Changing our model of Leadership in a changing world
Our world is going through a transition, one that commenced a few decades ago. In the simplest language, we are shifting from a phase of dominance, superiority, the alpha (often male), and the leader as ultimate authority.
As this model disintegrates, the rise of authoritarian figures hell-bent on seizing all-power is clearly evident. The last vestiges of a mostly patriarchal structure.
The emerging culture has an allergy to any form of hierarchy or structure.
There is a desire for consensus, collaboration, community participation.
Included in this desire is a reptilian response to not be told what to do. I want my freedom. My rights.
The stage we are emerging towards, painstakingly, is one where we accept that rights come with responsibilities. That what ‘I’ do as I express my rights, might have a consequence on another’s rights to act.
We want our cake and we want to eat it as well.
For any enterprise, community, family or collective to survive and thrive without turning into a messy human heap, we need structure. We need architecture that holds the shape of the community or enterprise. And within that architecture, we need a new form of leadership.
Syntropic World calls that form of leadership Stewardship. To care for the home space/the enterprise we are stewarding.
If we get the design of the enterprise architecture, the threshold crossing that says those who are part of this community, this home, this enterprise, agree to behave, show up, participate, in this way…then the requirement for a steward leader to be Bossy Boss, to be dominant, to have power over, should be minimal.
That does not mean there is no one who holds the shape, the Pattern Integrity, of the enterprise as a leader. If there is no one, or two, then the shape will in its early days collapse.
The tension between holding the Pattern Integrity, the structure, and allowing collaboration, contribution, voice, participation…is what keeps the family, enterprise and community alive and evolving.
The structure, the threshold crossing and the steward leader needs to be dynamic, attenuated to change, adaptive to ensure that that which we are stewarding is brought into existence reflecting is full integrity.
It is an entirely different type of leadership, requiring both service to that which we are stewarding, and the whole, as well as the ability to sense the small and large changes in the field within the enterprise or home, and the larger field in which we live, all the way to the level of Universe.
Photo taken June 30th, 2020
