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April 26, 2004 By Uncategorized

My friends Peggy Holman and Anne Stadler are working on a book. That’s not news, as either of these very interesting women has a book’s worth of wisdom ready to share at all times. What’s news is that I finally got around to reviewing the starter they posted called Emergent Organizations, and it is a provocative piece.

The paper outlines the central thesis of their work of the past few years, which is harnessing the spirit of large scale change events and translating them throughout organizations to sustain the moment. This is a pet concern for me as well, as Open Space events are fairly simple to put together and quickly activate an incredible depth of spirit and passion in people, and yet few organizations are curious enough to try to figure out how to put all of this into play on a day to day basis.

In their paper, Peggy and Anne look at three case studies and then draw some conclusions about the practices that support emergent form and leadership coming out of spirited large scale change events.

Essentially the practices that support emergent form are:


  • Center in the organization’s higher purpose by bringing it consistently into the daily work of the organization

  • Open the circle — the organization’s boundaries — for all the diversity to flourish via a self-organizing marketplace (involve all stakeholders)

  • Open system-wide avenues for communication and reflection (Practicing transparency).

Practices that enable emergent leadership are:


  • Make it easy for individuals to take responsibility for what they care about (unleashing the power of individuals to contribute).

  • Invoke spirit by creating shared vision and values, opening unanticipated possibilities.

  • Stand for “yes” and reflect regularly on what is being learned: individually and collectively.

  • Steward: Care for the whole community of life (sustainable, systematic).

  • Design simply from natural, universal patterns

Taken together, along with the practical advice contained in the paper (and hopefully, the book) these practices can sustain emergent organization and leadership, keeping people working in peak form more often and keeping the organization alive as both a stable arena for the practice of work, and as an agile organism able to deal with change and uncertainty robustly.

Peggy and Anne boil these practices down to three conditions that are essential for emergence:


  • A guiding purpose, values and principles that define the whole

  • An open-circle organizational form, with roots in natural cycles, aligning individual and collective practice in service at every level

  • A stewarding group to lead that reflects the diversity of the whole

The last one is especially interesting to me. I have noticed that one of the things that seems to keep people and organizations from attaining these conditions is the responsibility deficit. There is an awful lot of “shoulds” that plague people’s work and lives, causing people to defer responsibility for change to someone else. “We should have more resources,” “we should have a bigger market share,” “we should have better communications.”

The blame for this responsibility deficit I think rests equally with “managers” and “workers” in organizations (I consider those categories to be largely unhelpful, but you get the picture). Stewardship comes to the rescue here in that it invites anyone with passion to take on a role that both invites the responsibility for change of everyone in the organization while at the same time supporting the passion that leads to personal responsibility and leadership.

Stewarding groups in organizations can be composed of anyone who cares to take on the role:

This group experiences the intensive version of the organization’s work. They mirror whatever issues or questions face the whole. As a result, they also model staying open through the transition from a traditional organization. It is almost a guarantee that at some point things will get messy! This occurs as people begin to realize that their assumptions about leadership, organizational structure and power are no longer valid. Through periodic gatherings on the underlying systems of organization, people experience their environment in a new way. This group keeps the organization open rather than shutting down in fear by meeting regularly to reflect on what’s surfacing, what they are learning, how they can best support the whole. By experiencing conflict and uncertainty in this microcosm, the whole organization benefits from what is learned. Over time, this group is best formed through a self-selected commitment to lead a cycle through the pattern.

My favourite chacterization of the role of a stewardship group in Peggy and Anne’s paper is the story of how the stewarding group of the Spirited Work learning community handled conflict around governance challenges;

One aspect of Spirited Work that has been rich in learning about new forms of organization is its governance system. Leadership is entirely self-selected. The stewards work by paying attention to the community’s patterns of communication and action, in particular noticing places of disturbance. Often, traditional organizations shut down amidst conflict or when facing the unknown. At Spirited Work, these situations are viewed as indicators that something new wants to emerge. By following these learning edges and continually asking what is being called forth, the organization has evolved and grown. The emergence of the Stewarding model of governance itself is an example of paying attention to the underlying patterns that want to emerge.

…

In the Stewards group, conflict became a signal indicating an opening for learning. Stewards developed the habit of stopping and asking “What higher purpose are we trying to serve?” then listening in silence for a few moments. New possibilities usually emerged when conversation resumed.

I love this notion of paying attention to conflict and seeing it as an indicator that something new wants to emerge. It extends a kind of “wildcrafting” metaphor of leadership that notices what REALLY grows well on the land and then supporting the conditions for that crop rather that trying to cultivate something foreign by destroying the integrity of the environment to promote its growth.

I think this concept has legs, and I am keen to see this paper developed into a book to address strategies for leaders at all levels to create and sustain the conditions for emergent leadership in organizations.