Vertigo and The Intentional Inhabitant: Leadership In A Connected Environment

Bill Traynor is a leading theoretician and practitioner in the field of community development. He is currently the Executive Director of Lawrence Community Works, an initiative that’s rebuilding the struggling city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, his hometown. He was the Director of Community Development for the Boston Community Training and Assistance Center, and the Executive Director of the Coalition for a Better Acre in Lowell, where he raised over a million dollars to support organizational growth and to implement several housing and economic development projects. The author of numerous articles on community development and community organizing, Traynor received a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University in 1998. During his tenure with LCW, Traynor grew the organization from a staff of two and a deficit, to a staff of 45 and an operating budget of over $2 million, while leveraging over $25 million in public and private project investments for affordable housing, infrastructure investments, a city-wide youth network, and a range of family asset building and community organizing initiatives.

The Nonprofit Quarterly features this article in its current edition. Read the full article: Vertigo and The Intentional Inhabitant; Leadership In A Connected Environment: « The Value Of Place. Excerpts:

I have had to grapple with trying to find a way to lead when many of the traditional levers of power and decision making are neither handy nor useful. Moving from a traditional environment to a network or connected environment can cause a kind of vertigo because the environment is so radically different. It operates by different rules and responds to different stimuli. To try to lead in a network environment armed only with the perspectives and skills honed in traditional settings, is unsettling and disorienting.

It’s About the Space

A network environment is dominated by space, and so it is the space that should dominate your attention. The leader in a connected environment has to understand that the power of these environments comes from the space, not the forms that populate the space. Therefore the critical function of the leader in the network is the recognition of, and the creation, preservation and protection of space.

What is meant by space in this context? Well, it’s time and opportunity mostly, as well as accessibility, flexibility and options. It is the time for unfolding, time for adaptation, time and opportunity for intentional and random bumping and connecting, for creation, for response, for listening and reacting, for deconstruction. It is the space in between, around, behind, on top of and underneath the all of the action, the commitments, the transactions – these things are all forms. Networks die when the space closes because in the clutter of commitments, expectations, structures, programs, partnerships etc, there is no more space for adaptation or response.

At LCW we try to build language, tools and systems to help us recognize, create, preserve and defend space. We try to resource the demand environment in lots of different ways so that we can get better at resourcing real life opportunities rather than concepts and ideas that we or funders come up with. We try to keep all of our teams and committees loose and flexible and leadership moving from person to person so that we can stay focused on ‘what we do’ rather than ‘who we are’. This creates space for experimentation and allows things to grow and also allows for things to go away when they aren’t useful anymore. We try to do the routine things as efficiently as possible so that we can save time for the complicated stuff.

Over the past several years I have found that there are three ways to create and preserve space in a network environment.

First, keep moving the creative, adaptive edge of the network outward so that the universe of the network expands in 3 dimensions, even as it populates with forms. The principal challenge here is capacity, as an ever expanding network requires ever expanding resources.

At LCW we have tried to come up with strategies so that exponential growth in the network won’t necessarily mean exponential growth in the paid capacity we need to manage the network. Our goal is to have our “cost per member” decrease steadily as we grow. A few years ago we initiated what we called our “Sustainability Mission”. The principal strategy to emerge from that mission was the creation of MemberLink, a layer of stipended member volunteer and development programs whereby members start to take on aspects of the stewardship of the network. Now we have about 30 MemberLink-type opportunities. All of these ‘value propositions’ offer members developmental opportunities and modest stipends, in exchange for performing valuable functions in the network.

It is important to note that members can only enroll in each of the Member-Link opportunities for one term – usually one year. The idea is to have opportunities that members can cycle through and that can change with changing demand.

The second way is to achieve efficiency through creating an efficient demand environment. This happens when you achieve both the rapid creation and rapid deconstruction of forms; programs, commitments, organizational structures and so on, so that new space is always being created. In the creation, the key is making sure that only those things that truly have value get resourced (fed) by the environment, and that they truly earn their way in the environment – at LCW we call this ‘resonance testing.’ This is more a discipline than a process. It is a discipline exercised by staff who are listening to ideas and demand from members. Their job is to “stay close to the demand” and “resource the opportunity” and not make leaps of judgment about whether something is a good idea or bad idea.

