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This is a re-blog. Click here to view the original Written by Dr Kay Galpin and other blogs discussing this topic.
Professor Carol Jarvis, Professor Hugo Gaggiotti and Dr Selen Kars founded ‘The Unleadership Movement’ to explore new approaches to thinking about leader-follower relations and what leaderly practices could look like to help people and organisations to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. In integrating Unleadership into organisational life, they anticipate a flourishing of creativity and the humanising of our workplaces to accommodate the human spirit. Joined in 2021 by Dr Kay Galpin and funded by a series of Higher Education Innovation Fund grants they continue to run collaborative research workshops with organisational and community members to share and reflect upon the leaderly actions of others, co-creating innovations that keep developing the concept and practices of Unleadership. Carol, Hugo and Selen have written a book which will be published by DeGruyter in early 2024 as part of the series
Transformative Thinking and Practice of Leadership and Its Development, edited by Professor Bernd Vogel from Henley Business School.
This blog is based on an extract of the book chapter Collaborating and Connecting one of the key dimensions of Unleadership.
How do unleaders collaborate?
Our research has found a subtle shift in the way that unleaders collaborate which moves them towards a more positive and appreciative way of engaging with others. This has the potential to generate multiple ideas and possibilities — what could be? Seeking to ameliorate a challenge and not to fix or solve the problem, they are driven by a clear purpose and value — making sense as a collective, in a community.
Why is this important?
We live in complex times — political; social and economic struggles and inequality; wars; climate change; the challenges of developing technology; the list goes on and on. Problems such as these have been described as wicked. These problems are resistant to resolution and are not amenable to being controlled. They are dynamic, often have incomplete information and there are many complex interdependencies. Groups and individuals will have a different perspective on both the problem and what success might look like or involve.
If we stick with our tried and tested leadership approaches to problem solving, we are going to come up against barriers that might derail any action at all — take Greta Thunberg’s accusation at COP26 of the leaders and their ‘business as usual blah, blah, blah’. Unleaders shift their thinking to a good enough approach, recognising their limits and are open and responsive to collaboration. By making this shift, they can begin to thrive in complexity, accepting that a solution or resolution is not always possible and that it will involve contradictions. By being free of the quest for harmony, unleaders can become bricoleurs, making the best use of whatever resource comes to hand and developing collective wisdom with others.
How does collaboration create collective wisdom?
You’ve probably all heard of the phrase déjà vu — a strange short circuit in our brain that makes us think we have experienced a situation before (layman’s explanation!!?). Well, what about the opposite? Vu-jadé? We have never experienced anything like this ever before and it is completely unknown and unique? To respond, we are going to have to move beyond the tried and tested and begin using a different repertoire! This, first and foremost, requires an acknowledgement that we have never seen this problem before and a commitment to explore it from a new line of sight. This means that we must avoid the temptation of pigeon-holing the situation within a familiar, existing repertoire. This will involve increasing our ability to use enquiry and curiosity and to have collaborative conversations to make sense of things together in a collective. By valuing others’ experiences and narratives, we move towards dialogue — valuing the nuances of knowledge and making meaning out of the unknown together. Dialogue expert Bill Isaacs defines this as “the art of thinking together” which suggests that through dialogue we can build a common base that allows us to learn more about a problem collectively and to achieve what Jabri and colleagues describe as a “surplus of seeing”.
As we open our hearts and our minds to dialogue, we see the situation with fresh eyes, perhaps through the eyes of somebody else, and we develop the capacity to let new perspectives and meanings come into our awareness. Here we make a subtle shift in our relationships — we become part of a community. This means that not the individual, but the collective is responsible for building an holistic understanding of the vu-jadé situation by connecting the dots. In other words, no single person in the community is more responsible (and consequently accountable) for defining the problem and identifying solutions; responding to the problem is a mutual process for which we are all co-responsible.
Pause for reflection!
Draw a timeline to identify times in your life when you have been most open.
- What was happening at this time, what made these moments significant?
- What aspects of these experiences can you retrieve now to cultivate that level of openness, curiosity and inquisitiveness?
If this has made you think about your own practice and you want to know more, look out for our book coming in 2024. We share organisational vignettes where the practice of collaborating has led to interesting developments! We also offer more practical reflective exercises and tools to consider how we can track the subtle shifts in our relationships and how we can begin to open ourselves to connections and possibilities.
References
COP26: Greta Thunberg tells protest that COP26 has been a ‘failure’ — BBC News
Ford J., Ford L., & Polin B. (2021). Leadership in the implementation of change: Functions, sources, and requisite Variety. Journal of Change Management, 21(1), 87–119.
Grint, K. (2010). Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: The role of leadership. In S. Brookes, & K. Grint (Eds.), The new public leadership challenge (pp. 169–186). Palgrave
Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue: The art of thinking together. Doubleday.
Jabri, M. (2010) Utterance as a tool for change agents: Implications based on Bakhtin. Journal of Management Development 29 (6). Pp. 535–544.
Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169.
Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628–652.