Intentional Society: Leaderful Pie
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This last week we did some classic Circling together, which was our highest-attended and seemingly-most-appreciated session so far this season. I think it probably functioned like a re-infusion, a booster shot, of the core experience type that drew a lot of us to Intentional Society as a community of applied interpersonal growth-supportive practice.
So it was great, and, there was variation in the breakout rooms as always, and, in at least some rooms we had some experiences of struggle with "permission culture" — that default of so many classrooms, companies, and other orgs, where if you don't have explicit permission to do a thing then you hold and hide your directive-desire-energy (a.k.a. leadership) and just go along with the norm of the group. That norm could be "there is one leader/facilitator in charge" or it could be "leaderless emergence in a peer group" but those two poles are strong attractors in modern and postmodern worldviews we're steeped in.
1 and 0 are clear obvious possibilities for "number of leaders in any room." What about the opposite of 0 though? 1 is conventional, 0 is egalitarian, and if you try to flip the "nobody" into "everybody" how does that really work in practice? To me this calls to a synthesis, a fluid mode of integrating the 1-ness and 0-ness in a balance of structure and dynamism, pattern and nebulosity.
I've experienced it on great teams — have you? — and will embrace the term "leaderful" as pointing at that state of meta-aligned co-holding of leadership integrity in a fluid ever-shifting expression. In a leaderful space, there is more energy, more integrity, more direction, more intelligence woven into service of the collective. It's power-with instead of power-over or powerlessness. It's about growing the size of the pie rather than focusing on the relative size of the slices.
As the "1" in the congregation-sized room of Intentional Society, I've frequently fallen into the either-or tradeoff frame about leadership, even recently — so the integrity I'm working to flush through my system is that we won't get to a leaderful culture by me reducing, shrinking, or holding back my leadership contributions. Thinking in a pie-slice mindset, that doesn't balance the pie nearly as much as it shrinks it. I do want the proportion of my leadership pie slide to shrink over time — but only because the rest of the pie has grown so much!
Shrinking as a percentage, holding or growing (in my own growth journey as a leader) in absolute value... that's the spatial frame that makes clear that there's no paradox there. Saying something like "I want Intentional Society to move from founder-led to primarily community-led over the next year" is technically true but the "from" and "to" connotes the wrong model of shrinking the former to get the latter! Let's try...: "I want Intentional Society to grow up around me, with a wealth of self-aware and agentic leadership bubbling up through the community to reciprocate, extend, and even surpass my founding vision and still-growing leadership." Bit of a mouthful there, can keep workshopping the clarity, but seems like the right track to me.
Leadership, and leaderful culture, may very well be the next key domino in the IS stack. It feels "underneath" the requirements for broadening our space to more zones, in that the past leadership model of "James facilitates these weekly sessions" won't get us there, and we won't get to "vibrant and vital ecosystem of exciting and nourishing things happening all over this landscape" without building robust capacity for agency, power, action, and integrity into our IS culture.
That integrity of doing, sourcing, leading — it's the weak side opposite our IS strengths in the domain of being. It goes right back to our growth model of Awareness, Acceptance, Integrity (which I'll be talking about next week with Life Itself, check it out) which spans the being<->doing cycle and can be seen, welcomed, and integrated in interpersonal practice. Do you have any favorite practices already for developing and exercising leaderful nature?
Cheers,
James