In the paper I put forth a conceptual framework for examining the leadership issues and it is build around three simple prepositions: of, in, and with. Leaders of a system, really a sub-system, such as a CEO of a company have one level of influence largely bounded by the extent of their authority. Leaders in a system, perhaps that same CEO  but working through a U.N. initiative or the head of an international NGO, have a larger level of influence as they don’t define it in terms of formal authority. They know that they must collaborate and move multiple stakeholders in order to be effective. A few truly achieve large scale, meta-system change and I call these leaders with the system. They articulate the inconsistencies within the system and lead the system to be true to itself. Their leadership is not motivated by personal gain or the self-interest of any entity other than the system itself.

Jim Spohrer of IBM, one of my advisory team members, has suggested that leading with a system may at the point where one moves beyond a zero-sum outcomes. That’s an interesting insight that I am going to explore.

“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The leader with a system I examine most closely in the paper is Martin Luther King, Jr. That’s why I am posting the paper today on MLK Day 2012. Others whom I would consider leaders with the system would be Gandhi, Mandela, and perhaps the Dalai Lama. That’s an illustrious, almost stereotypical list. I will be looking for more as my work progresses. I invite you to read the paper and give me your thoughts on the of, in, with framework.

Read the full paper here: Leadership of Social Change cc.

Bargmann is an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture where her research through Project D.I.R.T., Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain, aims to “excavate the creative potential of degraded landscapes.” She is also a principal at D.I.R.T. (Dump it Right Here) Studio in New York. In both of these pursuits, Bargmann’s work is interdisciplinary and driven by an “obsession with urban regeneration”.

Bargmann has worked on such high profile projects as the green roof on the Ford River Rouge plant, working with William McDonough & Associates among others, and New York’s High Line Park, working with Michael VanValkenberg & Associates among others.

Her hero is Robert Smithson, the American artist who is one of the founders of the earthworks or land art movement. She described him as thinking with “a greater clock” – having deeper and more expansive concepts of time that were revealed through his sculpture. His art and essays have inspired her to think differently about land and landscapes. She said that she finds beauty in industrial landscapes and sees industrial uses of land simply as one point on a continuum of usage that stretch through time. “It’s not as if we are taking a landscape from what it is back to what it once was; I want to help the landscape become what it is meant to be next.”

Bargmann described the challenges of her work as beginning with the general lack of familiarity with brownfields issues. “You have to understand the minds you are dealing with,” she said. “My job is not to make the issues less complex, but to make the outcomes seem more attainable.” Bargmann said that this is her greatest leadership challenge. She has to be facile with economic as well as design issues.

On the Rouge River project, Ford executives were initially not interested in a green roof. However she and the team were able to convince the head of Ford’s environment group of the value of the project. He, in turn, became a champion who swayed the balance of the Ford executives.

“Every designer needs a champion on the client side,” she said. “You have to plant the seed, be catalytic, and get them thinking beyond business as usual. It means being both pragmatic and poetic.”

She worked on the Vintondale Reclamation Park project in Pennsylvania. In this case, a historian was the champion for the project: he had the vision that the site of a former coal mine could be reclaimed as park land. The historian saw the park, which would also include art installations, as continuation of the work of the land. “He saw this as the next logical step for the land,” she said. Bargmann worked as part of pro-bono team for five years and describes this as a “seminal project” as it brought severely damaged land back as a productive, vital landscape. It was awarded the Phoenix Award, “the brownfields equivalent of Hollywood’s Oscars.”

Bargmann described the Vintondale project as a typical example of leading from the bottom up. This is where she often sees projects taking shape and so now concentrates her work on pilot and demonstration projects. She noted that major projects are difficult to find given the current economic climate. She has purposefully kept her firm small so that she can pick-and-choose those projects that are most interesting.

