The question that stands before us now is not who can take part in the cultural transformation needed to address these complex problems, but how shall we stand together to do so? Will we simply try to fix the problems we now face with the same mindsets that created them or will we learn to be together in new ways?

Fortunately, every person can participate in and contribute to the creation of a new global ethos of partnership and peace. In fact, we do so each time we choose:

• discernment instead of judgment
• appreciation over criticism
• generosity in place of self-interest
• reconciliation over retaliation

A culture of partnership is one that supports our full humanity and helps us reach our highest human potential. Whether we build this culture depends on the choices we make, from the seemingly insignificant to the most exalted. By understanding our options, we can make wise decisions.

Reframing the Conversation

Through two decades of research, Riane Eisler (one of the authors of this article) found a fundamental difference in how human societies evolved (for a detailed discussion, see The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Harper Collins Publishing, 1987). She documented that, from the beginning, some cultures oriented more to what she termed a dominator system and others to a partnership system — and that gender roles and relations are structured very differently in each (see “Dominator-Partnership Continuum” on p. 10). In dominator systems, social ranking begins with our most fundamental human difference—the difference between female and male. The male and what is stereotypically considered masculine is valued over the female and the stereotypically feminine. This foundational ranking of one gender over the other sets in place a pattern of social rankings based on other differences, such as ethnicity, race, religion, and so on.

In partnership systems, societies value both halves of humanity equally and recognize that humans are social animals with a unique wisdom and capacity to work and live together. Here, stereotypically feminine traits and activities such as caring, nonviolence, and caregiving are highly valued — whether they reside in women or men. This orientation profoundly affects the society’s guiding system of values in all institutions, including business, government, and economics. For example, using the lenses of these social categories makes it possible to see that caring for people, starting in childhood, and for the Earth are important in human and environmental terms.

Toward the dominator end of the spectrum, social systems organize relationships at all levels according to a hierarchy of control, status, and privilege. They routinely extend rights and freedoms to those on top and deny them to those on the bottom. Such rankings lead to thinking limited to two dimensions: superior or inferior; dominating or dominated. Since there is no awareness of the partnership alternative, both parties live in fear. Those on top fear loss of power and control while those on the bottom perpetually seek to gain it. This ranking structure then leads to conflicts — sometimes over trivial issues — that escalate, often leading to cycles of violence, resentment, and retaliation. Such conditions do not generally contribute to growth, learning, or peace.

Social systems toward the partnership end of the spectrum are characterized by more egalitarian organizational structures in which both genders are seen as equal yet different, each capable of unique manifestations of value. A hierarchy of roles may exist, but delegation tends to be based on competency, rather than rankings by gender or other arbitrary groupings. Each group is capable of appreciating the unique value of the other. Differences are seen as opportunities for learning, and both individuals and groups organize through mutual accountability and individual responsibility. Empowerment stems from one’s unique contributions, and connections are made at the level of values, rather than by gender, ethnicity, and other social categories.

In her most recent book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Riane provides extensive evidence of how caring business policies that result from partnership values are actually more profitable than those that stem from dominator values. Economists tell us that building “high-quality human capital” is essential for the postindustrial, knowledge economy. Nations that invest in caring for children are doing just that—while those that do not will dearly pay for this failure.

Learning Conversations

In a global society, we see all shades in the spectrum between dominator and partnership systems. But the necessity to make headway on our intractable challenges requires that we accelerate the movement toward the partnership side of the continuum. A simple way to contribute to designing the future we desire is conversation. Conversation costs nothing but time and can include everyone. Conversations are one of the cornerstones of civic engagement. For millennia, they have served as a means to explore, defend, persuade, connect, and heal. Conversations become the threads of the social fabric of our lives, contributing to communal beliefs, expectations, and judgments about the structures and relationships underlying our families, tribes, communities, institutions, and nations. Conversations are so powerful that in an effort to control their subjects, despots and dictators often limit what topics can be discussed and how or if conversations are allowed.

