Over the last six months i’ve written around 25 new articles on Social Leadership, exploring new aspects of this work: leadership at the intersection of systems.
The point of this activity is to let me build out my language and understanding: to develop the vocabulary and ideas, and to see how well it hangs together.
I thought it may be worth summarising some of the central themes of the new work:
The notion of leadership as ‘Motion’, which is a way of considering how we move beyond our ‘structural’ responsibility, our place within the system, to be moving between and across the landscape. This includes between communities and social structures. It’s a view of leadership as ‘woven’, or as interconnected. In this sense, the language and ideas start to draw together some of the themes from ‘The Socially Dynamic Organisation’ book (which introduced ‘Interconnection’ as a central idea), and the new parallel work on ‘Culture Weaving’, which looks at elements of scale and individual action.
The notion of ‘Boundaries’ has become more important - whilst i’ve described Social Leadership as happening ‘at the intersection of systems’, i now place more focus on understanding what the nature of these boundaries are, and what crosses them, and how we lead ‘across’ or ‘through’ them. This includes the idea of ‘trespass’, that sometimes we have to cross into new spaces, or ideas, and hold willing to listen.
The language of ‘Imperfect Leadership’, which explores how we are accountable in many different systems, and that whatever choice we make will carry more weight in one than the others. Essentially a recognition that we cannot be endlessly ‘right’ and that the accountability weighs upon us, forcing us to reconsider our notion of ‘perfect’, and whether it’s more important to have a dialogue with our imperfection, and to help leaders to navigate and understand this.
The idea of the ‘Unreconciled Self’, which comes from my work on the Identity Project, and which considers that we are a different ‘self’ in different spaces, but never reconcile these views: this work is hence about respecting difference, and instead of bring our ‘whole self’ we bring a ‘safe self’. This is also a conversation about how our different ‘selves’ can engage in different ways, and provide us with opportunity to find different lenses on leadership through this more diverse approach.
The idea of being ‘In Dialogue’ with your practice - this last one has come from the work on Social Leadership Daily and considers how we can be in constant dialogue with our everyday practice. It’s about a mindset and community for this, and about the smallest of actions, but in constant change.
These are some of the central ideas: in August i’m giving myself time to sift through them, to better define the landscape, but already i feel i am getting close to the place where i will have a structure for a new book. This will most likely be a new Social Leadership book, not a third edition of the Social Leadership Handbook, but we will see.
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