Whole Measures for whole communities
What I have outlined above has some implications for how Whole Measures is used. First, while the larger goal of the Whole Measures approach is “building whole healthy communities,” the more specific purpose of a Whole Measures workshop is
To build your capacity to model and transfer a set of transformational collaborative skills, tools and practices for inspiring a systemic approach to designing , convening and measuring the success of your organizations in service of building health whole communities. (Whole Measures Guide, page 3)
It’s a mouthful, but we can extract some essential assumptions. The use of the pronoun “your” directed at the participant of the workshop is linked to “organizitions” — the assumption is you are or intend to be a leader in an organization. Yet, Whole Measures hopes to be not just for organizations, but also for the whole community — not just the part of communities cooped up in organizations. Here I am assuming a definition of community that refers to people living within a geographic area and who identify with and have cultural, economic and environmental ties to that area — like the Mad River Valley. While organizations exist in communities, and government is one these organizations, the people in a community form a larger and more diverse group than what is found in any one or even a collection of organizations.
The question is, do the tools and practices of Whole Measures work as well for communities and for leaders who are not representatives of organizations? This really divides into two questions. I have had the experience of being a leader representing an organization that is working in community for some community purpose, and have emerged as a leader working in community without reference to an organization. These require similar, but not the same tools and practices. What do these differences mean for the Whole Measures approach?
During the workshop I attended I mulled these questions and my tentative conclusion is that Whole Measures in its current iteration does not adequately distinguish between what it takes to be a leader in a community versus a leader within an organization. Its tools and practices have some relevance for professional leaders (leaders functioning within organizations) who design community meetings, but the guide still needs to be better adapted for a community meeting context. It also has relevance to emergent leaders who come from the extended, thin neck of the brontosaurus, those high energy people who may eventually become professional leaders. However, I don’t think the guide serves the “amateur leader,” someone who emerges from the long, skinny tail and who may (or may not) persist as a leader. Here I think the contradiction inherent in the concept of transformational leadership rears its brontosaurus head.
The importance of soft infrastructure
Supporting emergent leadership (leadership that comes from the tail) may not be so much a matter of training transformational leaders (who reside in the neck) as much as supporting the right community infrastructure. In this post I have been focused on the communication infrastructure provided by the internet. However, I think anything that brings people in regular contact and communication provides the opportunity for emergent leadership in communities and will build social capital — hurray for community potlucks and farmers’ markets! What the internet does allow is for larger groups (15 million Wikipedia contributors) to take advantage of the brain in the tail, and for smaller groups that are still too large to fit in a room (like the few thousand in the Mad River Valley) to communicate as though they are in a room.
By helping to create the Valley Futures network, the Center for Whole Communities created just the kind of communication infrastructure that nurtures emergent, amatuer leaders — and in doing so made its own professional leadership training unnecessary for a community to organize. This is the conundrum for organizations that are focused on leadership for social change: they may not be as relevant as they used to be. Perhaps what is more important than training leaders is making sure that within a community there is the right communication and cultural infrastructure to support emergent leaders. And the less complicated the better. Setting up a email list-serve and hosting potlucks, farmers’ markets, story-telling events, concerts and community work days might be better than designing meetings that require that someone learn the specialized language of any formal organizational theory, no matter how enlightened that theory may be.
* * *
The above observations suggest that Whole Measures would benefit from sorting out differences in leadership types, differences between open community meetings and internal organizational meetings, and recognizing how social media is changing the nature of leadership.
To summarize, meetings that are internal to an organization (with staff, board members, etc.) are qualitatively different from meetings in a community that are open to a larger group that is not governed by an organizational mission. Second, leadership coming from the extended, thin neck of a group is not the same as the leadership that may emerge from the long, skinny tail — “brain in the tail” leadership is more verb-like, a leadership event rather than a semi-permanent name attached to an individual. Third, it is now much easier to organize groups because of social media, and so it is much easier to be a one-time, episodic leader. Last, organizing in a sustained way used to require an organization, but now with internet communication coordinated action can happen with little or no institutional structure, and can take advantage of the brain in the tail. Organizations no longer hold a near-monpoly on organizing, and this has profound implications for leadership, especially leadership that has as its goal social change.
Of course, none of this matters if the infrastructure doesn’t exist — if there is not access to the internet, or people are not members of a social network, if potlucks don’t happen or you’re not invited. The lack of such infrastructure, or the barriers to certain groups being at the literal and figurative potluck tables, is the basis for CWC’s emphasis on “race, power and privilege.” CWC Whole Thinking Retreats address this head on.
