Public Leadership Shifts

Ever since the mid-term elections, I’ve taken to choosing a politically-oriented question for the practice meetings I do with participants in our collaborative skills workshops.  Specifically, in helping people to more firmly grasp the difference between content (an egg) and process (how you prepare the egg), I’ve invited participants to consider “process-oriented” changes they would like to see in our public leadership.  It’s been interesting to see some of the common themes and requests emerge across the political spectrum.  Below are some of the ideas that have come up for federal, state, and municipal/town levels:

• Suspend use of the filibuster
• Campaign finance reform
• Greater legitimacy and possibility for independent candidates
• Quarterly disclosures of campaign donors
• Employ teams of citizen facilitators for the legislature
• Collaborative leadership training for all public officials
• Politicians eat from the same pie they cook up for “the people”
• Greater transparency across the board in policy-making
• Multi-stakeholder engagement beyond bi-partisan discussions
• More opportunities for open and genuine dialogue

I very much appreciate my colleague Gibran’s post the other day, questioning the degree to which slight shifts to the current system will make the differences we desperately need and seek.  So in asking for your additions to and comment on this list, I would also like to bring back a slightly altered question from his post – How do we organize public leadership in such a way that it supports our collective capacity to both address threats to the survival of our species and further our evolution?