Not leaders, but 'experimenters'

These days in my kind of funk and holding pattern of writing and reading online, I keep up with one blog religiously, Dave Pollard's "How to save the world." Recently he wrote (yet more) about how today's corporate cultures don't work - they're patriarchal hierarchies with the goal only to perpetuate themselves. Yet there are bright spots, possibilities. As he wrote this week in his post, "We need experimenters, not leaders":

We don't need 'leadership' or 'leaders'. What we need is experimenters  ...   That will allow the successful experiments to spread, virally, and be adapted and improved. Eventually, bottom-up, it will allow us to create decentralized community-based self-managed political, economic, educational, and social systems that actually work well, for each community.

Unlike most 'leaders', experimenters are:

• collaborators: they don't do anything alone
• facilitators and coaches: they help others to learn and discover how to do things better
• demonstrators: more than just communicators, they show how it works and what it means
• ideators: they imagine what's possible, and tell stories to bring those ideas to life
• innovators: they take those good ideas and realize them, make them real
• researchers: they study what's been done, in nature, by other cultures and communities, and what's needed, and spread that knowledge
• connectors: they bring people together who were meant to work together
• model-builders: they design and build something that can be understood, replicated and adapted by others
• founders: they start new things -- enterprises, communities, different ways to do important things; they build something new rather than criticizing what exists

That's what we need. We won't find it in one or a few people. We have to find it within all of us. To do that we have to give up on 'leaders' and take charge of our own lives, collaboratively, as peers. Who's 'leading' in government, in business, in religious and educational and social organizations doesn't matter.

The power is in all of us.

I am fortunate enough to know one or two of these experimenters; and I work pretty closely with at least one. Unfortunately, it seems, those true experimenters still must rise in corporate culture in order to put their experimenting to work, to make a difference. If, in these cultures, their value is recognized, encouraged, nurtured and allowed to take hold, so much the better for us all. I believe I see small changes coming through people like this, and it is good.

But Dave's point is really that we all must be experimenters working for change. (O the dreaded campaign slogan!) And indeed, working with and knowing the people I do these days gives me hope and courage to be a little experimental myself!

Comments

[Dave Pollard]

Thanks for the mention, and the kind words!