It might work this way: A member has an idea that we need a club for 10 year old girls because they are especially vulnerable and need their own space. Staff are asked to challenge that member to pull together others who might agree, and provide the space and time for that to happen. If a group actually assembles, staff are asked to challenge them to put on one event – bring some girls together and do something fun and helpful. If that happens, staff might work with them on a short series. In other words we are resourcing the specific demand and not jumping to program development before the thing has proven its value to other members.

The collateral benefit of this process is that we learn by doing – through experimentation. In this example, we have learned by moving this idea through 3-4 life cycles in a span of a few months. Alternatively, if we had taken the initial idea, handed it to resource development, spent 6 months talking and raising money, we would not have learned anything and its possible that whatever demand that did exist would have evaporated. Of course, it is equally important to end things that no longer work or have resonance and to end them quickly. The environment has to ’starve” bad ideas and tings that don’t have genuine value.

The third way is to shrink or contract routine and reoccuring actions to their simplest and most efficient forms; everything from operating systems to routine functions like providing food for meetings or doing newsletters. These things should be efficient but are not, due mostly to human things like poor communication, resistance to compliance, forgetting etc. Because of this, ‘efficiency’ in these areas is less a system building challenge than a habit building challenge.

One management tool we have developed to help us with this is called the FOLKS Protocols – These are binders for all staff and key leaders that break down all of the routine and predictable functions in the network into a simple one-page description of what it is, how to do it, whose role it is to do what, and so on. This is a tool designed to help us make progress in the 3rd way of creating and preserving space – shrinking the routines. FOLKS is our network management motto and stands for:

F – Form Follows Function: We only want to build the level of structure and formality that we need to do the job – no more and no less. If we overbuild it will require more resources to support and it will be that much harder to deconstruct!

O – Open Architecture is Best: We try to build forms (ie committees, teams, processes) that are flexible, informal, provisional, with provisional leadership and always open to new people. These forms are more in sync with a network environment.

L – Let it Go: If it isn’t working or if there is no demand, you have to let it go and let it go quickly. That goes for an idea you might have that you can’t get interest in, or a program you have been running for 5 years that doesn’t sell anymore.

K – Keep it Simple: We need to keep things that are simple, simple so that we have the time and energy for the complicated stuff. Anything that can be routine should be routine. A 5 minute problem shouldn’t take 15 minutes.

S – Solve the Problem: In a flexible environment we need to move through stuck places a 100 times a day. Everyone needs to make ’solving the problem’ the most important rule of our engagement with each other.

Not a Form, But an Environment

Leaders in connected environments know that transition – change – is the constant state. Because the network is not itself form, but space and form, it is best viewed as an ‘environment’ rather than an institution or organization. That is, the relationship – the interaction – between space and form makes it an environment, and as an environment it is dynamic; always in transition. We all know that transition is the constant state of living things. The rule, not the exception. But it is unsettling in the moment. So, we all try mightily, through form, to pin ’now’ to the wall long enough for us to revel in our mastery of the moment. But things that are pinned to the wall dry up, shrivel and die. That is the way of living things. That is the way of ‘now’.

My understanding is that environments, simply stated, perform two functions: they feed things and they starve things, and in this concept I have found some ideas about how to lead.

At LCW our team was intentional about creating an environment that felt substantially different (better) than the general environment for getting involved in Lawrence. So, years ago we set about using new language, experimenting with new ways of doing things, creating new and fresh rooms for people to come together, feel productive, get to know, rely on and start trusting each other.

We tried to foster ‘habits of engagement’ – to feed the natural generosity and respect that we know that all people carry with them. We also were aggressive at starving some of the behaviors and habits that we felt dominated the rooms in Lawrence. This caused problems at the beginning, particularly among the experienced ‘community leaders’ who were used to dominating rooms with mastery of ‘Roberts rules’ or other forms of traditional leadership. Our task was to create forms that focused on creating space and creating habits around that process so that ultimately a culture could develop that could continue to feed the right stuff and starve the bad stuff. Some of these things are just intuitive: that all people appreciate and relax in environments that are fun and have food. So, early on we made a commitment to both.

