Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

Individual: Interview three people you trust in your extended community to give you feedback about how you show up in the world.

My actions and inactions affect everyone and everything around me.

If you are in a leadership position, make sure you have a circle of people who can tell you the truth, and to whom you can speak the truth. Bring others into shared leadership with you, and/or collaborate with other formations so you don’t get too enamored of your singular vision.

The Social Transformation Project has been doing a variety of experiments in creating safe spaces for leaders to be vulnerable and speak honestly of their accomplishments, failures, longings, and where they want and need collaboration.

Otherwise we are monsters. We can make missions drift, can get embroiled in inter-organizational or inter-movement beef that does not serve the people, can get into a victim mentality and direct a lot of movement energy towards defending our egos, or get convinced of our superiority.

Lifting people up based on personality replicates the dynamics of power and hierarchy that movements claim to be dismantling.

No one has time for rock star tears.

I’ve learned a lot since then. I learned, because there is always the other hand: rock stars get isolated, lose touch with our vulnerability, are expected to pull off superhero work, and generally burn out within a decade.

Maybe it was just that I tapped into my life force, my magic, for the first time