The Leader with a Thousand Faces

I'd like to take a walk through the topic of leadership.  Let's start with where we are; the world we see around us..

Generally speaking, our model of leadership is built on the basic principle of the leader on top.  It makes sense, after all we live in a world where power and authority are centred with the strong and capable.  Leadership as a role is a mixing pot of influence, headship, coordination, facilitation, direction and decision.

So how do we unpick this?  What is really happening, and can we imagine a form of leadership that is truly free from the paradigm of power and control?

To try to pick apart some of these many tangled functions, let's consider leadership in a leaderless environment.  Many systems and communities are entirely self organising.  Complexity theory, which represents many entities we see in nature, describes utterly flat organisations with extremely high levels of inter-connectedness.  To get a picture of this, consider a flock of birds, a shoal of fish, or maybe a colony of ants, termites or bees.  There is no centre of coordination, yet the system is undoubtedly capable of sophisticated and intelligent collective behaviour.  How is it done?

Mathematics has shown that even simple rules followed by members of a large connected population can deliver remarkably sophisticated results (see the example of cellular automata).  But there's more, individuals can and do wield their influence on the entire community; the first one to detect a threat and change direction triggers a shift in the whole system.  Behaviour of an individual can create a pattern that ripples through the whole collective.  In fact, in a super-connected system it is hard for an individual action not to have system-wide consequences, even if they are seemingly short-lived or insignificant.

So from this first case, let's start building some archetypes of leadership.  Because leadership isn't a role or a position, it's a set of functions, it belongs in the realm of process, dynamism and change, not structure, permanence or sustenance.  An archetype of leadership, as I would like to put it, describes a transition, a trigger, a genuine change in the probable outcome.  So here's my first nomination:  First to Move.  We see it in stories and films, often when the challenge has been laid before a group.  Step up and do right, or keep the status quo.  Once one moves, the rest will likely follow, but if they don't, the one that moved first will pay the price.  In attempting to take the safety-in-numbers onto a new path, the First to Move has to momentarily risk everything and forego that safety.  The First to Move takes a risk, prepares to make a sacrifice, and then hopes that the character of the whole will step up to the character of the individual.

Organic systems may offer us a glimpse of another archetype.  The human brain has certain centres of communication, hubs if you like.  Points that are connected to all the low-level distributed regions and act as motorways of communication.  High speed regional centres that speed up contact between separated points.  Via these hubs, any part can communicate with any other part quickly without having to be able to manage all of those communication paths directly.  In social networks certain people are nodes highly connected within a community and crucially to other nodes outside it too.  There is no doubt that the architecture of connection is vitally important, but more on that later.  For now, I nominate another archetype:  Connector.  The connector, in their very being, acts as the key link to makes things happen.  They look highly social and involved, not necessarily the originator of any behaviour but the conductor of huge amounts of valuable information from all around the system that facilitate its spread.

This is interesting because the Connector has broken the homogeneity of the system, but not the connectedness.  As long as the Connectors are effective, all parts of the system can still see all others.  This shouldn't be confused with the all-too-familiar role of the single-point-of-contact, which effectively (intentionally or unintentionally) filters information.  In organic systems there are multiple channels of communication; connectors serve to speed one of these up, not restrict the flow.  And here we already start to touch upon a very human aspect to leadership.  We are not just elements of the system, we are its architects.  Unlike any other creature, we create, design, build and manipulate communities and connections.  We are the plants and we are the gardeners.  So some of these archetypes of leadership are architects.  But before we go there, I would like to suggest one more archetype that operates from within.

Complex systems have this characteristic that processes and patterns expressed at the micro level are repeated at many levels above; as you zoom out, the same shapes keep reappearing at larger and larger scales.  In maths we call patterns like this fractals.  I like the example of a snowflake.  Snowflakes, as we know, take many different forms but they often follow an amazing and complex six-fold symmetry.  They are not designed, but each of the arms forms under the same conditions and most crucially, from the same tine nucleating crystal at their origin.  So my next suggestion is the Nucleation Point.  Some small point that exhibits certain new behaviour that then replicates and initiates now properties that propagate through the system.  This poignant behaviour gets replicated at different levels and is the starting point for defining characteristics of the whole.

A honeybee performing his dance is a nucleation point, his information on the location of food sources gets cascaded through the system, influences the behaviour of others and can eventually affect the relationship of the whole colony with its surrounding geography.  He could even set the flavour of the honey.

