7: Leading Proleptically on the Commons

Participating in commons means being an agent of social transformation. The commons stand for a different way of seeing the world, of organizing, and of valuing than the current way manifested in the state and private sector. As made clear in the chapters in this book, commons are based on a relational ontology that includes the human and more-than-human. They are self-organized, self-governed, autonomous, and based on values of responsibility, care, compassion, justice, equality, and love. Commoners are intent on remaking the world in accordance with these values and hence live these values in the present.

Several authors in this volume have examined leadership from the perspective of adaptive open systems. Others have looked at how leadership manifests from relationships and the in-between relations. Yet others have looked at leadership as a function of different processes on the commons. Still others have looked at types of leadership. In this chapter, I pursue leading from the individual leader’s perspective, employing a human action framework. The human action framework assumes that different levels of organization impact the leader and the leader in turn impacts these. These levels include the individual or micro, the collective, or meso, the social, or macro, and the universal, or meta. Leadership is a bridging process between all these levels and is a process of engendering change. Hence, the values that flow from these levels as well as the values imparted by the leader impact the quality of that change. Leading proleptically implies that glimpses of the perfect future invade the present and motivate leaders to live in the present in order to help bring into being that future, catalyzed by the hope that the future is possible. This hope, as George Por wrote, derives from a deep-seated longing of the human heart for a just, peaceful society in which everyone has enough to live at a universally established standard. This longing has been driving humankind since its inception and will continue to drive humankind until this utopian vision becomes the imaginary of a new socioeconomic order (Por, 2012).