We live in a moment with low levels of trust in government and the institutions that serve society. There are rising concerns about safety, accessible health care, livelihood, higher and lower education, the land and environment. This indicates that our existing structures for supporting the common good, democracy, and community are not working well.
The instinctive response is to spend more money on what we are now doing and find better leadership. When we seek better leadership, we are seeking more consistency, control, and predictability. This pattern adds to the task of leaders to build our well-being by delivering more convenience, speed, and cost savings. If we are committed to the common good, and the institutions we have counted on, it is not leaders and their mandate that will help; in fact, it is our affection for leaders that likely stands in the way of real change. Consistency, convenience, speed rarely serve the common good or create positive change. Technology, even offered as a social good, is simply an extension of the control, speed, and convenience impulse.
It is time to question our attention to leadership. Not to improve it but to give it a rest. If we are serious about creating an alternative future for the commons, perhaps we need less leadership. Since the first step in creating an alternative future is departure, let us depart the idea that leadership is important or decisive. We reclaim control of what we care most about when we redecide where to place our attention. This may be to move away from conventions of the American Dream, streets paved with gold, and move towards restoring our humanity through relational solutions.
Much like the exodus from ancient Egypt, our most powerful strategy may be to focus on departure as a political and spiritual act. Departing is an alternative to protest, programs for change, anger at what seems wrong. Departure is an act of agency, departure from waiting for our leaders’ transformation, departure from our resentment, departure from waiting for people in charge or new people in charge to make a difference. In Exodus terms, it is leaving Pharoah for the common good and the neighborhood which is the modern wilderness.
Departure
Departing leadership is giving up a lot. We hold a strong belief that leadership is what produces outcomes. In every domain of society––work, politics, churches, baseball––when things turn bad, we want to change leaders, hoping that this will better serve the public, build churches, grow institutions, win games.
In our faith in better leadership, we cultivate it, train for it, invest in it, research it. There is a world of executive development believing that to get the organizational outcomes of our choosing, the people in charge––whom we have forever called leaders––need to not only know the business we are in, but be more human, better coaches, stronger motivators, finer role models, clearer visionaries. Human. Coach. Motivator. Role Model. Visionary.
Setting aside our belief in leadership may be uniquely useful in the domains of the common good. Education, health, safety, government, local enterprise. These are worlds where service and the collective––instead of profit––are the point. In the commons, we are better served if we ramp down our attention to the concept of leader and ramp up our attention to the role of connectors.
This means we focus on an alternative to the market economy. We focus on an economy built upon peers and citizens and neighbors trusting one another and thereby making the place better. We replace the dominant cultural focus on the market world and focus on what we can call the creative economy. This is the economy where better outcomes occur when people are agents and produce their own well-being. The foundational shift is from a market narrative built on scarcity, competition, scale, speed, and control to the communal and common good building blocks of gifts, relationships, cooperation, imagination, and small-and-slow efforts.
This alternative narrative focuses on the common good as a third way outside the polarizing attention to top or bottom, left or right. Redirecting our primary attention from leaders to connectors is based on a belief that citizens, employees, neighbors can be trusted to deliver the particular outcomes we seek. Again: Youth. Safety. Health. Planet. Economic equity. Local circulation of the dollar.
This shift is not about self-managing teams, or bottom up, or grassroots or managing from the outside in. Those concepts still hold on to the idea of leader and only shift what we want from them. The required shift is to retire leadership as an organizational principle and make room for connectors to be the center of our attention.
Connectors for Community
The connector has expertise in bringing together any group of people––peers, strangers, neighbors, activists, congregations––to create trust and make a place better. The essence of that effort can be usefully called building social capital. It produces all the common good outcomes we seek, including winning baseball games. In the common good version of what the market economy calls productivity, social capital outranks financial capital, venture capital, return on investment.
What is encouraging is that there are connectors within ten feet of where we are standing. They are currently making the world work. They produce what humans need to get by. They welcome youth that believe they do not belong. They produce health and an extended life. Safe streets. More accountability among citizens. Care for the land and the water and the air. The outcomes we thought better leadership and management could deliver and have not. Their work requires we acknowledge that the focus on the people we look to as leaders has created more isolation, a breakdown of democratic values, and growing economic disparity. The problem is not the knowledge and skills of our leaders; it is our exalted version of their importance. It becomes tragic when citizens believe that the culture does not work for them and they seek leadership in the form of a dictator. An extreme version of a belief in the people at the top.
The invitation here is to flood our attention, our news, our philanthropy, our validation onto connectors. The uncredentialled people who make community, the common good, the creative economy work and know that peers, neighbors, and lateral relationships deliver the collective outcomes the market and political campaigners promised.
One step is to shift our attention about what we consider news. We need to let go of the people and events we currently consider newsworthy. Lose interest in what fails, whose fault it is, who is in power, what role the people at the top are playing and promoting. Let us consider connectors to be the heart of the news. A new storyline for the front page and above the fold is about high impact connectors and where connection is changing lives.
Instead of investigating conflict and crisis, let us investigate the fundamental methodology of connection and how bonds are constructed, and where there are struggles. This is not about good news; it is simply about where social capital is in play. An example is our concern for safety. Most urban violence turns out to be from people experiencing both abnormal isolation and often living in an outsider street culture. Accepting this takes our attention to where social capital is being built among neighbors. Where strangers are being brought together, not to resolve differences or talk emotionally about religion and politics, but to trust each other. This is a determinant of safety. One storyline will be about how vulnerability with each other produces safety. Where people attend to each other not as charity or generosity, but as a daily habit. Where connectors on a block are letting us know what is needed and how we can help. Where people know the names of all the children and the elderly and the vulnerable and the newcomers. This is what produces safety. The police are good in crises; they don’t prevent them.
Departing our attention to leaders means we focus on those not traditionally credentialled. Connectors know how change happens and have the methodology to bring more life to our institutions and peace and care to our civic spaces. Stories of where churches, educators, health care workers, enterprises, art centers, and architects are creating an alternative future are waiting for us to recognize many times a day how important they are. The eyes have it.