We also looked at trying to create rooms that were more productive and less focused and reliant on structure and positional leadership. So, we started to experiment with and name our concepts of “Form Follows Function” and “Open Architecture” described above. The idea was to move process and create habits of process that were more reliant on relationship and more consistent with transition, change and adaptation. We have found that, by and large, rooms where the feel is flexible and adaptable and informal are more productive and definitely feel better to most people.

There are adjustments however. We have had to find ways to explore and recast the function of leadership in these rooms and reinforce habits of leadership that are more consistent with a connected environment.

For instance, in 2004 we began to experiments with and recognize “weaving” as the principal and highest form of leadership in the Network. We started developing training curriculum and protocols around dialogue and debriefing so that we could really dig into the process of engaging and connecting people to each other. We created an annual award called Reviviendo Weaver Award that we presented to a member at our gala Annual Meeting each year and also had a leader of the month award presented at Board Meetings. Now, “weaving” is a core part of the learning and teaching of the Guided program.

The Intentional Inhabitant

Leaders in connected environments know that networks are always teetering on the edge of balance, requiring many small adjustments in order to achieve some measure of dynamic stasis. I have found that the leader has to be in constant motion, paying attention to the habits and the small stimuli needed to incessantly reconstitute balance and motion. One must have to learn to feel the current of change, look for and recognize resonance and deploy oneself not as prod, but as pivot for the many moments of change that are called for everyday.

I have learned that one can’t possibly do this alone. In fact there is no “alone” in this process. If this is all madness, which of course it feels like a lot of the time, the leader is not a mad scientist on the outside pulling levers and pushing buttons, the leader is a mad-inhabitant, an intentional inhabitant, and is deploying herself as a key variable in order to influence the environment from the inside.

This is a critical cognitive and functional shift in leadership. The leader has to genuinely participate in the environment in order to deploy herself appropriately. The challenges of this way of being are profound, and those challenges start with a fundamental reflection about who you are as a person and how you move through the world: how you exhibit fear, react to change, deal with letting go of power and ego. How you listen and observe and the keenness of your instincts for both conceptualizing and sythensizing. How you hold onto or let go let go of strongly held convictions about what is right and what will work. All of these things are of course rooted in the essence of who we are as people.

So does one have to achieve some high level of enlightenment in order to do this well? Not having achieved that myself I would say it would probably help! But even if complete self-awareness is beyond most of us, it is nonetheless critical to approach this role from the inside out and to see self-knowledge as a critical element of the leadership development process. This is, again, not something that one can do alone. Being a part of a team of people who are all at least aware of the importance of the self-awareness process and, ideally, who share a language and the space to challenge each other, is critical.

I, and our Network, have been fortunate to have some of this. For instance, I have been challenged time and time again about my instinct to create logic models and narratives about a situation or person – a great skill no doubt, unless and until one starts to ignore evidence that contradicts that model. I have also been challenged to reflect on my tendency toward being solitary, especially when I am feeling overwhelmed and afraid or when something is going wrong and I think that I need to fix it. In those moments I have been challenged to lean into getting help from others in a way that, still to this day, can feel uncomfortable. I have been challenged to let go of structure and formality as the path to clarity and progress. This idea has been so central to who I was for so long, it’s astounding to me every time I choose to let go and let it unfold, to see the power that flows into the room from others who want that same clarity and progress and who are willing also, to give up closely held ideas in order to achieve that together. These types of challenges are about behavior but routed in deeper self-awareness, and so the process is long and hard.

The leader of a connected environment is engaged from the inside out. To be sure, I still have moments of vertigo — it is inescapable it seems to me – as the environment is always shifting. But most times now, I can trust that my feet will find some ground eventually and my faith is reinforced by knowing that the payoff for hanging with and through those moments is so worthy.

The mistakes that I make now are when a) I do not have the emotional energy to be truly engaged and b) when I have moments of forgetting what I have learned, or c) when I fear and react against the imperative of letting go.

In those moments I pull in, try to prod, feel like a victim, and let my ego rule the day. I am lucky in those moments that I am a part of a team of people here and with colleagues around the country. Increasingly we are struggling together and intentional about supporting each other – through both forgiveness and truth telling – so that we can continue to build ‘connected environments’ that feed the world by feeding the best of what it is to be human.