Distributed Leadership

Example

The example of the conductor-less Orpheus Orchestra, by Harvey Seifter:

"In most orchestras, the conductor directly supervises each musician; the conductor not only decides what music will be played but how it will be played as well. There is little room for the opinions or suggestions of the musicians themselves; such input is rarely solicited and even less often welcomed. Like workers reporting to an autocratic manager, orchestral musicians are expected to unquestioningly follow the direction of the conductor -- anything less invites humiliation before one's colleagues and may be grounds for immediate dismissal.

As a result, orchestral musicians are a notoriously unhappy class of employees. Paul Judy reports that when Harvard Business School professor J. Richard Hackman studied job attitudes among people working in 13 different job groups, he discovered that symphony orchestra musicians ranked below prison guards in job satisfaction. Further, when asked about their satisfaction with opportunities for career growth, symphony orchestra musicians fared even worse, ranking 9th out of the 13 surveyed job categories. Clearly, although the results of an orchestral performance can be exceptionally uplifting, the means of attaining these results are often anything but uplifting to those whose job it is to achieve them.

In place of the traditional fixed leadership position of conductor, Orpheus has developed a unique system of collaborative leadership that invites every member of the orchestra to participate in leadership positions, either leading the group in rehearsal and performance as concertmaster, or by leading one of the orchestra's many different formal or informal teams. This system is extremely flexible -- musicians freely move in and out of positions of leadership -- and it can be used to quickly adapt to changing conditions in the marketplace or within the group itself.

This free flow of leadership positions within the group encourages all the members of the orchestra to give their personal best performance. Cellist Eric Bartlett says, "When there's an important concert, everybody feels it, and everybody goes into it doing their absolute best work, giving it their utmost concentration, playing off of each other, and making sparks fly. For the most part, in a conducted orchestra, you play a more passive role. Not only is less expected of you, but less is expected from you. You have to play extremely well, but you're not playing off of your colleagues -- you're playing off of that one person in front of the orchestra holding the baton. I don't see that people in regular orchestras are emotionally involved in the same way. Everybody plays well, they do a very good job, but the level of individual emotional involvement isn't there." With no conductor to act as a filter to the what and the why behind the group's decisions, the members of Orpheus are uncommonly energized and responsive to the needs of the organization and to the desires of its leaders. Turnover is extremely low and employee loyalty is extremely high." (http://www.leadertoleader.org/knowledgecenter/journal.aspx?ArticleID=110)

Discussion

Paul Hartzog

“One of the great mysteries of large distributed systems – from communities and organizations to brains and ecosystems – is how globally coherent activity can emerge in the absence of centralized authority or control”.

“We’re naturally predisposed to think in terms of pacemakers, whether we’re talking about fungi, political systems, or our own bodies…. For millennia we’ve built elaborate pacemaker cells into our social organization, whether they come in the form of kings, dictators, or city councilmembers.

As Steven Johnson describes in “The Myth of the Queen Ant,” humans have traditionally looked for “rulers” in ordered systems, “pacemakers” that are responsible for the maintenance of order. In addition, we look for such primary causers in other systems, from terrorist networks to fads to mass demonstrations to peer-to-peer file-sharing. However, “we know now that systems like ant colonies don’t have real leaders, that the very idea of an ant ‘queen’ is misleading. But the desire to find pacemakers in such systems has always been powerful…". In complex adaptive systems, though, organizers are entirely unnecessary when the structure of the system follows certain parameters. These parameters determine whether a system will self-organize or not, into a state which Per Bak calls “self- organized criticality”. In highly interconnected systems, when conditions permit, order can emerge spontaneously, what Stuart Kauffman calls “‘order for free.’ – self-organization that arises naturally”[8]. Indeed, what Complexity reveals is that sometimes the system itself is the organizer of order. (http://www.panarchy.com/Members/PaulBHartzog/Papers/21st%20Century%20Governance.pdf)

Mark Roest

"Leadership evolved in two or more major threads: small groups, especially small communities and conscious companies, and large organizations, city-states, and nations. There have always been people who understood both Theory X and Theory Y leadership philosophies, because they inherited them or discovered them on their own, before they were named.

But in both cases, leadership was defined by the finite nature of the organization or state, which often lived in hostility with at least some of its near or distant neighbors.

Now it is time to discover what we know about leadership of permeable organizations and states -- entities with permeable membranes, or way beyond that -- organizations that merge and re-merge endlessly. There *is* a way to make sense of this!

When we understand that we as humanity live in 827 eco-regions, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of smaller specific instances of ecosystems, and upwards of 6,000 cultures, yet we are all in the same boat, and we are capable of assimilating (into ourselves so we become it, in part -- NOT digesting and dissolving it into our more powerful cultural identity so it disappears) almost any culture, we can truly understand the mosaic principle -- unity and diversity. Then we can collaborate fully with anyone else who gets it, and partially even with those who don't.

To get there, those who understand it can show the way within their specific eco-region and culture to others who share that basis for differentiated thought and action, but have not yet understood it. That is leadership by pioneering, and by going back and showing. Early adopters wlll follow the pioneer. About half of the mass of people will follow established opinion leaders who move when they decide an idea is proven, and about half will follow the other half when they decide it is 'the standard'. There is a 'long tail' that will adopt late, or never. This is the Chasm Theory of Marketing model, minus the discussion of the chasm between adoption by early adopters, and by established opinion leaders.

Permeating the process I just described, and perhaps usually operating in relatively short time frames, there will be tens or hundreds of millions of groups of people finding their way, and getting progressively more familiar with the nature of nature -- with how we can live in harmony with the world, and by extension, have the emotional space to live in harmony with each other. There is this generalized axis they are moving along, and also the particular process they are figuring out or carrying out. There are opportunities for leadership along both axes, within the longer movement along the axis toward general sustainability and social justice, which has its own opportunities as well.

Leadership is going to include three main aspects:

1. the topic (domain)content being worked with (e.g. renewable energy and conservation),

2. the knowledge of how to work with such content (process and whole systems) (e.g. knowing the scientific method and having access to the literature on ecology), and

3. human process (psycho-social-spiritual context for learning and choosing) (e.g. the content of the Stanford CCARES curriculum or process that teaches people how to understand themselves and each other, so that they can approach others with compassion and altruism every day).

At the meta-meta level, we also need leadership to disseminate the meme that all three of these aspects of behavior and skill are needed, along each axis, and that any combination of those can be picked up and carried at any time by every person, as inspiration motivates. This, when thoroughly assimilated, allows each of us to surrender the perceived need to rule in order to protect our interests. We will finally understand that we are in it together, we are inherently both the same and unique, and we can truly be as supportive of each other as our cells are within us. Believe me, we can do this! I have seen and felt early versions of it many times." (NextNet, May 2011)