Nora Bateson — The Paradox of Agency

"Agency is a paradoxical product of mutual learning within and between people, nature, and culture." An individual both has a "unique perspective or epistemology" but also "there is no aspect of that entity that is uninfluenced, uninformed, or unbound to the larger contextual interactions."

Important questions asked: "Can we extract a stand-out entity from that mutuality and call it a break-away? Isn’t the break-away a product of the mutuality? How can ‘leaders’ exist without all the relationships that have culminated and fermented to make them? Should we not point to those mutualities as heroic?...What is a leader in a complex system... See more

Leadership qualities depend on a person's contexts: their history, culture, religion, family, etc.

We now need to understand leadership through the lens of interdependency.

"... leadership is produced collectively in the community, not the individual. The individual’s responsibility is to be ready and willing to show up, serve, and then, most importantly, stand back. Leadership for this era is not a role or a set of traits; it’s a zone of interrelational process. Step in, step out."

"In ecological terms we can attribute the health and vitality of the whale to the ocean not only to the whale, and we can attribute the strength of the lion to the jungle (or savannah) not only to the lion."

We are all entangled in systems that both ensure our survival and destruction. The responsibilities that we place on institutions, such as big oil, big banks, big pharma, etc., does not lie within these institutions but within the linkings between them. "An institution is made of people, each with their own biographies, and it exists within communi... See more

Our notions of leadership may create "hold-back" in the ecology of information as people don't feel able to share openly with those ordained with higher status.

"We may learn more about leadership if we study it as an entrustment of context, and not as a twinkle bestowed upon a few select individuals from the heavens above."

A common question right now is, "where are the leaders of today?"