DOMINATOR-PARTNERSHIP CONTINUUM

The necessity to make headway on our intractable challenges requires that we accelerate the movement toward the partnership side of the continuum.

Modern social science and psychological research has found that the what and how of conversations often lead to defining moments. The what of conversations are the topics we choose to discuss, and the how includes ideas for holding conversations from which we can learn and grow, rather than persuade, coerce, or intimidate. The purpose of holding conversations about our fundamental differences is, therefore, not to blame or judge each other or ourselves. Conversations are held in order to learn what still binds us to the dominator dynamic and to allow us to see each other and our world more clearly.

To understand what divides us, we must look honestly and earnestly at our differences. We must make an effort to understand the other’s point of view and to share our own. The best way to have a powerful conversation about what separates us is to simply listen, become aware of the meaning we may be making for ourselves from what we hear, and recognize that what the other person is saying is true for her or him.

At first, it may be difficult to hold neutral conversations due to the learned meanings we draw from words, phrases, and even tone of voice. Even if you hold your heart for humanity deeply, you are likely to carry some biases based on the tacit meanings that come from your experiences in life related to your own gender. To truly understand the other, you will want to consider what it is like to be in the other’s shoes, to have their beliefs, points of view, and experiences. The “Learning Practice of Leadership” may serve as a helpful reminder for how we can lead ourselves through the controversial waters of gender conversations (see “Learning Practice of Leadership” on p. 11).

Tips for Partnership Conversations

Below are tips for holding partnership conversations and some sample questions to get you started. These tools will be particularly useful in dealing with emotionally charged issues.

1. Convene the conversation in circle so that everyone holds an equal position.
2. Take time to allow people to get settled and leave their work and other concerns behind. Prepare a question that allows people to get introduced and learn a little about why they have joined this conversation.
3. Allow each person to speak when they are ready. There is no need to pressure anyone to talk. People will learn both from listening and speaking.
4. Allow each person who wishes to speak adequate time to do so without interruption.
5. Select a question to start the gender conversation. Several are included in the bulleted list below.
6. As you explore the conversation more deeply, use open questions. Open questions are questions to which there is no “yes” or “no” answer. They are not intended to lead to a specific outcome. Open questions come from a genuine place of curiosity. They often begin with words like “how,”, “what,” “when,” and “why.”
7. Be mindful of your intention when asking any question. If you have a judgment behind your question, it will likely show through., “Why” questions are particularly tricky as they sometimes sound accusatory, such as “Why do you believe that?”
8. Be transparent by stating your personal experiences in relating a position or asking a question.
9. Listen and try to put your judgments aside.
10. Resist the temptation to voice either your own affirmation or your disagreement with another person’s point of view. Allow each speaker to be accountable for their own words.
11. If you find you are having a strong reaction to someone’s comment, good or bad, make a note for later reflection. Ask yourself, what is creating this reaction?
12. In these conversations, it is not important to convince or draw conclusions, but to listen and learn. Have something to write on. Jot down what you notice. And when time allows, journal about what you notice about what you notice. See where a deeper inquiry leads without trying to find the “right answer.”
13. When the conversation has concluded, take time to record notes about what you’ve learned.
14. Reflect on new questions you may have as result of the conversation and new options for relating with others.

Examples: Gender Topic Questions

• What is the first memory you recall in which gender played an important role?
• What happened?
• Do you recall any conclusions you may have drawn as a result of this experience?
• Did the experience make you feel more satisfied to be your gender or less? More empowered or less?
• How do people in your church, work, or community express gender equality and gender rankings?
• What evidence do you find that men are more valued than women?
• What evidence do you find that women are more valued than men?
• What do males and females have in common when it comes to personal values?
• What do you believe about the expression of gender in living species that influences your attitudes about gender differences in humans?
• Think of a major historical event in your lifetime. If you were a different gender, how would your interpretation of that event be changed?
• How do the perceptions we hold about gender influence our attitudes toward power and money?
• What would be different if you had been born a different sex?
• How would the sexes have to change to live more closely aligned with the partnership model?
• What would be the impact to government, business, and other social systems?

