The Challenge LEADERSHIP FOR THE NEW COMMONS A Bioregional Leadership Initiative of the Whidbey Institute We live in a time of dramatic change—a hinge point in history—and there is a critical need for a new practice of the art of leadership. In a world characterized by increased complexity, diversity, and moral ambiguity, we drift into polarization. Narrow, single-issue politics and role-based morality feed growing dysfunction, injustice, environmental deterioration, and the loss of community. We need leaders who can see things whole, who are committed to the common good, and who have both the moral courage and the skill to work on behalf of a more compassionate, just, sustainable, and prosperous future. Such leaders have a keen sense of our interdependence, a deep sense of worthy purpose, and the capacity and commitment to enhance the quality of our collective life. A key competence of such leaders is the ability to see how their own sector relates to other sectors of society and to the natural world that together make up “the new commons.” This new, complex commons requires integral leadership—the capacity to integrate a depth of inner spiritual and ethical awareness with thoughtful, skillful, and creative action in the outer world, particularly in the face of radical uncertainty. A hunger for this kind of leadership is showing up in every domain, and we are at a point where inadequately addressed and critical issues are starting to overtake our capacity to deal with them. There is a vital need for leaders who can recognize the interdependent features of emerging conditions, ask new questions, imagine alternative possibilities, and skillfully navigate within complex dynamics to enable organizations and the wider society to create more viable modes of working together on behalf of our common future. A Creative and Distinctive Response Leadership for the New Commons is a response to the call for informed, morally courageous, effective leadership that is a match for the economic, ecological, and cultural conditions in which we now find ourselves—leadership with new skills and new animating myths—new ways of seeing and working. Such leadership is characterized by three distinctive capacities: · Consciousness: A compelling awareness of interdependence and connectivity that is grounded in an understanding of the ecology of the natural environment (the more-than-human world). This complex interdependence requires a re-alignment of our cultural, social, political, and economic arrangements toward the development of a more hopeful future for all. · Conscience: A spiritual and ethical awareness and commitment that arises from this consciousness of the interdependence of all life, embracing both suffering and wonder—the Mystery we all share. Such awareness is informed by historic faith traditions and by contemporary, emergent spiritual insight. It provides orientation, purpose, meaning, and depth—and is manifest in hope, reverence, compassion, imagination, courage, moral-ethical accountability, and the capacity to hold steady and stay the course. · Competence: The confidence and skill to recognize and respond to the toughest problems—those that fall in the space between known problems and unknown solutions. Such challenges require bold action. And this action must embody anticipatory learning, skillful innovation, new patterns of thought and behavior, profound collaboration, resistance to false solutions, and the creation of new realities (often involving conflict, loss, and grief) on behalf of a positive future for all. To these ends, Leadership for the New Commons recognizes “the commons” as a place, an aspiration, and a metaphor. “The commons” is the image that informs the “common good.” The commons (by whatever name) is the place where people gather and experience a shared life within a manageable frame: the crossroads of a village, the great plazas of European cities, a New England green, Main Street, the playground, the marketplace, or a cathedral, mosque, synagogue or temple. The commons is a place of celebration and memorial, commerce and communication, play and protest. Key elements that constitute the commons—water, food sources, air, government, language, a monetary system, ritual, art, etc. are ideally accessible to all, and thus the notion of the commons presses toward inclusion. But the commons is always imperfectly practiced—slaves were sold on the commons, Quakers and Jesuits were hanged on Boston Common, and hundreds were killed in Tianamen Square. Thus the commons is both a reality and an aspiration. The commons, as metaphor, does what good metaphors do—it conveys complex but interdependent realities. Today we are all swept up into “a new global commons.” How we are all going to dwell together within this new commons is an urgent question at this critical turning in our history. In this new commons, the environmental challenge in which we now find ourselves is not merely one issue among many. It is a key, orienting issue that touches and potentially reorders everything else. If human beings are going to be able to meet this challenge and imagine citizenship within a global/planetary commons, it is vitally important for people to have an experience of a micro-commons. This requires reclaiming a meaningful sense of the integrity of place within the more-than-human-world and an active belonging within a shared ecological-social-political-economic-spiritual frame. This initiative, therefore, is framed by the boundaries of a place, the Cascadia bioregion—specifically the largest Coastal Temperate Rainforest on the planet—west of the Cascade Mountain Range to the Pacific Coast and extending from British Columbia to Northern California. This bioregion is punctuated by three major cities: Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, WA, and Portland, OR. Thus Leadership for the New Commons is grounded in a bioregional imagination, an understanding of the ecology, culture, and the integrity of a particular place, woven inextricably throughout all sectors of the commons: health, education, business, government, religion, science and technology, the arts, philanthropy, social services, sports and entertainment, and media. A bioregional vision yields new capacities and approaches—it gives juice to the imagination and practice of leadership. . .
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 04:17:29 +0000
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