Podcast Archive
Pioneering Leaders
Take the Seminar!
In this audio seminar, Paul Born speaks with Margaret (Meg) Wheatley about her seminal essay from a decade ago Pioneering Leaders and explores how her work has continued to evolve and deepen: reaffirming the power of community and the importance of being a "warrior for the human spirit."
Learning Objectives:
- To introduce and explore the concept of the Pioneering Leader
- To explore how this concept has evolved and changed over the past decade since it was originally introduced.
- To discover what's needed to support the work of pioneering leaders in today's increasingly chaotic times.
Access Podcast Highlights...
- What Time is It? How the World is Now
- Pioneering Leaders: A Decade Later
- Supporting & Sustaining Pioneering Leadership
- Walk Out Walk On: Picturing a Path Forward
- Berkana: A Theory of Change
- Reflection Questions
- Links & Resources
- Meet Meg Wheatley
What Time is It? How the World is Now
This question, which Meg used to open her Pioneering Leaders article in 2002, is an invitation to step-back and "view the world you're living and working in from 50,000 feet..." Meg engages listeners in this question today by inviting them to think back five years and consider how they and those around them have changed since then. Meg herself then observes that, in her travels across North America, she's increasingly encountering people who are more overwhelmed and exhausted; more absorbed in fear and anxiety; and, worried as they confront a world that is more troubled and more polarized and overseen by governments that are poorly run.
Meg notes that it takes real mindfulness and dedication to do leadership work in communities during these times. She believes that this leadership begins by "looking reality in the eye." From this place of frankness and honesty she believes the human spirit can persevere. Listen here as Meg outlines this process and invites listeners to be "revolutionaries for the human spirit."
Meg offers concrete examples of what she refers to as her practice of "guerrilla compassion" reminding listeners that we need to choose how we want to respond to the anxiety and chaos of these times in the clip below.
Pioneering Leaders: A Decade Later
Paul shares with listeners how pivotal Meg's paper, Pioneering Leaders has been in guiding the development of the Tamarack Learning Community and acknowledges that many of the paper's themes, now a decade later, seem prophetic. He then invites Meg to share how the thinking outlined in this paper has evolved over the past decade. Meg shares that the themes she introduced in Pioneering Leaders are more important to her today than they were then. She also acknowledges that, while the collapse of systems which the article predicted has now become widely accepted, the choice to work towards the creation of healthy communities and strong relationships is now so counter the culture of today that working for those things makes us seem more like pioneers now than ever before. As she suggests in the following clip, Meg believes the importance of community to support pioneering leaders is more critical than ever.
Supporting & Sustaining Pioneering Leadership
Being a pioneering leader is not easy. Your work can be challenged and criticized. There are those who would like to see you fail. In the face of these challenges, Meg believes that having a community of like-minded colleagues is increasingly needed to support and fuel pioneering leaders to continue in their work. In fact, in the following clip, Meg explains why these communities are so valuable and acknowledges that she is making time to be with colleagues more and more often.
Walk Out Walk On: Picturing a Path Forward
The stories captured in Walk Out Walk On illuminate for us the work and path forward to abundant communities. One of its core messages is that we must rely on one another within our own communities to find what we need to sustain us. It is when we stop seeking outside the community for someone to "rescue" us that neighbours turn to one another and rediscover an abundance of resources that we already exists among us. Our strength comes from relying on one another. In the clip below, Meg clarifies that the intent behind these stories is not to provide hope, but to provide clarity of the nature of this work in communities.
The work of the Berkana Institute was very much rooted in a premise that within any system, there exist people who are living the future now. Unlike more traditional forms of systems change, which rely on gap analysis, Berkana identified the following four-step process for changing the culture of a system:
- Look for and Name the Future you Want - Find those "pioneers" within the system who are demonstrating the qualities you want
- Connect the Pioneering Leaders Together - Recognize these individuals as pioneering leaders and link them to one another
- Nourish these Leaders - Provide these leaders with resources to share what they know so others can learn from them; and,
- Illuminate Their Work - Profile and highlight the work of these pioneers as an inspiration and example of the future you are seeking to create.
Listen to the following clip as Meg illustrates these core elements of Berkana's Theory of Change.
Reflection Questions
- What do I see as the supports that would help me to further cultivate my practice of pioneering leadership?
- How does Berkana's Theory of Change offer me insights about how I might nurture a change in the culture of my community?
Links and Resources
- Margaret J. Wheatley Website - This website contains a list of Meg's writings, videos and other resources.
- Supporting Pioneering Leaders - This seminal article, written by Meg in 2002, identifies that "new leadership becomes a central and pressing challenge of our time" and goes on to outline how Communities of Practice offer a way to rapidly develop new leaders in great numbers.
- The Berkana Institute - This institute, co-founded by Meg, shares the clarity that whatever the problem, community is the answer. Berkana has worked in partnership with a rich diversity of people around the world who strengthen their communities by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in their people, traditions and environments.
- Two Loops: How Systems Change - This Berkana video, explains their "two loops" view of how systems change.
- Living the Future Now - This video contains clips of individuals who have "walked out" of the mainstream and are "living the future now."
- What is Our Role in Creating Change? - In this 2008 article, Meg reiterates the idea that "A leader is anyone willing to help, anyone who sees something that needs to change and takes the first steps to influence that situation."
- The Art of Hosting - This website is home to a global community of practitioners who use integrated participative change processes, methods, maps, and planning tools to engage groups and communities.
- Pioneering Leaders Tweets- Here you will find a list of tweets that capture participants' key ideas as they participated in the Pioneering Leaders tele-learning seminar
- Engaging Community Toolkit - Here you can order this resource, created by Meg and her colleagues, to "build healthy and resilient communities." It contains a variety of approaches for engaging community: information and processes in a rich variety of media, to "make it possible for all communities to know how to engage their members to resolve their current challenges and create the futures they desire."
Margaret (Meg) Wheatley - Margaret Wheatley is a respected writer, speaker, and teacher for how we can accomplish our work, sustain our relationships, and willingly step forward to serve in this troubling time. She has written several best-selling books, beginning with her path-breaking Leadership and the New Science, first published in 1992. Her other books are: Walk Out Walk On (with Deborah Frieze); Perseverance; Turning to One Another; A Simpler Way (with Myron Rogers); and Finding Our Way. Each of her books has been translated into a number of languages. Leadership and the New Science appears in 18 languages. Her newest book, (October 2012), is So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World.
Meg is the co-founder and President Emerita of The Berkana Institute. Berkana has been a leader in discovering new organizational forms based on a coherent theory of how living systems change. Berkana has responded to the global crisis by moving courageously into the future now, experimenting with many different solutions to create healthy and resilient community. Meg Wheatley received her doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Change from Harvard University, and a Masters in Media Ecology from New York University. She's been an organizational consultant since 1973, a global citizen since her youth, a professor in two graduate business programs, a prolific writer, and a happy mother and grandmother. She has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates.
Tamarack is thrilled to welcome Meg as a featured keynote at the 2012 Communities Collaborating Institute in Kitchener Ontario from October 1st - 5th, 2012.
©2011 Tamarack — An Institute for Community Engagement