Not Just a “Women’s Issue”

Exploring the issues that divide us by examining how we are influenced by our experience of gender can be powerful. It may lead to further inquiry to uncover how gender differences impact your family, community, work, and institutional relationships. In turn, these explorations may give rise to questions about how culture and nations impact each other through our policies, markets, and impact on the planet.

Beginning with our most fundamental human difference, the difference between male and female, it is now time to understand deeply how our gender privileges, limitations, and experiences have shaped and continue to influence us, not only as individual women and men but as members of a world that has inherited a system of values that is heavily influenced by dominator valuations.

One of the most interesting, and important, outcomes of open-ended conversations about gender is a new understanding of what it means to be human for both women and men — and that gender is not “just a women’s issue” but is a key issue for whether we move to a more peaceful and equitable world. As more of us talk openly about these matters, we become participants in the cultural transformation from domination to partnership — not only in gender relations but in all relations. We also help create more effective, humane, and sustainable business practices and government policies when we bring these unconscious impediments out into the open.

Note: References to behavior resulting from the ranking and hierarchy of roles in dominator and partnership systems were adapted from the work of Virginia Satir and the Satir Institute of the Pacific.

Riane Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, consultant, and author best known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now published in 23 languages. Her newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking” and by Peter Senge as “desperately needed,” proposes a new paradigm for economic systems. Riane keynotes at conferences worldwide, teaches transformative leadership at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (www.partnershipway.org).

Lucy E. Garrick is an organizational leadership consultant, speaker, artist, and founder of Million Ideas for Peace, a public project designed to help individuals connect their personal and social passions to peacemaking (www.millionideas4peace.com). Lucy consults with corporations, nonprofits, government agencies, and public groups to improve individual and group leadership and performance. She holds a masters degree in Whole Systems Design, is chair of the OSR Alumni Association board of directors, and is principle consultant at NorthShore Consulting Group in Seattle, WA (www.northshoregroup.net).

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The Nature of Man and His Environment

Our story begins over 1000 years ago, in the Middle Ages. Life expectancy was 27 years, 40 percent of the children did not survive infancy, 95 percent of the people never traveled more than four miles from their place of birth, and people lived in abject poverty. Given these bleak conditions, there was an intense focus on spirituality and the afterlife; this life was considered preparation for the life to come.

The conversion from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was sparked by the Crusades and the opening of trade in the city-states of Italy. These events brought different cultures in contact with one another, and that, along with improved living conditions, sparked a renewed interest in life in the here and now—a desire to understand man and his environment.

The view of the world that developed during the Renaissance was based on three fundamental beliefs. The first was that complete understanding of the universe was possible. A European conference of leading scientists in the mid-19th century declared that by 1900, our understanding of the universe would be complete. The second tenet was that the world could be understood through analysis, by breaking things down to their most basic level. This led to a fundamental belief throughout every branch of human knowledge that everything and every experience is reducible to indivisible parts. The third element of this worldview was that all relationships can be described through simple cause-and-effect relationships: (1) A cause is necessary for an effect (the effect will not occur unless the cause does); and (2) The cause is sufficient for the effect (if the cause occurs, then the effect must follow).

Implications for Our Worldview

The commitment to cause-and-effect thinking led to three very fundamental doctrines which have permeated our thought for almost 400 years. The first was that if we want to explain a phenomenon, all we have to do is find its cause. To further explain that cause, we simply treat it as an effect and find its cause. But is there any end to this causal regression? If the universe can be completely understood, there had to be a first cause—and this was the official doctrine as to why God exists. God is the only thing in the universe that could not be explained because God was the first cause.

The second consequence was that cause-and-effect thinking enabled us to have an environment-free theory of explanation. Since we believed that the understanding of the universe would be derived from the understanding of dyadic relationships (cause X’s effect on Y) without the intervention of the environment, we had theories of explanation that looked at events within a vacuum. The third doctrine was that everything that occurs is the effect of an earlier cause; nothing ever happens spontaneously, or by chance. This is called determinism—each event is determined by the events that preceded it.

