I want to suggest a model of social policies and leadership for consideration.
In this model, the social organization may be of any scale - a team, a department, a company, a nation.
This seems to me another one of those concepts that applies to many different levels of the organization of living matter in our world, from cells to our entire planet seen as one.
I'll model the social fabric as a sort of flexible "rubber sheet" with the normal state being "flat".
There are, it appears to me from observing the world, two ways that leadership, in the middle of this sheet, can operate.
( You may need to click on the picture to zoom it up to full-size to see the details. )
In one mode, which looks like the letter "W", the central leaderhship attempts to concentrate resouces centrally, pushing themselves upwards, at the expense of ever larger numbers of the people, who are consequently pushed downwards. That's illustrated in the left side of the picture.
Disparites grow, and the leadership gets higher and higher - but only measured locally with respect to the surrounding deepening poverty. As seen from outside, leadership's castle is rising in the middle of a rapidly sinking swamp. The net result from outside is that everything, including leadership, is, net, going downhill.
In the other mode, which looks like the letter "M", the opposite is true. Leadership attempts to boost the people around themselves, and encourges them to "pass it on". In fact, leadership may actually take a hit to get those around boosted to an even higher level than the central leadership, even to the point where the whole company or country is rising and the leader is falling proportionately behind them.
But, as seen from outside, the entire enterprise is rising, and even the leadership is rising.
These two policies are derived from two mental models of the role of leadership. In one, the role of the elite is to have perks and get richer than their neighbors. In the other, the role of the leader is to raise up the level of the whole enterprise, even if they themselves get a proportionately smaller "piece of the pie."
The "W" model is self-sustaining for a while, and is based on central leadership having a limited horizon and being oriented primarily in an "us" versus "them" relationship with their own people. But, because the whole enterprise is sinking ever deeper underwater, psychologicallyl and economically, sooner or later it will fail to be self-sustaining and even the illusion of prosperity in the center will vanish. Often, and I guess this is based on theories of leadership from Machiavelli and the Middle Ages in England, the central figure maintains power by keeping the underlings in constant battle with each other, so they won't "gang up" on the King.
The leader in this model is under constant strain and threat that, at any moment, if they let down their guard, the curve will "snap back" to a smooth bell-curve shape and they will be flung downards. If you glimpse in the "cockpit", it's more likely you'll see a fist fight in progress than someone actually flying the plane. An explicit goal may be "disunity" among "minorities."
The "M" model is not constrained, and can continue to grow without bounds, because every part of it is rising above the waters, and prosperity is spreading farther and farther. It requires somewhat "selfless" leadership with a broader vision of the mission, or even a selfish, but more informed view of how things play out. The leader in this model maintains power by providing prosperity that comes from all the underlings working together so that stuff actually gets done.
Explicit goals will definitely include repairing "disunity" among sub-populations and sub-cultures. The "motive power" or "secret of success" is a very low key but very constant pressure from the top (top-down) to move towards unity. Holding the stress of that shape is leadership's job that cannot be done by anyone else in the organization -- the very first component of the top-down series of descriptors has to be "unity with diversity." If the central leadership becomes tired and "lets down their guard", the worst that will happen to them is that they'll be pulled UP into the bell-shaped curve. Knowing they can do that any time they want gives them the strength to never have to utilize that option.
As with "Leading by Questions" by Marquart, the M model is actually a much easier leadership model, with far fewer threats to the palace, and much less requirement to "know everything" or otherwise attempt to justify your own existence to constant threats of people who want to switch places with you. The larger problem is succession of management and even finding or growing anyone who can and is willing to take the reins.
The trend in management literature these days is from the "W" model increasing towards the "M" model, and we hear terms like "servant manager".
We need to be careful about extrapolating upwards from local data. It may seem from the bottom rungs of a company, say, that higher and higher levels of management seem more and more remote and interested in personal profit, and therefore we should dislike "the system".
