Seeking starlings
When you are trying to create a healthy garden, or indeed any regenerative system, permaculture’s first principle is that you should observe and interact for a full cycle before you intervene. Study what is already thriving, how resources are flowing, and how value is being exchanged. Notice where energy is coming from, and how it changes over the course of a day and a season.
In this spirit, our Bramble team has spent the past year learning from our partners, our fellow practitioners and each other as we considered an existential question: what is the most important work we can do with leaders to help a regenerative future emerge?
In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing some of what we’ve learned so far, and where those observations are leading us.
Why we’re still using the word “leaders” – and what we really mean when we do
We have a confession: although we have spent, collectively, something like five decades working on leadership, we regularly question whether the word “leader” is still fit for purpose.
“Does it have too many associations with an egocentric theory of change?” we wonder. “Is there a concept that is more relatable to the many people doing truly transformative work at local scales in their teams and communities?”
History and nature both offer examples where the simple actions of an individual can change the course of a much larger group without having control or even direct influence over the other members. As adrienne maree brown observed in Emergent Strategy, a murmuration of starlings can react swiftly and collectively to a threat even though there is no individual directing them. Instead, any starling can trigger its group’s collective movement; each bird has the potential to be a leader.
We very occasionally witness similar dynamics when we are working with groups of humans. In one “serious play” game we run, our colleague Julian plays a flesh-eating zombie, and the group needs to thwart him. We don’t want to reveal the punchline but suffice to say that compared to starlings, humans generally struggle more to move as one.
There are a lot of lessons that any would-be change-maker should learn from creatures that shoal and swarm and flock, not least that whatever dynamics exist at the scale of the collective will have consequences at the scale of the individual, and vice versa. Attempts to change systems in ways that don’t account for the humans and communities within them are likely to lead to see a host of community- and human-scale issues that will stymy progress, from polarisation to burnout. Useful solutions might indeed get rolled out, but the results are unlikely to be particularly just or joyful.
University of Oslo professor Karen O’Brien and her colleagues conclude that we need “fractal approaches” (patterns that repeat at small and large scales) if we are to overcome this dynamic and deliver sustainability responses at the pace and scale needed. Or as adrienne maree brown puts it, “until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.”
This is what we mean when we talk about leadership in a regenerative future: a capacity to help the world become more sustainable, just and joyful at every scale.
Awareness, Imagination, and Agency
So what are the qualities we expect to see in individuals and groups that embody this kind of leadership?
We’ll be focusing our own attention on three in the season ahead:
Awareness: the practice of increasing your awareness of your whole self and the world around you. It means employing all our senses and faculties to perceive what is present and possible.
Imagination: the ability to dream a future unconstrained by cynicism. We see imagination as an act of hope. It requires vision and ambition, but it is more than these things. It bravely accepts the probability of disappointment and dismissal, and persists anyway.
Agency: the belief and ability to make what you do matter to the future you most dearly desire. It is not just about having the power to impact the world around us – we all have that power – it is about understanding our place in a complex web of fellow agents, being able to sense how moves we make may cause ripples through that web, and acting with intention when opportunities arise.
Fortunately, although these qualities don’t seem to be evenly distributed, we believe they are all capabilities that are possible to develop intentionally, as individuals and as groups.
We’ll be exploring how in our upcoming posts, spotlighting some of the practices we’re finding most exciting in our field, and sharing some of our own. We are curious to learn from those of you who are trying to help more sustainable, just and joyful world emerge. Which capability do you wish your team or community had more of, and how are you trying to build that capability?