Isaac Newton was the first to synthesize these doctrines into a single image of our universe—a hermetically-sealed clock. He described it as a closed mechanical system, self-contained, with no environment. This assertion—that the universe is a machine created by God to do God’s work—was preached by every religion in the Western world. Combine that with the biblical belief that man was created in the image of God, and you have the premise of a very interesting syllogism: (1) The universe is a machine created by God to do God’s work; (2) Man is created in the image of God; (3) Man should also create machines to do his work. That was the origin of the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution and the Machine Age

The Industrial Revolution, as the manifestation of our view of the world as a machine, brought about the mechanization of work. Work was defined in reductionist terms as the application of energy to matter to transform it. Based on this belief, Frederick Taylor developed a model of production that reduced work to its most basic elements, tasks so simple that no two people could do them at the same time. Those tasks that could be mechanized were assigned to machines, while the rest were done by hired labor. The machines and people were then aggregated into a network of elementary tasks dedicated to the production of a product—the modern factory. In the process of mechanizing work, however, we made people behave as though they were machines. We dehumanized work.

Dilemmas that Rocked the Machine Age

The decline of the Machine Age occurred as certain dilemmas appeared that challenged the validity of the worldview upon which it was based. The first chink in the Machine Age armor appeared with the realization that if everything we do is determined by something that preceded it (cause-and-effect thinking), then there is no free will. This flew in the face of the emerging belief in freedom of choice.

In 1923, a young German physicist named Werner Heisenberg came out with an incredible finding: the more accurately you can determine one basic property of an atom, the less accurately you will be able to know its other properties. For example, if you know the atom’s mass, then you cannot determine its energy. His finding challenged the belief that the universe can be completely understood. Similarly, John Dewey’s classical book The Quest for Certainty said that understandability of the universe is an unattainable end but an ideal we can continuously approach.

The dilemma that finally broke the back of Machine Age thinking, however, was the emerging understanding of systems that was anticipated by the publication of Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics in 1947 and realized in von Bertalanffy’s 1954 book, General Systems Theory.

The Systems Age

Why did systems break the back of Machine Age thinking? It has to do with the fundamental characteristics of systems. A system is a whole which consists of a set of two or more parts. Each part affects the behavior of the whole, depending on how it interacts with the other parts of the system.

Also, the essential properties that define any system are properties of the whole which none of its parts have. For example, the essential property of an automobile is that it can take you from one place to another. No single part of an automobile—a wheel, an axle, a carburetor—can do that. Once we take a system apart, it loses that fundamental characteristic. If we were to disassemble a car, even if we kept every single piece, we would no longer have a car. Why? Because the automobile is not the sum of its parts, it is the product of their interactions.

To understand a system, analysis says to take it apart. But when you take a system apart, it loses all of its essential properties. The discovery that you cannot understand the nature of a system by analysis forced us to realize that another type of thinking was required. Not surprisingly, it came to be called synthesis.

Synthesis vs. Analysis, Understanding vs. Knowledge

Synthesis is exactly the opposite of analysis. The first step of synthesis is to determine the larger system of which the system to be explained is a part. The second step is to try to understand the larger system as a whole. The third step is to disaggregate the understanding of the whole into an understanding of the part by identifying its role or function in the containing system.

Analysis, on the other hand, reveals structure— how a system works. If you want to repair an automobile, you have to analyze it to find what part isn’t working. Synthesis reveals understanding—why it works the way it does. The automobile, for example, was originally developed for six passengers. But no amount of analysis will help you to find out why. The answer lies in the fact that cars were designed for the average American family, which happened to be 5.6 at the time. Cars are now smaller in design because the average family size is 3.2.

The Doctrine of Expansionism

When we substituted synthetic thinking for analytic thinking, the Machine Age began to die. Reductionism gave way to expansionism–the belief that although we may never reach a complete understanding of the universe, the larger the system we comprehend, the greater our understanding. The man who was first responsible for this transformation was Arthur Singer, Jr.

