“When we look deeply into a sheet of paper,
we see that it’s full of everything in the cosmos:
the sunshine, the trees, the clouds, the earth, the minerals,
everything—except for one thing.
It’s empty of one thing only: a separate self.
The sheet of paper cannot be by itself alone.
That is why the word inter-be can be more helpful than the word be.
In fact, to be means to inter-be. The sheet of paper cannot be
without the sunshine, cannot be without the forest.
The sheet of paper has to inter-be with the sunshine, to inter-be with the forest.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
When the activity of leadership is stripped of the behavioral characteristics, personality distinctions, and situational competencies typically used to describe a leader, what one is left with is simply movement – leaders cause movement, they cause change simply by their presence in a system irrespective of anything else they may bring. Leadership is defined for the purposes of this brief article as being the activity of co-creating the coordinated movement necessary to generate the actions required in order to produce desired results. The activity of co-creation is central to this definition and is important because of the simple fact that nothing is ever created absent a relationship of some type. Leaders can never unilaterally cause movement. Change only occurs when something has moved in relation to what was before. It requires two (or more) to be part of the process.
It is in this sense that leadership must be seen as being foremost a relational activity. It is not an exaggeration to assert that the quality of the myriad relationships found in organizations is an accurate litmus of the likelihood of the organization’s long-term success. These relationships include the obvious interpersonal relationships that are readily and objectively visible. Perhaps more importantly however, they also include the subjective relationships that are not so visible – the relationships that individuals have with such things as values, work processes, goals and objectives, vision, mission, self, spirit, identity, behavior, mood states, parking places and office layouts. To the degree that all these varied relationships that are present in any system are working well, the system has a pretty good chance of being successful. Being unaware of, and consequently, not attending to these objective and subjective relationships can and does limit any leader’s effectiveness dramatically.
In today’s rapidly changing world it must be understood that the difficulty people and organizations have with change is seldom with the change itself. The true difficulty is with the difficulty people have in dealing with the disruption to the myriad relationships that the change causes. Learning to lead within this context of co-creation requires a fundamentally different world view and educational approach. It’s not enough to simply teach to a set of situational or generic leadership competencies. Relationships are much too fluid and complex to be held hostage to such a competency framework. Rather, leaders today need to learn what it means to co-create. They and their organizations need to disabuse themselves of the legacy paradigm of the leader as the one “in charge”.
Competition and collaboration are terms that are widely used to describe how results are generally produced in and by organizations. They can be thought of as existing on a zero-sum continuum that moves from competition to collaboration as two or more parties come closer together to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Both terms are predicated on a fundamental duality that is framed in language as “us” and “them”. “We” collaborate or compete with “them”. This experience of separation, despite our best efforts and intentions, often reinforces a sense of scarcity relative to resources (and success) which frequently results in counter-productive competition. Not incidentally this dynamic typically involves feelings informed by notions of fairness or its lack. This is important to understand because its feelings that drive behavior – not intention.
Co-creation requires a different paradigm – a paradigm organized around a world view that recognizes that everything is connected. Being able to lead from this world view requires skills steeped in arenas such as Awareness, Context, Communication Mastery, Trust, and Commitment/Ownership. These new skills are informed by the domains of Spirit, Time/Space, Mind, and Personal Mastery as its core.
Ultimately, the effectiveness of tomorrow’s leader will be measured not only by the results they produce but by the beauty and elegance by which those results are co-created and delivered. Beauty in this model is linked to the Platonic virtue of Beauty which is defined as being the result of a spiritual co-creation. Something is beautiful when the spirit giving birth to its manifestation is evident – think of a beautiful sunset, the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David, an exceptional relationship, and the iPhone. Beauty is the measure of co-created outcomes that are designed to thrive rather than merely survive. Beauty is the measure of co-created outcomes that are designed to thrive rather than merely survive. Wherever we find Beauty there is an enormous reserve of power behind it because what is being produced is connected to all of life.