Not every project comes to fruition. The architect on a large project for a university that was expanding into a brownfield site brought Bargmann onto the project team. The original plan called for excavating tons of potentially contaminated soil and trucking it across several states for disposal. Bargmann and her team developed a plan for a “soil farm” process through which the “dirty” soil could have been reclaimed on site. “It made an enormous amount of sense but the team from the university just couldn’t get their arms around the idea,” she said.

Another leadership challenge for Bargmann is navigating the political aspects of a project. She noted that major projects typically involve a “dysfunctional network” of agencies, developers, designers, and other players. She said that she often had to play “match maker” between agencies that don’t often speak with each other, yet that must come together for a successful brownfield redevelopment. She counseled that knowing the players and their interests. Then you can “make room for the landscape’s best interests,” she said.

Bargmann said that it is important to “level the ground” and find a common desired outcome. She works to do this by focusing on what is “best for the landscape.” This gets the discussion out of the functional silos and up to a more strategic level. “I try to be the voice of the landscape,” she said.

No matter how skillful one is, however, permitting is still an enormous logistical challenge, she said. “No matter how many agencies give you the green light, there is always one more out there that can stop you in your tracks,” she said. To mitigate this she tries to work with architects (who are usually the design lead on a project) who are politically astute and who know how to navigate in the city where the project is situated. “Someone on the team has to know the bureaucracy,” she said.

Looking to the future Bargmann said that she is intrigued by smaller industrial cities such as Trenton and Baltimore where the challenges are great but resources scarce. She is particularly energized about the possibilities in Detroit, a city that is trying to “shrink in a purposeful way.” She sees the potential to create “an urban wilderness” out of abandoned industrial and commercial sites, a prospect she sees as an enormous, exciting challenge.

Bargmann’s work is instructive and an inspiration to see the discards of our past in a new light.

This article in Disaster Response Journal, co-authored with my NPLI colleague, Dr. Barry Dorn who also spent time in the Gulf with National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, presents some of the lessons learned specific to situational awareness in a fast-evolving incident. It explores how the meta-leadership framework developed at the NPLI can improve situational awareness and thus enhance decision making. Among the lessons:

A COP (common operating picture) ensures everyone sees a common set of facts. This is important. However, each individual will interpret those facts somewhat differently because each person has different experience, expertise, biases, and preferences. That is why the meta-leadership framework begins with the person: having the capacity to be self-aware and cognizant of others’ perceptions, the leader will more accurately comprehend the situation and integrate input from others. Being able to integrate multiple sources of information, both objective and subjective, is central to situational awareness.

Please read the article and share your thoughts and comments.

In doing the research for the proposal, I spoke with a number of local people and the idea took on a life of its own. It has been embraced by a number of local organizations as well as the Green Restaurant Association (GRA) which has agreed to certify Washington Square as the nation’s first green restaurant district if 25% of its restaurants meet the GRA’s certification standards. The Green Restaurant District project will be a feature of Brookline’s Climate Week in January 2012.

Why pursue a Green Restaurant District?

-          Restaurants are the dominant business in Wasington Square (20 of 62 storefront businesses are restaurants).

-          Restaurants have a greater impact on the environment than other businesses: on average, they use 2.5x the energy of other businesses, generate approximately 50,000 lbs of waste (95% of which could be recycled or composted), and use up to 300,000 gals of water;

-          The Square already has Boston’s first certified green restaurant here: The Fireplace. Owner Jim Solomon is enthusiastic and says that he saves significantly on his operating costs as a result of adopting environmentally friendly practices;

-          The Green Restaurant Association (GRA) gathered more than 2,000 signatures in Brookline from people who said that they wanted Brookline restaurants to “go green.”

Thus it seems logical: if  Washington Square restaurants  “go green,” they benefit from lower costs while the town benefits from a smaller environmental footprint. And, with the publicity likely to result from becoming the first green restaurant district in the country, more diners will be attracted to the Square giving business a boost. It’s a win, win, win!