In 1898, Singer published what was later seen as the most revolutionary article in science in the last 100 years. It addressed the issue of determinism and free will. In it he asked, “Is an acorn the cause of an oak?” Clearly it is not; if we throw an acorn into the ocean, a desert, or an iceberg, we will not get an oak tree. An acorn is necessary, but not sufficient. Singer called this relationship producer-product. Unlike deterministic thinking, which says B is determined by A, a producer-product relationship says that A is necessary but not sufficient to produce B.

What are the implications of looking at the world through a producer-product viewpoint, instead of cause-and-effect? First of all, the environment becomes important. If I want to explain an oak, I first look for the acorn which produced it. But there must also be a certain amount of moisture, soil, nutrients, etc. The producer-product viewpoint provides an environment-full, not environment-free, theory of explanation.

Secondly, producer-product thinking is not a replacement for cause-and-effect analysis; it is simply another way of looking at the world. Just as an orange looks different depending on which way you cut it, Singer showed that cause-and-effect is only one way of looking at reality. Because reality is multidimensional, there are an infinite number of ways to look at it, and every slice through it will give you a different view. Therefore producer-product is not an alternative to cause-andeffect, but the two are complementary. And when you look at it this way, free will, purpose, and choice are compatible.

Business as a Machine or Social System?

Our view of business has been profoundly influenced by this changing worldview. During the Industrial Revolution, business was viewed as a machine invented by man to do his work. The “god” of early business was the owner who created it. There were no labor laws or restrictions, and the business existed to serve the owner’s purposes—to make a profit.

The appearance of unions and the education of the workforce brought some change to the workplace, but more fundamental shifts were wrought by economic factors. The economy was growing so fast in the 1920s that even if an enterprise took all of its profits and reinvested in its own growth, it still could not grow as fast as possible. Therefore, business owners in the 1920s had to decide whether to retain exclusive control of their enterprises, constrain growth, and remain “god,” or to share control with others who could contribute capital. Those corporations that survived went public to raise the additional capital so they could grow. Now the “god” of the organization was not one single owner, but a group of shareholders.

World War II brought yet another transformation to the workplace. Even as the bulk of the American workforce was drafted into the military, our industrial machine demanded greater productivity. This prompted a huge influx of women into the workplace, and for the first time in the history of enterprise, the workforce was not primarily economically motivated. Pay in the army was $21 a month plus an allowance for each dependent, which meant that dependents could live comfortably, though not luxuriously, while the primary supporter was in the service.

The people who went to work during this time were the first ones who did not have to work in order to survive, and therefore they had a different attitude toward work. They said, “If you want me to work, you’re going to have to pay attention to me. I am not a machine that you can use as you see fit and discard when I don’t serve your purposes. I am here because of patriotism and loyalty to a national cause.” For the first time, management had to begin to think of the workforce as human beings.

Most managers are still acting as though the corporation is a mechanism or an organism, not a social system.

The civil rights movement, women’s liberation, revolt of the younger generation, and problems in the third world represented parts of systems claiming the system as a whole was not serving their interests. As a result of these forces, the nature of management changed dramatically. Our view of organizations, however, has not quite caught up. Most managers are still acting as though the corporation is a mechanism or an organism, not a social system. Although we don’t normally treat machines as organisms, one legacy from the Machine Age is that we have a tendency to treat organisms as machines, and even social systems as machines. That has a very limited usefulness, but it is not nearly as useful as looking at a social system as a social system.

Communications in the Systems Age

The Machine Age had the Industrial Revolution as its counterpart. So what is the technological counterpart of the Systems Age?

Around 1850, we began to use electricity as the source of power. When we started to use it, we had to develop devices such as ohmmeters and ammeters to measure it for us. These instruments were not machines in the classical sense. They were observers, not producers, and had nothing to do with the application of energy to matter to change the nature of matter. Yet we called them machines.