Like so many other curves, in the multiscale, multilevel life shape that we live in, what actually happens is that the curve twists and we realize that for any CEO who wants to rip-off a company, there is a higher-level investor, such as John Templeton, who prefers the company not be ripped-off, and sees their profit going down the drain if that rip-off happens. Every boss has a boss, and if you go far enough up that chain, you're back to core-values again. It's only the middle that's a mess. There is much more cause for optimism that this thing can be made to work than people think by using the wrong method of one-level world extraplation to judge a multi-level system of life.
Whatever level organization you are considering, one question that could be asked is whether the model in use locally would "make sense" or "scale up" if "everyone" used the same model. That can be a very powerful "symmetry" test, and "scalability" test. I had a roommate once (JJC) who had a test for candidate roommates - if there were two of that person, could they get alone with each other? Great test, and we can all think of people who would fail it. I believe the "M" model above is scalable and works even better if shared. I think that is not true for the "W" model, which again means it is fighting a losing battle, depleting resources to fight an even larger context in a battle that cannot be sustained forever. Far better to transition from the W model to the M model, if that can be done stably and without violence. Then, you can "lead" and say, "Hey everyone, look what we're doing that can work for you too!" A post for another day.
references
-------------------
General reading:
The Utility of Humilty, CIO Magazine, Dec 1, 2002 (on-line)
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t ( Jim Collins, HarperCollins, 2001)
Hostmanship - a Serial Review #7 - in comparison to Servant Leadership, from the weblog Leading Questions, 4/27/2007. (accessed 6/1/07).
And, going back a little further in time than 1970,Hostmanship is a leadership approach that mirrors what is called servant leadership, a business leadership concept developed by the late Robert Greenleaf. His work is carried on by an organization under his name. The Greenleaf center describes servant leadership this way.
Servant-Leadership is a practical philosophy that supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions. Servant-leaders may or may not hold formal leadership positions. Servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment.
Here's Robert Greenleaf's own definition.
The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.
The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”
Taken from the Servant As Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.
And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him.On Military leadership:
"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law". And He said to him "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."
"This is the great and foremost commandment."
"And a second is like it, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
"On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.
Words of Jesus from the Christian Bible, NAS, Matthew 22:35-40.
Quotations from Chairman Powell - a Leadership Primer1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in order.
The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual - (FM22-100)
Battle Tested Wisdom for
Leaders in Any Organization
from GovLeaders.org
Quotes on Leadership
From "motivating quotes"
Ancient Chinese Wisdom
A leader is bestMore recent Chinese thought
When people barely know he exists.
Not so good
When people obey and acclaim him.
Worse when they despise him.
But of a good leader
Who talks little
When his work is done,
His aim fulfilled, They will say "We did it ourselves."
Lao Tse
Pay attention to uniting and working with comrades who differ with you.I apologize for not having relevant quotations from Hindu and other traditions. Please feel free to add them to the comments here. My point is that, whether ancient or modern, capitalist or communist or Christian, Jew, or Muslim - the same wisdom is found and held up for our attention. When such different groups agree on something, we should look into it if nothing else because it appears to be "common ground" that we can build some "unity" around.
Quotations from Chairman Mao
6 comments:
There are only a few things that we can build unity around and accomplish the basic "ground-cover" step of growing this social ecology.
They can include sports, commerce, compatible wireless frequencies, compatible voltages for appliances, love of our children, respect for our ancestors, and unity.
Among those few things, the idea of unity has a unique distinction - it is completely self-reflexive. That is to say, one of the ways to develop unity is to work together to develop ways to work on developing unity.
It has the same aesthetically pleasing property as an exponential, and is probably therefore maximally efficient in some way.
Regardless, it's hard to see what the downside is of focusing on unity, provided critically that it's "unity that embraces diversity", not "Unity that replaces diversity."
The fastest way to crash an ecology is to oversimplify it, homogenize it, and remove diversity. Let's avoid that failure mode.
Oh, yeah, "Unity" is also scale-invariant, so any social learning we do in one place can be applied to all other places and all other scales.
