Had an ‘Aha!’ moment in Oslo with my friend Marion this weekend when we realised we are both working on self-organising systems, in which usage and participation allow the shape of the system to emerge.
The one I’m working on is The Leadership Hub, which is in its pre-launch testing phase at the moment,while Marion’s is her Star Wards initiative, which has already got almost 100, or twenty-five percent, of the country’s acute mental health wards signed up to it, after only being launched a few months back.
Marion is a social entrepreneur whom I learn an awful lot from. For the Star Wards initiative – which centres on offering 75 clever and practical ideas for improving the quality of life on acute mental health wards – Marion came up with three degrees of change that participants could aim for, depending on how ambitious the participants are – Tweaking, Turning and Transforming – and mapped the 75 ideas for action into the three categories. Very clever and inspiring stuff.
I’m fascinated by how some catalysts for change can, like Marion, reach in from the outside and make a massive change happen very quickly.
Here’s her description of how Star Wards seemed to go viral so rapidly by drawing on the behaviour of Mao and geese: Revolutions and Flocking
I hate the classic distinction between leader and follower. Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, neatly dances us out of it with this beautifully-argued passage from Birth of The Chaordic Age:
“The original sense of the hipster term ‘cool’ referred to the capacity of African American jazz musicians who could control their rage at the racism of the times, even as they channeled that anger into an extraordinary expression of deep feeling. Effective leadership demands the same sort of capacity for managing one’s own turbulent feelings while allowing the full expression of positive emotions.”
LinkedIn
