2: Leading So All Can Thrive: Commons Leadership for Mutualistic Self-Organization

Leading systems change requires the development of new mental models and cultural narratives about leadership (Meadows, 1997; Waddock, 2020; Walker, Gunderson, Kinzig, Folke, Carpenter, & Schultz, 2006). Through the twentieth century, leadership has generally been thought of as asserting one’s will onto others, imposing order, and prescriptively guiding followers to achieve a specified future state. Yet the past few decades, and the crises of 2020 in particular, make clear the urgent need for new thinking about leadership to untangle intractable problems like environmental degradation, racial injustice, growing inequality, and pandemics.

A key distinction between conventional leadership and COMMONS LEADERSHIP is their aims. Historically, leadership has sought homeostasis – creating stability at a moment in time by maintaining operational variables to stay within pre-established parameters via regulatory control. Yet what is needed to ensure adaptive capacity is allostasis – maintaining stability through dynamic change (cf, Sterling & Eyer, 1988). An analogy for understanding these differences is to think about leadership as a task to stabilize a marble in a gyrating bowl. Conventional leadership tries to solve this problem by putting a brick in the bowl to prevent it from moving. While this temporarily creates predictability and stability through forced control, it decouples components from the fluctuating environment, creating a build-up of energy that can ultimately cause the bowl to disintegrate. Instead, what is needed is dynamic stability – staying in tune with the dynamism through relational orientation, enabling the marble, bowl, and motion to remain coupled in reliable harmony over time.