Interesting report from a group I hadn’t heard of before, the Centre for Innovative and Entrepreneurial Leadership. THey have just released a publication called “Coping with Growth and Change: The state of leadership in rural BC.” I have an interest in this given that I teach and facilitate collaborative leadership and I live ina rural community in BC.
The report’s authors write:
“Many people see leadership development assisting with issues like change, economic diversification, youth attraction, innovation and collaboration, key ingredients to 21st Century success for rural communities.”
Many communities reported that youth are moving away and young families are not moving in. “Young people between the ages of 25 and 34 are the ones who typically start families and businesses, critical issues for communities,” says report co-author Mike Stolte, President-Elect of the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation (CRRF).
“The theme of youth leadership came up time and time again,” stated report co-author Stacy Barter, of CIEL. “Communities say they don’t know how to engage younger people. The established leaders are getting older and many of them are feeling burned out.”
One of the things that is exhausting community leaders, according to the study, is the increasing challenge of creating dialogue and communication between groups. “Many communities told us they want to work together, but they just don’t know how,” said Barter. “They want to learn how to practice collaborative leadership.”
The report shows that many communities are caught in a bind. “If special care is not taken to conserve the qualities fostering our community’s distinctive character, critical dimensions of its image and identity may be lost.” “These issues are dividing communities,” said Barter.
“The kind of leadership training they are asking for, collaborative leadership, involves the skills of leading a community through these differences. Without a new kind of leadership, they are telling us, the differences will continue to divide people, and the rate of growth will continue to overwhelm them.”
It seems there is an appetite everywhere for this kind of leadership. Yesterday talking with a friend involved in the biodeisal energy he was speculating that the shift in leadership models to something ore dialogic and less top down is a generational one. He was remarking that it seemed as if the current generation of 35-55 year olds were assuming th emantle of leadership and were altering by flattening structures that concentrate power. Of course my friend Jon Husband has been predicting this for a long time. He calls the idea wirearchy, informed as it is by the ways in which networked structures change power systems and leadership lenses. This report is encouraging to me, as it says that more and more people in governance systems (who tend to cling to the status quo) are finally loosening the kinds of leadership styles that characterize local government, and they are looking for some other way to deal with the stresses of the work they have to do.
[tags]local government, british columbia, rural communities, wirearchy[/tags]
Via Johnnie, comes a sweet elucidation from David Weinberger about the creeping relgion of “accountabalism:”
The Folly of Accountabalism
Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.
The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to schools–where it is eating our young–as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.
When such disincentives as the threat of having to wear an orange jumpsuit for eight to ten years didn’t stop the Enron nightmare and other bad things from happening, accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters. Accountabalism is a type of superstitious thinking that allows us to live in a state of denial about just how little control we individuals have over our environment.
Accountabalism manifests itself in a set of related beliefs and practices:
It looks at complex systems that have gone wrong for complex reasons and decides the problem can be solved at the next level of detail. Another set of work procedures is written, and yet more forms are printed up. But businesses are not mechanical, so we can’t fine-tune them by making every process a well-regulated routine. Accountabalism turns these complex systems into merely complicated systems, sacrificing innovation and adaptability. How can a company be agile if every change or deviation requires a new set of forms?
Accountabalism assumes perfection–if anything goes wrong, it’s a sign that the system is broken. That’s not true even of mechanical systems: Entropy, friction, and manufacturing tolerances ensure that no machine works perfectly. Social systems are incapable of anything close to perfection, so if something goes wrong in one, that need not mean the system is broken. If an employee cheats on expenses by filling in taxi receipts for himself, the organization doesn’t have to “fix” the expense-reporting system by requiring that everyone travel with a notary public.
Accountabalism is blind to human nature. For example, it assumes that if we know we’re being watched, we won’t do wrong–which seriously underestimates the twistiness of human minds and motivations. We are capable of astounding degrees of self-delusion regarding the likelihood of our being caught. Further, by overly formalizing processes, accountabalism refuses to acknowledge that people work and think differently. It eliminates the human variations that move institutions forward and provide a check on the monoculture that accounts for most disastrous decisions. It also makes work no fun.
