Leaderless Groups

I've been thinking a little lately about how groups operate, based on my own participation in a number of voluntary organizations.

A couple of things moved this to my mind. First, I read an article by environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawken about the emerging environmental movement, which he says "is the largest social movement in all of history," adding that, "no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye." What's mysterious about these groups, Hawken observes, in that they are fluid, atomized, arising spontaneously, and bound by ideas rather than ideologies. For example, he says, "we read that organic agriculture is the fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture."

I happen to be involved in two of these groups, and what is interesting about them to me is their resistance to traditional models of leadership. One of them has been meeting continuously for at least three years. We do accept the rather loose control of having someone facilitate meetings, but everyone has resisted designating an individual as a leader. This does not mean there is an absence of leadership, but rather it means that leadership moves more fluidly from one individual to another based on the demands of the situation and the interests of our various members. We have succeeded in pulling off a World Cafe on global warming, have launched a Low Carbon Diet group, have educated electrical contractors about opportunities for electrical energy improvement rebates, organized a sustainable transportation week, and have hosted numerous small forums and meetings on sustainability topics. We have a website, a blog, and are collaborating with others on developing an environmental mailing list. All this has been done without the traditional apparatus of an organization: we have no budget, no board of directors, no staff, no meetings minutes, no dues, and no "Roberts Rules of Order."

When a group operates in this manner, things can get done easily and rapidly as group interests coalesce around an issue or approach to matters. Because most of the group members are responding based on their own internally generated priorities, actions that don't meet these needs simply whither on the vine. For example, the sustainable transportation week, which was one of my top priorities, failed to generate resonance with other group members. The project needed allies to be successful, and it failed to find these. In contrast, the World Cafe on global warming resonated strongly with enough members to make it a collective effort worth pursuing.

I contrast the behavior of this group to several more traditional groups that I have been invited to join. AAUW, the American Association of University Women, has an active chapter in my community. The organization has a long and storied history of good works and community building. Unfortunately, I found I was not attracted to the group based on both its more traditional form (membership dues, designated leaders, minutes, and so on), and to its less fluid content.

Despite the fluid content of these newer untraditional organizations, they still must develop an organizational culture. Stresses and strains arise not only to leadership failures, colliding values and patterns of domination, but due to the multiple levels of maturity and consciousness of group members. It takes real wizardry for leaders within these groups--self acknowledged ones rather than designated leaders--to navigate through these layers of ambiguity, harnessing the potential collective energies for good group work.