Q: How Do You Self-Organize an Island of Sanity?
A: You Rely on Human Human Beings
In my early years of teaching self-organizing systems to leaders, too often they thought that order for free was putting them out of a job. If they felt excited by the concept, they would often rush up to me and say, “I realize I just have to get out of the way!” If they got frightened by the prospect, they just ignored me and returned to command and control.
On an island of sanity, the sanity is in treating people, as Grace Lee Boggs said, as human human beings. The technical name for our species has another double descriptor: Homo sapiens sapiens. Seems we need the reminder.
Humans being human are wonderfully talented. Generally, people are internally motivated when they believe in what they’re doing. We are naturally creative when we want to contribute. All people want to belong and feel part of a community. And we want our children to be safe and healthy. It is for these reasons that self-organization works so well: it engages us humans for a cause and relies on our hearts and minds to find ways forward.
And, as I already described, when humans self-organize, there is the potential for rigidity, fanaticism, and orthodoxy. When this happens, we aren’t so wonderful and how we behave cannot be labeled “sane.” But inside these bad behaviors, all humans still possess the same great qualities. We can trust these are present even when hidden by the veil of certainty.
Self-organizing requires a clear sense of identity known to everyone in the organization and the personal autonomy to figure out how to put that identity into action moment by moment.
There will always be differences over which actions to pursue, and that’s as it should be. What’s critical is that the identity is truly visible in every action. In organizations, identity is the values and principles we establish at the beginning. And then, as work gets done and decisions get made, the identity is also the culture that forms as patterns, norms, and expectations. Where there is strong agreement on who we are and sufficient trust in one another, self-organizing develops astonishing capacities and creativity. Terrorists and social justice movements each become more effective as they learn how to work with self-organization.
The first essential act for leaders of a self-organizing system is to keep watch over the identity. It is foolish to think it won’t change as people make their own decisions about their actions. They will always shift it toward more extreme in order to make a difference and get attention.
It is equally foolish to get so distracted by events and crises that you stop watching what’s happening to the identity. If you lose focus and get absorbed in crises, you end far from where you intended to be—more controlling, more bureaucratic, less trusting, more demanding, exhausted, and wondering what happened. (I think you know this pattern. We all do.)
The second essential act of leadership is to ensure that people are using the identity to determine actions. This is especially important in a crisis when reactivity is high and there seems to be no time to reflect.
If you don’t live by your values when things are difficult, you render them unimportant; they gradually become meaningless, and the leader gets accused of hypocrisy, a valid charge.
In my experience, very few leaders take advantage of order for free. They don’t quite trust the power of identity to ensure coherence and continuity. As events intensify and pressures increase, control creeps in and the slippery slope takes shape. Therefore, another essential skill for leaders is self-awareness and the ability to notice who you are becoming as you respond to unending pressures. Where has fear or distrust begun to influence decisions? Where have you asserted control? Was it necessary? What happened to relationships as a result? This quality of self-reflection isn’t easy, and even if you commit to it, it becomes a casualty of crises and disappears. The best way to ensure that you reflect honestly about your own behavior is to have one or more people who will speak truthfully to you. And whom you know to listen to because they have your best interest at heart.
What I’ve described here requires hierarchy, not a structure usually associated with self-organizing systems. Networks are self-organizing and they don’t have hierarchy. But, as I’ve already noted, self-organization requires sane leaders.
Someone has to be responsible for creating coherence at the core, a dependable and trustworthy identity that people can rely on not to change too quickly.
Someone has to stay alert to what’s happening to the identity as decisions are made and work gets done. If we’re doing well, someone has to ensure that our smugness and arrogance don’t seal us off from change. If we’re doing badly, someone has to stop us from hunkering down and becoming overly defensive or beating ourselves up for having failed.