Another personal benefit of the project is that it is a chance to move beyond the academic exploration of leadership to the front lines. While the initial enthusiasm from the neighborhood is great, it will take a lot of meeting, educating, and cajoling to make the green restaurant district a reality. And did I mention that I am looking forward to getting to know the restauranteurs better?

I’ll keep you posted. If you are interested in helping, please be in touch.

Interestingly, we created a scenario quite similar to this in the “novel” that runs throughout our book, Renegotiating Health Care: Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration. A battle over money pits a major insurer against a local health system. Each sees the other as the source of pain. Only when they open themselves to see their own role in the problem does it become possible to imagine a new reality in which they both win. We hope that these two real-life organizations come to that same realization.

Please check out the story and leave your thoughts.

I am a climate change believer. I see it as one of the Pillar Trends that has the power to reshape our world and the way we live. However, I must ask: is the war for truth one that can be won?

In my latest paper, I explore the epistemology of climate change science. My conclusion is that more physical science is likely not the answer.  One must turn to the social sciences to better understand how we learn and come to hold the beliefs that we consider to be the “truth.”

I invite you to download the PDF: ClimateChangeSciencecc and leave your comments here.

I had two people who worked for me as well as my client on flights out of New York that morning. There were several tense hours before we ascertained that they were safe. Nothing like the agony of people who had lost friends or family that day, of course, but an intense realization that bad things happen to good people and that much less is under our control than we imagine.

I remember the uncertainty, the need to make decisions about others who were due to travel to join us, and finally to the realization that those decisions were out of my hands. I remember an intense desire to get home.

The lessons I have taken away: be present for every day, take nothing for granted, and make your contributions now for no one knows what tomorrow brings.

This tradition is also reflected in how we think about leaders: we relate the rise and fall of organizations through the stories of their executives, the successes and failures of armies through the exploits of their generals, and the triumph or defeat of social movements through the journeys of their most visible advocates. Bezos. Bloomberg. Petraeus. Gandhi.

The reality is not that simple.

Leaders never act alone. Rarely, if ever, do breakthrough ideas have a single parent.

Successful strategies, tactics, negotiations, and operations are not often the product of sitting alone in one’s room. Researchers use the term agency to describe the actions of individuals. The leaders described above are portrayed as individual agents—think “my idea,” “my vision,” or the title of a regular feature on CEOs in Harvard Business Review, “How I Did It.”

In my experience and research, leaders are more often co-creators or joint agents. I may have an idea, but you and several others add to it before it becomes the next big thing. Jeff Bezos has contributed mightily to the success of amazon.com, but he certainly didn’t do it alone. Employees, investors, suppliers, customers, and even competitors played roles in making the company what it is today. So, too, with the efforts of Mayor Bloomberg to make New York a more sustainable city.

Research on nonlinear systems at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere holds that change in a system comes not from the actions of one agent but rather from the interactions of two or more agents.

If you view global organizations and cities as complex systems, as I do, then evaluating and developing leaders as individual agents is foolhardy at best. These efforts are much better directed at improving how leaders foster interaction and build relationships.

In a recent literature survey, I found that the agency of leaders was an area not covered in great depth (see my recent post on complexity for another).

Warren Bennis wrote about “great groups” at Apple and other innovative companies as the successors to the “great man” tradition of leadership. He wrote about “the myth of the triumphant individual” that underlies much leadership thinking. Most others—from James McGregor Burns through Jim Collins—focus on the efforts of the individual rather than the individual as part of a group.

Creation is wonderful, but cocreation opens up far greater possibilities, unlocks more resources, and more effectively hedges the risk of overlooking either opportunities or pitfalls. Cocreation gives you the freedom to say, “I’m not sure. What do you think?” It allows you to more deeply engage followers, peers, and even potential naysayers.

As you think about your own leadership journey, I encourage you to keep agency in mind. Yes, you must think about what you will do, but try placing it the context of what you will enable others to contribute, how you will remove obstacles to others’ success, how you catalyze collaboration, and how you can ensure that credit is shared as widely as is deserved.