Accountabalism bureaucratizes and atomizes responsibility. While claiming to increase individual responsibility, it drives out human judgment. When a sign-off is required for every step in the work flow, those closest to a process lack the leeway to optimize or rectify it. Similarly, by assuming that an individual’s laxness caused a given problem–if so-and-so hadn’t been asleep at the switch or hadn’t gotten greedy or hadn’t assumed that somebody else would clean up the mess, none of this would have happened–accountabalism can miss systemic causes of failure, even, ironically, as it responds to the problem by increasing the system’s reach.
Accountabalism tries to squeeze centuries of thought about how to entice people toward good behavior and dissuade them from bad into simple rules by which individuals can be measured and disciplined. It would react to a car crash by putting stop signs at every corner. Bureaucratizing morality or mechanizing a complex organization gives us the sense that we can exert close control. But grown-ups prefer clarity and realism to happy superstition.
[tags]accountability, David Weinberger[/tags]
Victoria BC
I love a space with a brick wall in a space. Tonight at Ferris’ Oyster Bar with a couple of friends for dinner, I kept noticing how that wall lended its presence to the space, as I enjoyed a beautiful and tasty rice bowl of vegetarian potstickers and deep friend tofu. I was noticing all day how details do more than they seem capacble of doing. The stillness permeating the inner harbour as the water stayed flat for a second day in a row, the signs on the busses that say “Sorry…I’m out of service.” Something about that “Sorry…I’m” part that makes the whole downtown core a little more friendly as the post-rush hour busses deadhead back to the bus garage.
We were locked deeply in design conversations today, and we went through six design tools from the Art of Hosting, all of which I taught and we discussed as I harvested them all on this diagram.
The tools that are elucidated here include the following:
Attention to the details of design led us into an incredibly deep conversation about the work we were doing, working at a whole different level. The quality of attention flowing from the presence lingering from good design…
[tags]ferris’ oyster bar, victoria, design[/tags]
My friend Alex Kjerulf has just released his new book about happiness at work.
Alex is a true clown in many senses of the word bringing joy and humour to everything he does. How do I know? Well, in November 2003 he suggested that we swap blogs for a week. It was a crazy experiement and it drove some of our readers nuts. I wasn’t too high on it either, but I was game for a go.
When I switched to wordpress the author marking fuction didn’t come over in the import, but Alexe’s post are still in my archives. You can read what he had to say about the experiment as we finished. It was an interesting experiement in mixing up online identities, and it was fun to hack Alex’s blog for a while and have hime hang around in mine.
At any rate, I am a happy worker and I deeply appreciate Alex’s life mission. And I hope his book becomes a classic. He already is.
Monica Nissen, George Por, Ria Baeck and I have been in some conversations about harvesting lately. When Monica and I were together at the Art of Hosting in Colorado last month we had three incredible conversations about harvest. Naturally we harvested from them and I have just spent some time making some deeper meaning of these notes.
I have made all of these notes at my flickr site. When you visit these links, view them in order and be sure to read the notes and annotations on the photo page. Most of the photos are pictures of my journal, where I was recording my thoughts as we went along. Click on the photos to view the notes.
Conversation 1
We began with our first conversation about harvesting, by seeing harvest as a cycle:
Conversation 2
In the second conversation, I started explaining to Monica the difference between folksonomy and taxonomy and how the two might work together to create meaning. This was based on a conversation I had with George:
From there, Monica and I wondered about the simple hobbit tools of harvesting including the most basic kind of cycling and iteration:
That prompted a powerful learning about what happens when we see harvest in an evolutionary context, when well designed feedback loops create great depth and meaning and transcendance:
Conversation 3
Seeking to understand more about the patterns we were seeing, we co-convened a session on harvesting during the Open Space and we collaborated on the recording. Monica focused on deep questions and I focused on further articulating the cyclical nature of deep harvest:
I have walked away from these conversation with a deep and lively question: What if the Art of Hosting was actually the Art of Harvesting?
Why is this important? I think it matters that harvest, good harvest, moves organizations and communities forward, links leadership and action to conversation and makes the best use of the wisdom that is gathered from meetings. If you have ever wondered about meetings that seem not to go anywhere, this inquiry into harvesting, sensemaking and iterative action holds the key to avoiding those kinds of situations. It’s not enough just to have good process and a good facilitator – the results of the work must also be alive in the organization. That’s where we are going with this.