Very shortly thereafter the telegraph was invented. Then came the telephone, wireless, radio, television, and laser. They also were not machines; they were symbol transmitters—communications tools. For years, however, we treated these inventions as machines, as part of the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t until 1946 that we recognized that something fundamental had changed.

What we were doing, in effect, was building a whole new technology based on an arch that had three stones. Observation was on one side and communication was on the other, but we didn’t have a keystone until 1946. Then the first electronic digital computer, the Univac, was invented. It was neither a communicator nor an observer. Although we called it a thinking machine, it wasn’t really a machine because it did not apply energy to the transformation of matter. It was a symbol-manipulating device.

A remarkable professor of philosophy, Suzanne Langer, observed that these emerging sciences and technologies all had to do with the manipulation of symbols in one way or another. And as Langer turned attention to the processing of symbols, at the same time synthetic thinking began to emerge. So when you put all these things together instead of taking them apart, what do you get? What you get is a mind.

The first Industrial Revolution was about the replacement of muscle by machine; about the application of energy to matter to transform it. Now we have a whole new technology which is about the use of artifacts as a substitute for mind, because they can communicate and observe and think. And so automation, rather than mechanization, is the key technology of the systems age.

Our current managerial and administrative problems were generated by a world that operates as a social system; but we have been trying to solve them using approaches based on mechanistic or organismic views of the world. Continuation of this mismatch assures continued degradation of our quality of life—if not our standard of living.

This article is condensed from a talk given by Russell Ackoff at the 1993 Systems Thinking in Action Conference. The complete story is available on both audio and video through Pegasus Communications.

Russell L. Ackoff was widely recognized as a pioneering systems thinker. He taught at Case Western Reserve and The Wharton School, and served as chairman of the board at INTERACT: The Institute for Interactive Management. He wrote numerous books, including Ackoff’s Fables and Creating the Corporate Future.

Note: Gender-specific terminology (i.e. “man” for “humankind”) was retained throughout the article to reflect the thinking of the times described.

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We live in the networked society, with over 1 billion people connected to the Internet and a projected 3 billion by 2015. More than 95 percent of all enterprises today leverage the Internet as a strategic element of their business. In such a hyper-connected, networked economy, behaviors have shifted radically. Individuals expect real-time information, collaboration has become the norm, and pervasive technologies no longer seem so pervasive.

In a networked economy, experience and experimentation are the primary means of learning. Individuals no longer rely on an expert model for advice and guidance; instead, bottomup information emerges from the masses and is rapidly distributed across social networks to influence behavior. Passive, top-down learning seems to have given way to a more active process of exploration and inquiry. Consumer personalization is no longer a concept that is forecasted for the future; in fact, a do-it-yourself population deconstructs products and services in order to adapt them for their own personal needs. The boundaries between buyers, producers, sellers, and consumer have become so radically blurred that new models of double-sided markets have emerged to describe these relationships. A consumer today may be a provider tomorrow. Self-organizing networks are proliferating at an unprecedented velocity, and intense, real-time feedback loops have the capacity to revolutionize markets at a moment’s notice.

We’re now finding that, when our time-tested principles are challenged by radical change, they are found wanting.

Pervasive connectivity has the potential to generate swarm-like behaviors that replicate the spreading of a virus. Yet leaders are still taught command-and-control tactics to influence and manage behavior. The bias of deep analysis, comprehensive planning, and methodical execution still rules the day. Adaptation, experimentation, and collaboration are only considered in desperation when conventional wisdom has failed. But we’re now finding that, when our time-tested principles are challenged by radical change, they are found wanting.

The Napster Example

We don’t have to look too far for examples of such limitations. In the late 1990s, when the music industry was at its heyday, 85 percent of the recording business was owned by what was then considered “the big five.” However, in 1999, a 19-year-old student attending Northeastern University in Boston changed the industry forever. Shawn Fanning, known by his friends as “Napster,” wrote a simple peer-to-peer search and retrieval system for online music. His aspirations were quite simple: to develop a program that provided online users an easy way to download music.