Heroic narratives may be easy—perhaps even essential in storytelling—but do not confuse them with what is actually essential to your success as a leader. Truly great leaders are masters of cocreation.

The Action Plan
• Watch the credits. The next time that you see a film, stay through the credits. You will see that the stars’ names may be in larger type but that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of others who were essential to creating the film. Eliminate any of them and you would have a lesser experience or perhaps no movie at all.
• Create a genealogy chart for a great idea. Look at the last (or next) successful initiative in your organization and trace its lineage. From where did the seed emerge? Who was at the meeting where it was first surfaced? Who was it bounced off as it matured? How did you or another leader nurture the idea? Try to include everyone who contributed in some way to its development—and then post it on the wall for everyone to see.
• As you keep your leadership journal (and I encourage everyone to do so), periodically note the times when your actions have either encouraged or discouraged cocreation. Think about what worked and what you might have done differently.

A version of this post first appeared on BecomeaLeader.org.

Mayor Bloomberg photo from Flickr. Some rights reserved by makeroadssafe. City Year photo from Flickr. Some rights reserved by cityyear.

Library of Congress Photo courtesy of KansasPhoto (Flickr Creative Commons)

I have been thinking for some time about the gradual disappearance of what I call the “rich-poor” life. This is the life once lived by my grade school teachers who didn’t have a lot of money but who managed to be culturally rich. They traveled and brought their slides to school. They read books and saw films. They visited museums.  They were educated, sophisticated, and adventurous without being slaves to a job or worrying about health care. This was a life I always felt that I could live as a fall-back should I find myself in hard times. Now, I’m not so sure.

The rich-poor life depends upon public libraries, free nights at museums, public lectures, open rehearsals at the symphony, theater in the park, the parks themselves, and so much more. It needs quality public spaces and those “third places” where one can find a reasonably priced cup of coffee or glass of wine and spend an hour conversing. At a more fundamental level, it requires quality public schools so that people cultivate a taste for cultural exploration, an appreciation of nature, and a thirst to learn. Each of these is under threat by our current economic downturn with funds dwindling and, more significant, a turning away from viewing social spending as necessary.

I may have a romantic view of the rich-poor life, thinking that I could survive happily in a small garret with my books, tea (OK, wine), and a subway pass. For many, however, these resources are critical for social mobility. It was for my parents and many other people of their generation. The library, the arboretum, the museum opened a view on the world that inspired them to study. They saw a better life and a way to get there. They saved and worked and strove.

Instead we have been sold, and to be fair have happily bought, a poor-rich life full of easy credit and the mountains of stuff it makes possible: a new car leased every two years, acres of granite counter tops, and useless gee-gaws that give us a momentary purchase high.  We can’t live without 200 cable channels so that we can track every movement of the Kardashians (who are they and what do they actually do?).  We have failed to address the decline in public education in a meaningful way for more than a generation.  Household debt is up; social mobility is down. Unemployment is up and so is income inequality. Our public infrastructure is a shambles. We’ve quite willingly sold our collective soul to the company store.

This is not about the “nanny state.” This is about how much of our common wealth should be hidden behind a pay wall. Is there a certain amount of life that should be free or is it all going to be pay-to-play? I believe that making it possible to have an intellectually and culturally rich life at low or no cost is critical to the fabric of a healthy democracy and vibrant economy.

Is it that important, this rich-poor life? We have reached a point where it seems we cannot afford to be us. Or at least us as we’ve defined it over the past 20 years. We’ve just witnessed widespread rioting in London. When people at every economic strata cannot live satisfying lives, pressure builds and eventually bursts. When we hollow out life so that it is defined only in economic terms, it becomes expensive at best and impossible at worst for many people to find that satisfaction. That is a tragedy for  individuals and society as a whole if we wish them both to be sustainable and resilient.