Morning mist rests on the Behr fields hiding Pearl and Alexandra, my two Oberhalsi goats. Grass is heavy and wet with dew. This cool morning promises to become a hot September day; skies are clear also pale in a way that forewarns humidity. I’ve been back and forth between the Mad River Valley in Vermont and Tamworth in recent weeks. It’s been a bit over two weeks since the Tropical Storm Irene passed through New Hampshire and Vermont. The Mad River Valley was hit hard. Homes and farms flooded, some people experiencing a total loss. The cleanup and recovery is ongoing.
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While I have made progress on my next planned Monteverde mapping,[1] I am diverted to another interlude. I find myself mulling over the query I posed in the July Whole Measures workshop which we never ended up discussing: “question leadership.” This is not a reference to the seventies phrase, “question authority,” though I suppose there are some similarities. My questioning is more related to leadership within the context of organizations, and what I really meant to question was the assumption that organizations will play the same role in future social change as they have in the past.
Leadership does not have to come from established organizations — leadership can emerge from communities and without an institutional relationship. In other words, people can organize without organizations. The recent examples of social uprisings in the middle east are examples of emergent, non-organizational organization, as are the recent riots in London (it’s not all positive). Closer to home, the recent community response in the Mad River Valley to Tropical Storm Irene shows it is possible for a decentralized yet “organized” response to a natural disaster in parallel to the usual institutional responses from government, nonprofit and for-profit businesses. All of these recent examples are possible because of modern social media.
The Center for Whole Communities (CWC) is a leadership development organization that affects change through transformational leadership. How does leadership differ when it comes from within an organization versus leadership that emerges outside of the context of an organization? Social media has opened up a space for emergent leadership that did not exist before. The difference between these two types of “organization” — organization as a thing (a noun) and organization as a process, “to organize” (a verb) — and how leadership functions in each, is what I explore in the paragraphs ahead.
