Nora Bateson — The Paradox of Agency

"Mutual learning is only possible when all participants are willing to be wrong..."

"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."

"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."

Believing that there is someone else to blame for the problems that we face is part of how we created these problems in the first place.

"... 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."

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

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

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

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.