Communities

It’s been a big week with the launch of my latest book, ‘The Humble Leader’. This work forms a guided reflection on Social Leadership, but i’ve taken to describing it as ‘fragile’. It’s not confident or assertive work, but rather something half formed and uncertain. But still important.

In what may be challenging times, this work looks at the ‘self’ in the ‘system’, and gives a space to consider both what we want to be, and how we want our systems to look. My sense is that there is space for more humility, if we are willing to invest in ourselves and our communities. And that a time of ‘coming together’ would be no bad thing.

You can buy ‘The Humble Leader’ here.

Layers of Community

One idea that we explore in the Social Age is the idea of Community: that collaborative technologies have unleashed the power of emergent and often fully social (but politically powerful) communities, that act as spaces of belonging, of sense making, and of change.

These last few months in the UK have seen a Community of protesters called ‘Just Stop Oil’ take radical action such as blocking motorways, dangling off bridges, and throwing soup over Old Masters - all acts which have caused disruption, controversy, and yet have most certainly catapulted them into the public eye. Coordinated through social technologies, they have most certainly claimed a voice, whether you like it or not.

But this week i have been thinking about more nuanced layers of community: layers that inhabit the same physical spaces.

I first explored this in a book i wrote in New York called ‘Communities, Spaces, and Performance’. This work looked at public and private spaces and the communities that concurrently inhabited them (such as the dancers in the Lincoln Centre, but also the informal skateboarder gangs that claimed the same space for their illicit performances’.

Many of our physical spaces have these co-located communities. In officers we have cleaners and service staff. In my own town we have shoppers, residents, and homeless communities, with almost no lines of communication between them. The same space may be ‘home’, and yet the tribes are not aligned. Often not even visible to each other.

Indeed, even within the more formal layers of the Organisation we can have communities that are located together and yet separate - groups that never converse even though they inhabit the same culture.

The view we have of the Organisation, or indeed Society, that surround us may feel complete, but there is value in considering which Communities, or layers, are hidden from us. Not least because we will tend to spend forces like kindness and trust within our known layers, meaning that neither opportunity nor fairness will be evenly distributed.

My writing

This week has mainly been one of illustration, alongside signing books! But the key piece of writing i’ve shared has been a draft first section from the ‘Learning Science Guidebook’. This is a collaboration with my long time friend Sae Schatz, a US based learning scientist and researcher.

https://julianstodd.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/workingoutloud-on-the-learning-science-guidebook-1/

We are adopting the full principles of #WorkingOutLoud for this book, sharing the emergent work on the blog, as well as ‘behind the scenes’ views on the Learning Fragments site.

We will see how this goes: it may only end up as a series of blog posts, but equally it may develop further. Hopefully into a book. We have developed a structure of around 20 topics we want to explore and will see how we progress. Watch this space.

With best wishes

Julian