Collaborative leadership, as I understand it, is a transformative practice. In addition to patriarchal norms, it also challenges the anti-authoritarian, horizontalist rebellion against leadership of any kind.
We use this phrase to refer to a deep commitment to practicing here and now every aspect of our vision, including at the edges of what we can imagine, to see how far we can go in applied nonviolence.
In a position of structural power and leadership, I fully accept my responsibility, in general, to hear impacts of my actions on others with less power before saying anything about my own experience of the relationship and any impacts I may have absorbed within it.
Mourning is an act of softening. It supports us in softly closing the gap between what we want, envision, or long for, and what actually exists. In the absence of mourning, we are likely to try to do it with some degree of force: either by trying to force ourselves …
Anita was present at almost every one of the 34-sessions of my online course Responding to the Call of Our Times. I have sometimes wondered what this course would have been like without her steady willingness to explore the depths of nonviolence. I was counting on it as a thread …
Last Saturday, while leading the first day of the Leveraging Your Influence yearlong program, I responded unskillfully to a participant I will call James. What happened points directly to the way that the experience of privilege or lack thereof shapes our lives. How we handled it, and what I have …
The terms power-over and power-with were coined in 1924 by a woman who has mostly been forgotten – Mary Parker Follett, while writing and lecturing about management theory and practice. Her approach, which centered on human relations and collaboration between management and workers, stood in stark contrast to the mainstream …
I have known for some time now that the models of authority and leadership we have inherited are deeply flawed and fully embedded in the either/or paradigm which underlies our way of living. We lack forms, models, and habits of collaboration which are essential for transforming the way we use …
For some years now, I’ve been learning through ongoing experimentation what collaborative leadership means. It’s not been easy, because our either/or lens on reality renders the space between coercive leadership and no leadership elusive, almost invisible. Which is not to say it’s not there, as so many successful leaders know. …
On October 18th I participated in the general assembly meeting in OccupyOakland. On October 22nd I posted a piece about that experience, which I named In Search of Dialogue. Even before writing that piece I have been engaging in my mind with the large question of decision-making in this movement. …
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