Actualizing Evolutionary Co Leadership Bay Area Learning Circle Reflections

WHY ARE NEW FORMS OF LEADERSHIP URGENTLY NEEDED?This month our Bay Area participants brought necessary questions about Collective Leadership to a Learning Circle on October 1st. A bright sunny room filled with 19 participants from all over the Bay Area at the California Endowment set the stage to learn about Evolutionary Co-Leadership with Alain Gauthier of Core Leadership Development. To begin, Alain first engaged participants by asking them to share in small groups what "evolutionary" means for each person. In small table groups participants shared definitions that included viewing evolution as a biological and anthropological process, a process of growth and learning, and of adaptation and innovation for survival. Many of us at the circle also likened evolution to progress, continuation and improvement. We were asked to share our experiences of collective leadership and the questions we bring. Questions surfaced around the role of an individual's identity in the collective process, how accountability is achieved, what degree of openness is required, and ways to equitably bring together stakeholders regardless of positional leadership status.WHAT IS EVOLUTIONARY CO-LEADERSHIP AND WHY IS IT URGENTLY NEEDED AT THIS TIME? In his most recent ebook, Actualizing Evolutionary Co-Leadership to evolve a Creative and Responsible Society, Alain imparts that an emerging form of integral leadership - Evolutionary Co-Leadership is the next development stage for leadership. Not only does he argue that leadership is in a stage of transition, he describes how we currently find our world in the poly- crisis or meta-crisis due to the failure of our increasingly interconnected and complex nature of the current development paradigm. Serious ethnic and religious conflict, world hunger, the widening gap between the rich and poor, global ecological disaster; we find our world coming to a critical point in our history. We look to new leadership models, such as Evolutionary Co-leadership, as a framework to help solve complex social issues. Many of us in the room were grounded in some understanding of Collective or Shared leadership and Collective Impact- or what Alain calls Co-leadership, while a handful of participants came with additional backgrounds in Change Management, Organizational Development and Theory U methodology. The value of Alain's framework helped to further our thinking on Co-leadership by applying an evolutionary paradigm. With a scientific understanding of adaptation and evolution, he positions the individual at the intersection of the "we" or the collective to describe a new model for tackling social change.WHAT ARE SOME INTEGRAL PRACTICES THAT ENABLE ITS EMBODIMENT? Alain asserts that a radically new development paradigm is needed now - one that is not based on ever-increasing material growth, but on long-term sustainability - with broader measures of individual and collective well-being. The slides below illustrate a shift from a domination paradigm to a partnership paradigm and demonstrate an emphasis on equivalence, honoring partnership, and self regulation. As elaborated in his ebook, Alain points to existing and emerging directions toward disseminating and scaling evolutionary co-leadership in the next few years.HOW TO DEVELOP CO-LEADERSHIP AND SCALE IT UP? During the learning circle, participants generated ideas of some behaviors that would shift and demonstrate Co-Evolutionary leadership. Some suggestions included: * Coming to an agreement about group accountability * Integrate time for learning and reflection process * Develop agreements on the indicators of collective success * Individuals being mindful of how they show up * Being aware of and naming the power dynamics in the room * Creating agreements to deal with conflict * Incorporate quiet time and breathing to open up meeting spaces * Rotating members of management teams * Robust co-decision making * Remember play * People need to be validated The content that Alain presented during the learning circle was largely theoretical, but he encouraged participants and the learning community to continue to develop and discuss concrete examples of successful co-leadership models. We want to continue exploring this shift toward a partnership paradigm and what it means for the Leadership Development field - especially as we operate within economic and social systems that perpetuate and reward participation in a domination paradigm. We'd like to engage the community in further exploration of what it takes to meet and transform hierarchical systems toward a future dedicated to collective prosperity.VIEW EXCERPTS FROM ALAIN GAUTHIER'S LEARNING CIRCLE PRESENTATION HERE: ACTUALIZING EVOLUTIONARY CO-LEADERSHIP PRESENTATION EXCERPTS from LEADERSHIP LEARNING COMMUNITYFOR MORE ON THIS TOPIC: READ: Actualizing Evolutionary Co-Leadership - Evolving a Creative and Responsible Society CONSULT: www.coreleadership.com CONTACT: alaingauthier@coredevelopment.comSAVE THE DATE! WE ENCOURAGE BAY AREA COMMUNITY MEMBERS TO JOIN US FOR OUR NEXT BAY AREA LEARNING CIRCLE ON NOVEMBER 6TH. * SF Bay