Author Note: I am saddened to learn that Mila Baker passed away recently. While I did not know her personally, she was a mentor from a distance. A few years ago, I read her book about peer-to-peer leadership and found it both enlightening and validating as I continued my journey to uncover more about the promise of seeing and doing in networked ways.
Mila N. Baker
Mila Baker was a writer, teacher, philanthropist, cross-sector leader and artist. At the time of her passing, she served on the Board of Directors for the Berrett-Koehler Foundation, was a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University Teachers College, as well as a Principal Research Investigator at the Institute for Collaborative Workplaces, and Visiting Professor at Kuwait University. The following is a post I wrote after reading her book published in 2014.
I just finished reading Mila Baker’s Peer-to-Peer Leadership: Why the Network is the Leader, which adds to the growing case for more widespread network thinking, foregrounding of human relationships, and shifting traditional conceptions (and myths) of leadership in business and beyond. Baker’s book echoes the spirits of Margaret Wheatley, Clay Shirky, Carol Sanford, Nilofer Merchant, Kevin Kelly, and Harold Jarche, and I appreciate how she couches her writing in the evolving leadership and organizational development literature and thinking.
Baker begins by making the case that the still dominant individualized and command-and-control leadership lexicon is insufficient for our changing, complex, and interconnected world. She goes on to promote the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) IT architecture as a model for framing thinking about leadership and how people organize themselves. In P2P arrangements, everyone becomes a generative and recipient node in a network, and has easy access to other nodes. Going forward, Baker believes that the following concepts will be critical for organizations to embrace to remain relevant:
“node community” (instead of hierarchy)
“equipotency” (instead of fixed positional authority)
“relational dynamics” (instead of purely role-based and transactional modalities)
Where this leads, as evidenced by a few examples offered by Baker, are arrangements where everyone leads and follows, reciprocity and transparency are fundamental values, and survival and thriving come through connection.
While there is much from the book that could be mentioned here, I wanted to focus on what Baker lifts up as the four developmental steps for P2P organizations to go through on their way to leveraging individual and collective potential for greater adaptability, resilience, and responsibility. These are:
Internalizing values and purpose
Creating opportunities (permeable boundaries and multiple channels) for mutual and continuous exchange of input and output (flow!)
Reconciling polarities and abstractions (harmonizing destructive internal dissonance)
According to Baker, an organization must go through the first three steps if it is to realize the fourth. What this suggests is that leadership becomes about the collective work of creating conditions for an organization (or community of nodes) to:
align at different levels around commonly held ground and direction,
build and deepen connectivity,
take self-organized action (cooperation and collaboration),
continuously monitor and course correct.
In other words, the focus is on stewardship, relationship, and interaction.
I am struck by how this seemingly validates and extends what we at IISC uphold as the need for more wide-spread and skillful Facilitiative Leadership. And I am sitting with the implications for how mindsets need to continue to shift to seeing the greater potential of the networks that support us and the peer-to-peer world. Thank you, Mila Baker, for the bequest of your gifts.
I just finished reading Mila Baker’s Peer-to-Peer Leadership: Why the Network is the Leader, which adds to the growing case for more widespread network thinking, foregrounding of human relationships, and shifting traditional conceptions (and myths) of leadership in business and beyond. Much of what Baker writes about has been expressed in the writings of others, including Clay Shirky, Carol Sanford, Nilofer Merchant, Kevin Kelly, and Harold Jarche, and I appreciate how she couches much of her writing in the evolving leadership and organizational development literature and thinking. Read More
The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do
when things are falling apart? You’re either going to become
more fundamentalist and try to hold things together or you’re
going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an
experiment, making it up as you go along.
-Pema Chödrön
I’m blown away by #occupywallstreet. And I am thrilled by the conversation it has unleashed – sometimes amused, sometimes frustrated and often moved. I’ll be at Liberty Plaza this Friday.
I’m appreciating the political discussion, the strategic questions, the desire for racial inclusion in this emergent process. However this turns out, it is way bigger than a protest. Something is changing, Kevin Kelly points to it: Read More
Today I’ll once again have to turn to Kevin Kelly, our contemporary sage of the technium. His recent blog post “Why the Impossible Happens More Often” is a must read and it is extensively quoted below. For a long time I have been trying to make the point that what is happening in the web is not just about social media and new technology – it is about us, and how we are with each other.
|Photo by TeresaM3Kids|http://www.flickr.com/photos/teresam525/3530463356/|
|Photo by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel|http://www.flickr.com/photos/43147325@N08/4370125469/|
I’m a big fan of Kevin Kelly. His latest blog post reflects on what he calls “Two Kinds of Generativity” and it has me thinking about the next phase of movement. Kelly describes the evolutionary process of an innovation. He speaks of the first stage as one that is “vague, incomplete and open to change.” This first stage is appealing to the early adapters, “tinkerers, nerds, fans, and hacks who will make it do all kinds of things no one had thought of.” Read More
Every year at this time, like most of you, I make several commitments which are generally to increase my health and well-being, deepen my spiritual life and learn myself a few inches back from the learning edge. This years’ learning commitment is to learn all things technological i.e. everything from powerpoints to Twitter and everything in between. As it stands now I know just enough to get by, develop bad habits and to be dangerous across multiple platforms.
And, like the book falling off the shelf as if guided by some cosmic know-it-all, I picked up the latest Orion Magazine the other morning to find an interview with Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine where he puts forth the idea that technology is holy. Read More
The second lens through which the Interaction Institute for Social Change looks at collaboration is the lens of networks. I think about this as one of the most important interventions on the sector, the shift from an organization centric paradigm to a network paradigm. The good news is that this shift is already happening; the even better news is that this shift calls for stronger and deeper forms of collaboration.
In the recent Convergence report, LaPiana consulting identifies the fact that “networks enable work to be organized in new ways” as one of five converging trends that will redefine the social sector. It is important to understand that while there is a close relationship between new social technology and our capacity to work in networks, the shift to a network paradigm is not just a technological shift – it is a different way of organizing how we work together, a different paradigm for collaboration.
That’s in just 11 years, so what is our vision? Things are changing really fast, so how do we take the shift into account. In his TED Talk on the next 5000 days of the web, Kevin Kelly outlines the contours of the world that is emergent, and it is very different than anything we’ve seen before. What is our role, as individuals and communities, organizations and movements – people who want to see a better world – how do we help shape this?
