of the necessary process are:

• Otto Scharmer and Peter Senge: Presencing
• The people of The Art of Hosting: http://www.artofhosting.org/
• Juanita Brown: The World Cafe

What is tricky is that the process is not just something you can read a script to facilitate. We need people trained in the subtle process of working with people of diverse backgrounds in the same room (e.g. blindspots, the role of emotion, etc.). But all these things are learnable.

I firmly believe that this is the way forward: co-creative distributed leadership that promotes social self-organization and coordinated action. We need to invent the future together, and this is how to do it. We just need to get people to take a chance and try it.