Even though, in my early years of promoting participation and self-organization, I was critical of leaders at the top, I’ve come to see that people need visionary leaders. Not charismatic demi-gods or Masters of the Universe, but people they trust because they embody the values and qualities we’re working toward. Leaders don’t have to be perfect, and it helps to make one’s personal struggles and challenges visible. But people need to see what’s possible. That it is possible to live with integrity. That humans can still live and work well together. That we can still behave as human human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens.
This is why we need leaders.
And why leadership can be a noble profession.
SELF-ORGANIZATION: NOTES
1 The cover image for Leadership and the New Science is a strange attractor.
2 If you are unfamiliar with chaos science, or want a refresher, I detail many aspects of this and other new sciences and their implications for leadership in Leadership and the New Science (3rd ed., 2007).
3 For a summary of Kaufmann’s work on order for free, see my coauthored book A Simpler Way (1996).
4 Here are three sources I highly recommend:
Utopia Is Scary: And Other Complaints, Nicholas Carr. Brilliant article and book on how society has been changed by the Web and handheld devices. I read everything Carr writes.
A brilliant, definitive article: “I Used to Be a Human” by Andrew Sullivan, nymagazine.com, http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killedme.html.
“Has the Internet Become a Failed State?” by John Naughton, theguardian.com, November 27, 2016.
5 See Sebastian Younger, Tribes: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Twelve, Hatchette Book Group, 2015).
6 Internet “trolls” are those who use the Internet, including social media, chat rooms, forums, to intentionally harass, disturb, threaten, harm. See the next notes.
7 Joel Stein, “How Trolls Are Ruining the Internet,” Time, August 18, 2016.
8 BBC Trending, http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35111707.
9 Ibid.
10 In Leadership and the New Science (3rd ed.), Chap. 10, “The Real World”; also published in Leader to Leader Magazine, Summer 2006.
11 Hassan Hassan, “Is the Islamic State Unstoppable?” nytimes.com, July 9, 2016.
12 Harald Doornbos and Jenan Mousa. “Present at the Beginning,” a series of three articles, foreignpolicy.com, August 16, 2016.
13 Ibid.
14 Rukmini Callimachi, “How a Secretive Branch of ISIS Built a Global Network of Killers,” nytimes.com, August 3, 2016.
15 I have to confess that you will find these ideas about self-organization in most of my books and articles until quite recently. My recognition of the critical role played by formal leaders entered my thinking in the past few years because of what I was seeing and experiencing.
16 Tragically, the New South Africa that Mandela and others worked so hard for is besieged with difficulties, mostly social and political, and the future looks dim. See my reflections on South Africa’s decline, written in 2012, in So Far from Home. Things have gotten much worse since then.
17 See John Lewis’s trilogy of novels done as comic books, March, meant to serve as a handbook for resistance. He tells the history of the civil rights movement in details that instruct and clarify the path.
18 The title of an excellent PBS documentary on the civil rights movement, and also a phrase that appears in songs and speeches.
19 See the work of the Boggs Center in Detroit for long-term community building from the 1960s to the present (www.boggscenter.org). In 2012, I led a Learning Journey to Detroit in partnership with the Boggs Center. We sat in a circle with Grace who was still very present and active at the age of 97. A video of her remarks to our group is here, second one down: http://margaretwheatley.com/library/videos/detroit/.
20 “Organization Means Commitment,” available as a pdf from the Boggs Center. Grace has written many fine books, including the Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism in the 21st Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
21 Watch this inspiring short video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvO9ooZ0vks.
22 This widely quoted phrase has an interesting origin. The original phrase—“What didn¹t you do to bury me but you forgot that I was the seed”—is in a poem by Dinos Christianopoulos, a gay poet in Greece in the 1970s. A statement borne of one man’s portrayal of his own marginalization by a particular society has now grown to be the rallying call of entire populations and peoples against marginalization. (Thanks, J.S.)
23 Grace provides additional descriptors of what’s required of movement builders in Yes! Magazine, 2005, http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/what-makes-a-great-place/seven-great-ideas-for-movement-builders.