Intentional Society: The physics of leadership
Next week: new member orientation video call on Saturday, June 10th at 1:00-1:55pm Pacific Standard Time (4pm Eastern, 8pm UTC).
IS Operations: Community sessions are humming along... fishbowls are still great, observational feedback is helpful, revealing experience and impact is powerful. Oh, and this Sunday we have member emeritus Caroline A. returning as featured guest so if you'd like to catch up on her journey into monastic living, we have space for a couple guests — just reply if you'd like to ride along.
There's a thing called source-holding or driving-force or directing or ownership; I'll just use the word "leadership" today. That thing, the energy that makes things happen — it exists largely as a shape in other people's minds. (I'm focusing on the interpersonal here - yes we lead ourselves internally to act in the environment, but I want to gloss over that layer today.) It's the shape of expectations and understandings and raw this-is-how-the-world-is (or is going to be) that makes up the social reality of leadership.
Assuming a decision without agreement is delusional (or worse, a coercive reality distortion field), and a leader without a follower is just a lone nut. This is what I mean by the realness of leadership existing largely in other people's minds. As such, I'm observing the weight and the momentum of leadership. Stopping is just as hard as starting; either direction requires the F=ma of energy applied to change. The social space doesn't strictly follow Newtonian physics by any means, but it takes some analogous kind of work to adjust relationships including the status of any leadership relationship.
The momentum of leadership can be easily observed in bureaucracies with many layers, as a high-up titled leader's proclamation ripples downward through the organizational hierarchy. It goes both directions — a downward pronouncement may hit the boots-on-the-ground wisdom which then asserts its own leadership which ripples back upward. Those ripples may take a long time (or fail) to converge when there's a long distance-of-minds to shift along the way.
Even across a single direct relationship link, alignment over the mind-to-mind gap must be maintained with frequent investment. Doing any thing together is a balance of leadership energy from multiple parties, and changes take momentum. For example if a leader stops leading something, and doesn't lead in the un-leading, there's a lag until the other person notices, becomes sure, sees the impact, and acts in response. Nature may abhor a vacuum physically but the natural state of leadership is a lack!
Consider the converse as well, and this points at two states I'll call "under-leadership" and "over-leadership" describing the relative balance of leadership energy between two parties. One can lead strongly, the other could lead strongly, they could contribute equal energy, but successful leadership means the two work together to get the thing done. Any balance can be fine as long as the two parties agree on their responsibilities owned and energy sourced.
When a goal/domain/space is in a state of under-leadership, the combination of all leadership energy is insufficient to get the thing done. A state of over-leadership produces friction via conflicting claims and fights — which may resolve peacefully or explode the thing, but tends to be more easily noticed. Under-leadership, though, can often go un-noticed for far too long since the lack of leadership-energy for stewardship is a superset of noticing-energy for awareness of the lack.
Notice how typical "strong leadership", of the conventional "boss brain" in charge and "worker boots" executing all labor, actually creates a situation of under-leadership when all source-holding is claimed by one side. That's a false/impossible claim, but workers then are forced or asked to abdicate their own leadership energy, and that's when their system ends up doing dumb things via "just following orders".
Notice also how the balance of energy doesn't mean that the amount of total leadership energy is fixed! It's not a pie — both sides could lead more or lead less, and the more source energy is in play, but better outcomes can get. It's just that expansions of leadership need to expand the pie, not claim the other party's slice.
My last thought of notice today is to point at "meta-leadership" as being that specific responsibility of leading the state of leadership: awareness of that balance/distribution and calling attention to observed or needed shifts in leadership. Social cooperation can be quickly updated with effective communication — but if meta-leadership is lacking, the whole thing may be lost to the social system slipping into a state of under-leadership.
To try to sum it all up: Leadership is a construct (as is everything), it exists inside combinations of brains, it is a distribution of energy and responsibility, there can be more or less, it ebbs and flows, and getting meta about shifts in leadership is a keystone strategic skill. Working "with source", with leadership-as-object, is yet another piece of the metasystematicity required for a, dare I say it, Intentional Society.
Cheers,
James