But now let's move onto the architecture question.  Because it's here that I want to really get down to where I think leadership has become broken, and it links back to how humans are broken in the first place.  Let's assume for a moment that humans are "meant" to operate as part of a near-infinitely connected system.  Closely, elaborately and dependently connected to all other humans and the Earth which sustains and homes us.  If this is the case, then we can form the ultimate self-organising complex communal system.  If our primary identity is that of the collective; "I am nature" then the high-level needs and aims of all parts of the system are harmonised.  Of course, we see around us a world of competition and selection, a world which doesn't fit with the ideal of this structure, but humans with all their brains and technology could help to neutralise and recreate this order as they went.  All they would need is to stay in a state of deep, far reaching interdependence with each other and the world.  It would sort itself out, all would aim for the overall surviving and thriving of the whole order.

Now we all know that's not how it works.  But why?  Well for a start none of us likes the idea of "far reaching interdependence", in fact we pretty much aspire to the opposite; self-sufficient independence, but that doesn't make for a vey healthy system.  For a moment, let's take a step back and look at this from the perspective of a cold and calculated network system engineer.  Now my nodes don't want to be connected to each other any more.  They still need information to make decisions and understand the world around them, so what can be done?  Well, you could replace some of the connections with the equivalent of a fixed value, or better, some fixed rule- some kind of stimulus-response that is defined and repeatable and doesn't depend on lots of inter-connectedness to give feedback.  Great, now I've replaced a connection to the complex, turbulent deep and dark ether with what is effectively a well built wall.  Nothing passes through but I can lean on it, bounce balls of it and get on with life happy and secure.  You could even cut off whole sections of the network with this kind of separation.  Back to reality then, if we're thinking about groups of people, what would this look like?  It's all to familiar, it's The System, it's organigrams, it's laws, rules, manners, bureaucracy, guidelines, procedures.  It is the stuff of leadership and management in our world.  All of these are substitutes for being able to see the whole picture and choose the best response.  Sometimes we do it for lack of trust, sometimes for lack of visibility - we just can't see enough, but it always impedes the natural self-organising power of the community.  As such, we can loose our complex strengths; adaptability, responsiveness, efficiency and agility.  We become a machine and the leaders are the engineers.

But I'm not interested in that.  It is well known and well documented and it probably doesn't need another blog about it.  We're looking at leadership as gardeners, not engineers.

So what archetypes of leadership exist at the architectural level?  Just before we go there, let's look at an odd archetype of leadership that semi-transcends the contained system.  This is actually one of the archetypes of the mono-myth, identified by Joseph Campbell.   It is the Herald.  One who calls the people to a new direction; who delivers the decisive catalyst for engagement.  This is an important function, one of commissioning and mandating the community to take on new priorities and make sacrifices.  Here's the really interesting thing; it has to come from the fringes, from the borderlands, the outlying boundaries of the system.  A good Herald must have enough stake in the community to be credible, to have the best motives, but unless the call comes somehow from without, it lacks the spark, the authority, the authenticity to provoke change.  "This can't just come from within us" says the community, it must have something extra, something original.  Here's where I think this gets really interesting, because it suggests that it is actually fundamentally impossible for one person to simultaneously carry out all leadership functions.  You cannot be simultaneously in the middle (to be a Connector or Nucleation Point) and the edge (to be a Herald).  And perhaps this is where Government (despite it's habitual dependency on systems and boundaries as its instruments of leadership) really has it wrong.  Political leaders try to do it all and therefore often fail across the board.  Their calls for change lack authenticity, energy and originality.  Their efforts to nucleate are undermined by their obvious heraldic agenda.  Finally, an essentially legislative entity cannot be a connector - a wall-builder doesn't produce bridges.  But politics isn't where this is post is trying to go.  So on to the final question, how to garden?

Here's where I get excited, disappointed and then excited again.  When you try to garden, you think about the soil, the distribution of different plants and the weather.  Perhaps this is all a bit soft.  Leaders think about who they have where, how they are connected and how they can be facilitated, strengthened and coordinated.  A gardening leader ends up making connections (planting Connectors), sowing seeds (creating Nucleation Points) and sometimes delivering the call (Heralding), although it's often best to find a Herald from somewhere else (obviously!).  It's hard to plant the First to Move, they really must come from within.  And this points to my disappointing realisation; sometimes you can't plant or grow what's needed.  You simply have to be it.  So here's my overarching archetype for the leader; to be The Seed.  Eventually, the leader has to become integrated into the community they lead.  They have to be invested.  A seed has to fall to ever germinate.  And this is where I finally get excited.  because I think that deep down, most of us are actually attracted to the risk of committing ourselves completely, investing wholeheartedly and seeing what we can grow into if we embrace interdependence, let go of control and be.