Fanning couldn’t have predicted that, almost overnight, online file sharing would become a creative, musical epidemic. From June of 1999 to February of 2001, Napster (the name Fanning gave to his software) had grown to 26.4 million users. Based on conventional wisdom, the recording industry responded to the rise of Napster by filing a flurry of lawsuits for copyright infringements. In July 2001, a district court ruled in the recording industry’s favor, and Napster was forced to shut down services. The industry declared success and turn their attention to the Napster clones.

What the recording industry seemed to ignore was the impetus behind the Napster explosion. Napster created an easy user interface to download music while also enabling users to select one song at a time. Record companies had become incredibly profitable by selling a complete CD through the popularity of a couple of best-selling songs, an approach that often frustrated consumers. The industry seemed to ignore the unfolding opportunity around distributing songs one at a time and instead dedicated its attention to protecting its profit pool.

According to the recording Industry Association of America statistics, this strategy proved to be a costly mistake. The dollar value of the sales of physical CDs has shifted radically since the introduction of Napster. In 1999, revenue generated from physical sales exceeded $14.5 billion, while annual sales for 2007 were less than $8 billion (Recording Industry Association of America, Year-End Shipment Statistics, 2007). The recording industry launched an irrational war on the peer-to-peer providers, filing more than 20,000 lawsuits against individual users while ignoring the basic premise behind the shift—a new consumer preference.

At the same time the recording industry was applying conventional wisdom to squeeze out what leaders saw as a threat, Apple’s management was observing the emergence of a new channel for online music distribution. On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs announced that “listening to music will never be the same again.” The new iPod provided users with the ability to place their entire music collection in their pockets, and iPods quickly became a major fashion icon of the early 2000s. Generation after generation of enhancements and the launching of the iTunes store in 2003 have made Apple the number one retailer of music in the United States and the dominant force in online distribution, providing more than 85 percent of downloads. Thus, the conventional leadership wisdom of the music industry proved not so wise within the dynamic context of a networked economy.

A Shift in Leadership

We no longer live in a world dominated by hierarchies with rigid boundaries. Today’s institutions are much messier and require a constant need to explore and discover on a real-time basis. In a real-time environment, no single individual can know everything, and no one person has control. To believe otherwise is at best illusionary or at worst pure arrogance. Complexity has surpassed individual human capacity, significantly limiting the ability of our command-and-control design.

These days, we live in a world that is becoming more plastic and liquid and ever less concrete in nature. The world’s financial services ecosystem changed within a month, just as in the early 1990s we saw an old paradigm around dominant government control crumble with the Berlin Wall. Likewise, the fear and cost of threats of continued disruption from terrorism keeps us in a constant state of heightened awareness.

MACRO-LEVEL LEADERSHIP NETWORK MAP

In government and business alike, we need to create new models to balance a need for appropriate control and the fluid nature of open markets. We must move beyond outdated paradigms of static and behaviorally based approaches to leadership. There are still times when conventionally wisdom holds true. The ability to shift between traditional and emerging models of leadership represents a new type of navigational wisdom.

Michael Arena, PhD, is an adjunct faculty member of Queens University’s Master in Organization Development program. He is also a senior vice president of Leadership Development at Bank of America, where he serves as an Executive in Residence within the Center for Future Banking, a partnership with MIT’s Media Lab to drive banking innovation. His research findings on whole system change and complexity science have been published in multiple peer-reviewed management journals.

Sharon Benjamin, PhD, serves as adjunct faculty in the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, where she teaches the capstone course in leadership for graduating Master of Public Service students. Sharon also serves on the governing boards of Plexus Institute, BlueVoice.org, Earthworks, and Oceana.

For Further Reading

• Brafman, Ori, and Rod A. Beckstrom. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (Portfolio, 2006).
• National Intelligence Council. GlobalTrends 2015: A Dialogue about the FutureWith Nongovernment Experts (Issue NIC 2000-02, December 2000).
• Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (Portfolio, 2006).

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