By Jocelyn Yerxa, Rayna Preston and Marguerite Drescher
Recently NS GovLab held an orientation session with its first cohort of fellows. NS GovLab is a social innovation lab on aging. We’ve structured the work of the lab around a series of overlapping year-long fellowships. Fellows will commit to us for a year and in turn we commit to supporting them for a year. The first 3–4 months are focused on grounding and immersing the group in human-centred design, systems thinking and complexity. The experience is intended to be both educational, informational and experiential with focused teaches on various elements of the human centred design process.
NS GovLab has a CoCreation team made up of two full-time CoLeads and five others with specialization in digital service design, health promotion, evaluation, communications, graphic recording/facilitation, and participatory leadership. During our 3-day orientation the team gelled around a distributed leadership model where we sensed and designed together through the three days. We payed close attention to our fellows, what they were telling us they needed and what we wanted them to walk away from the experience with and made this the foundation for our work together. Many of us have worked in settings where participatory leadership models are valued and used routinely. A few of us have been fortunate enough to have done so for many years. That said, this experience felt distinct. Special. Transformative. As teammates, we were tuned in to what was happening with each other and the space we were trying to create. We supported each other to be vulnerable and step up in different roles than those we may have traditionally been inclined to take on. We stayed up late, revising, iterating and improving the plan to best meet the needs of the group. We drew our inspiration from our surroundings at magnificent White Point Beach, ebbing and flowing like the rhythm of the tides powerfully and organically moving in and out of the roles of leader and supporter.
Part of this was an opportunity that the three of us have had to teach the Chaordic leadership path together. Marguerite has taught this many times, but for Jocelyn and Rayna this was a first. Part of our hypothesis about what may be needed to create space for innovation is about testing and living a particular type of bottom up leadership of which enables collaboration and innovation to flourish. The Chaordic path gives us a model or map to understand the nature of the problems and issues we face and to apply a leadership style which can be effective when working in chaos and complexity.
We started our teach by recognizing the founder of the Chaordic leadership model — Dee Hock — and those who have since built on that work. We positioned this as one way of looking at leadership and one model. We asked for patience and attention to see if it resonated with our fellows’ experience in their professional and personal lives.
The Chaordic leadership path offers many entry points to talk about the concepts. We chose to start with the how fast the world is moving. The rapid nature of change. The globalization of financial capital flows, transportation, human networks and technology. The rise of mass global migration. The volume and often contradictory information receive on a daily basis. The challenge that humans have at keeping up with the speed, pace and the overwhelming volume of change and chaos around us.
We talked next about common responses to chaos and complexity being to make order out of disorder; to take control. The idea that we need to “get it together” or that we can grab a complex problem/issue, hold it tight and force it to behave appropriately. We can put our hands around it and get it back under control. This is often where command and control institutions work well. Here the idea that there can be one all knowing leader who knows the answer and can provide the solution. Where problems and issues are known and their solutions are straightforward, control is important. This space is called Control and in contrasted with where we started our description, which is called Chaos. While control can be important and needed, it is also possible for too much control to lead to apathy — lack of caring or feeling like I don’t matter.
The other result of too much control and the flip side of apathy is revolt. This pulls us over to the other side chaos. It is an important space that can be necessary as a response it injustice. This space is represented by total despair and that we have lost our way. This space was named and articulated during the fall of the economy in Greece and is named Chamos — translated from Greek to “the pit of despair” or “lost”. The space between this and Chaos is often termed as Activism.
The place between Chaos and Control is called Order. It is represented by the minimal amount of structure needed to provide stability, meaning and productivity. The space between Order and Control is often called Management. It is an important function and is exactly what is needed with complicated and simple problems. However, it is not sufficient when is comes to complex problems that require a whole system and diversity of perspectives for us to even begin to understand them. For that we need to go back towards Chaos.
It is the space between Chaos and Order that can provide the required Leadership to allow enough creativity and enough structure for new thoughts, ideas and ways of working and being to come forward. It is not one single person that can do this. We require collaborative and participatory leadership that allows multiple often contradictory truths to occupy a space so we can emerge with a new way forward. This is the sort of leadership that our team strives for and in fact need — in both our CoCreation Team and Fellows — for innovation to thrive in our Lab.
