Intimate Innovation

Clare Huffington, Kim James and David Armstrong in their paper, ‘What is the Emotional Cost of Distributed Leadership’[i] discuss the relationship between emotions and the distribution of leadership. They sketch out what to me appears to be a ‘system of systems’ in which context (or environment) is crucial. They propose:

‘… to accept distributed leadership involves bringing into view the outer boundary of the organisation as a whole in relation to one’s own or one’s groups sphere of decision and action; this means keeping in mind the overall system of organisations and influences of which this organisation is just apart. This is what one might term its ecology’.

They go on to coin the term ‘…pro-tainment to capture this aspect of the functioning of leadership; the making present of an organisational idea embodied in a lively and enlivening sense of the enterprise’

This hints at why a vision is so important to partnerships – although I suggest it is more likely to be the effect that visioning has upon transactions in turning them into relationships. We make the mistake of reifying the text, the document. It is only if you have been part of the visioning itself that you will find the output – the vision – compelling. And the outcome of visioning is a set of meaningful relationships that are bounded.

So, I wonder if there needs to be something that leaders in these types of settings – these modes of organising – need to be very good at doing. I think that the leader needs to design the processes through which the system comes into being. Their ‘idea’ is something like this – rather than ‘set direction’, they ‘spread it.’ And in this sense, too we are talking ecologically, learning from living systems some of the analogues of spread – how (to name but one dimension) concepts of proliferation and requisite variety and diversity are part of the power of the system, its capacity to prevail.