Leadership - what is it exactly?

Leadership is one of those things that keeps raising its head in my life. Apparently I'm a leader - something that I've never aspired to be. Interestingly tho I do want to change the world - or at least improve it - that's why I do what I do. So I guess that means I do need to lead. But what exactly does that mean?

I've had the privilege of watching Joe and Joanna Doherty of Ngaputahi in Te Urewera (see below!) leading their community through some significant changes in what seemed like a remarkably short time and they have taught me a lot.

Their leadership involves listening, learning about people around them, working hard on projects of benefit to the community, facilitating discussion about the future and the way forward, supporting and encouraging others in their endeavours where they can, passing on a wealth of knowledge and understanding where it is needed quietly and efficiently (but not where it is not!), and maintained their networks out from the community and where appropriate have shared their understanding of those networks so that others in the community can tap into them too.

It seems to me that leadership, in this context at least, is about supporting and fostering the skills and interests of others and creating some sense of common purpose to draw those skills together. It is also about sheer hard and sustained work, and locating all the necessary skills and capacities. It helps of course if those leading do actually have those skills and capacities, or that they know what they lack and are able to work with others that have them.

hei kona mai

Chrys

Conceptual vs concrete

I watched a meeting some years ago in which there was a major mismatch in communication between 2 planners and a group of 3-4 community members all trying to work together to develop a district plan.

The planners would put out a question with some background and then the group of community people would sit there and try and work out what it meant in terms that would help them answer. This was a complex task - they had to listen to the question, work out what it meant by finding concrete examples of what it might mean, gauge the reactions of the planners to see uf they were on the right track, and then think about what they should do in their plan.


The planners were frustrated that the community group had to 'go round in circles' before they could come up with what, to the planners seemed like a simple answer. As an outside observer, I guess I was able to see what was happening - the planners were conceptual thinkers who worked across a range of communities. The community group were much more grounded in the local area and as such were more concrete thinkers.

I got the opportunity to point this out to the planners over lunch and they were immediately able to try to communicate using concrete examples up front which made life much easier for all concerned (so they told me).

This , I think, was part of what was going on the other night (see my last post). What I found difficult was providing relevant concrete examples of new ways of doing things. I realise now that its relatively easy if you can give examples of what exists now but coming up with relevant, credible ideas that provide options for new ways of doing things is more difficult. I need to ponder this too, because there are some other issues here about the way I see participatory research which might be intervening here.

Relevance and irrelevance

I was in a meeting the other night with a community group to whom we had come to deliver some research results. From where I stood it was frustrating, so it has been occupying my thoughts recently.

Relevance is a funny thing. From my own experience as a receiver of information, one wee statement can suddenly make a whole lot of information suddenly much more personally relevant than it was a few seconds before.

As a giver of information, working out how to frame what I"m saying so that if is relevant is a matter of listening really carefully to the people I am are talking with. I guess part of my frustration the other night, was that I was finding it incredibly difficult to understand where they were in the conversation. Perhaps also my team and I were so bound up in the idea of delivering the research results we had prepared that we couldn't easily listen in a connected way to our audience?

More later.

Chrys

Networks networks networks

I picked up a paper the other day by Nardi, Whittaker & Schwarz (2002) about networkers and their activity in intensional networks.

I guess that for me as I read it, it began to ring bells of recognition. They talked about the work that goes into building, using and maintaining networks associated with project based work. This includes activities such as remembering/ recalling people (including keeping databases), communicating with them during projects and keeping in touch between projects. Added to this are managing relationships between organisational insiders and outsiders (short term contractors), "feeding" relationships by making sure to know things about people's personal circumstances, keeping track of who they know, and ensuring that appropriate language is used with different people in the network. It made me realise that my work managing a research programme looking at Maori tourism development has involved a great deal of networking work - work that is not really recognised as work per se and certainly not accounted for well in this system.

I was particularly interested in the questions that the authors raised about the distinction between strong and weak ties (as Granovetter coined them), because this work highlights a more gradual continuum that is likely to be time bounded. ie your weak tie today may become tomorrow strong tie as that person is brought in closer for a particular project.

ka kite ano

Chrys

A Crash Course(?)

Terry Thomsen from The Inside Story sent me a really interesting link last night: Chris Martenson's Blog.

I started watching his "Crash Course" last evening. It began with an outline of the basis of the US (and world) economic system and provided some fascinating insights about recent bank collapses and the property market bubble. He then provided some very clear and chilling analysis of the effects of climate change, peak oil, the aging population and currrent human resource use. The course is a series of short lectures that take about 2-3 hours to watch/ listen to, but once I'd started I found them just riveting and well put together. I think they are REALLY important.

Chris's descriptions of what is happening right now reminded me strongly of the descriptions that Jared Diamond provided in his book "Collapse" about societies which .... well ... collapsed, although I feel as if I may be lapsing into the rhetoric of "I have a nightmare" which, as my last post implies, may not be productive.

What I particularly liked about Chris's articles were his own attitude that this is a really exciting time to be living and that we really need to be thinking about and planning for the things that are coming. We need a vision of how the world might look in the future! As Chris points out, we will have to lead more simple lives and we'll have a more simple society with lower standards of living, out of necessity but that could well mean a better quality of life!

I recommend you have a look at this site and in particular at the crash course.