We don't have to "reinvent the wheel" at each level, because anything that is "scale-invariant", by definition, works at any scale.
Again, this seems maximally efficient.
While "works at all" is a good test for any strategy to get us out of the mess we're in, "maximally efficient" means we can't do better than that.
Which means, we could stop searching for other better ways and focus on rolling up our sleves and settling on this as an approache.
Which means, in a context in which time is short, which it is for this social powder keg we've created around ourselves, we should stop "giving off sparks" and just accept that we should all be working on something that contributes to "unity with diversity" and getting us from here to there in an equally efficient and non-explosive fashion.
South Africa proved that apartheid could be dismantled without an explosion, which demonstrates that amazing things are possible in that regard.
I keep forgetting that people haven't had physics, or got taught by someone who only knew the rituals and not the spirit.
If something is "invariant" it means it doesn't change during some process.
What that means is that, for all practical purposes, it is a "constant" and something you can use as a basis for building upon.
It won't change, or twist or rotate on you. Anything you invest in it will not only not be lost later in some revision or enhancement, but will simply steadily compound over time.
"Invariant" is GREAT. It's a "holdfast" for us, viewed as life in a tidal-pool of change. It's a constant that we can learn once, and then don't have to upgrade once we learn. It doesn't have "bug fixes". It won't be replaced. It's something we can count on in a rapidly changing world.
Invariants are probably the ONLY good place to put down roots or foundations for our social structures. They're rock solid.
Nothing can be more solid.
Which means we're done. The 40 years in the desert is over. Unpack the wagons and set up camp and let's get to work.
Another cross check for this being an intrinsic, core concept is to ask whether a "lack of unity" is an issue that is "in the way" of whatever project you are trying to accomplish,
from getting a new copier to tackling world hunger, TB, AIDS, or global warming.
I think 100% of our social problems look like technical problems, but have a component of 'lack of unity'
that is blocking progress.
Again, this is a common interest to fix this sucker. It's a pain to everyone. It's an organizational cost that keeps on costing and draining the life energy out of otherwise good projects.
If we can get Unity with Diversity fixed, almost everything else will become easier, or simply dissolve as problems.
Inclusive diversity-celebrating unity is an "easy yoke" and allows freedom within it, and is in fact the only way to create sustainable freedom versus anarchy. It's ecologically valid and based on the solid principles that got our life this far.
So, we've run out of convenient excuses for inaction and needs for new study committees.
As Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise would say, "Make it so!"
Another subtle point -- where problems are expressed is not always where they are broken. And it's not where they need to be "fixed" or where an intervention can do any good or be effective, let alone efficient.
Very often in legacy computer systems, the visible symptoms of problems are a long, long way downstream of where the system is actually malfunctioning.
Due to that distance in space and time, it's hard to persuade people that the problem is "architecture" or "unity" or "integrity", but they do notice that when you fix the upstream issue, that all the downstream problems suddenly stop happening.
So, as I discussed for Comair flight 5191, the "downstream" shadow of the Air Traffic Controllers' Strike in the mid 1980's was still visible in the short-staffing at Lexington the day the "acccident."
There's a lot of that kind of effect going around, once you learn to look for it. Most of it comes down to strained relations and lack of unity at some high level, which results in a long causal chain and finally disaster or dysfunction at the lower level.
You can easily see that the clerk you need is getting behind, but you can't easily see the unity problem 3-levels up that resulted in a total budget mess that resulted in being short staffed and unable to fix it, that resulted in this particular clerk being exhausted by the time you got there.
And, changing the staffing levels won't "fix" the real problem, and will usually result in something else "breaking", and so on, until someone realizes that all this is due to a higher level problem that never got fixed.
But, it cuts both ways, and when the higher level people seek budgets to fix the higher level problems, they are voted out of office or denied the money, because all these more immediate low level problems are "in the way" and need to be solved "first".
So, it's not safe to say that this would be fixed if only "management" did their job, because everyone else is probably preventing that from occuring.
The lack of visibility into distant parts of the organization is everywhere, from every angle.
Post a Comment