further work with integration
leading in uncertainty
in our systems leadership program with dana shen, we've completed a series of sessions to build our learning community, and then ground our knowledge with conceptual frameworks. our focus is now guided by the systems practice framework. the framework names six areas of systems practice (knowing, being, doing, relating, thinking and perceiving) and the capabilities that practice asks of us. we explore the practice area through concepts and methods, as well as mindfulness meditation. we also run peer coaching clinics where participants bring and explore the leadership challenges they are working through.
to lead in uncertainty is to hold hope for others while tending your own
this was a reflection and integration session, the second of four we weave across our program year. these sessions slow the pace and make room to sit with what the work is asking of us. this time the room arrived at a hard and living question: how do we hold hope in systems work, when the challenges are large and the outcomes far from certain?
it started with a question about the growing body of writing on collapse, and opened into something practical for anyone who leads. we held several threads together rather than resolving them.
people meet the state of the world differently, and what steadies one person will not steady another. there is no single right relationship to difficulty, and part of leading well is making room for that range rather than prescribing a mood.
we kept returning to the difference between wishing for something better and active hope. active hope as doing what is required now, in the conditions we are actually in, rather than waiting on a brighter forecast before we act. it asks less of our optimism and more of our commitment.
there is also equanimity, the practice of noticing how readily our attention gets pulled around, toward despair one moment and toward easy reassurance the next, and learning to hold a steady base in the middle of that pull. not detachment, but somewhere stable to keep acting from.
underneath it all sat the leadership question. those who set the tone in a room carry a particular responsibility for its generative energy. tip too far toward reassurance and you reach a forced positivity no one quite believes; let your own despair fill the space and you can pull the creative energy of a room down with you. both, we came to name, are really responses to uncertainty. the work is to find somewhere your own response can be held, so you can be with others in theirs. and being with others in uncertainty is harder still than steadying your own.
this is core leadership work, and it belongs to systems change as much as any strategy does. the capacity to hold a field of hope, honestly and without looking away, is part of what makes collective work possible.
how do you tend your own hope, so you can hold it for others without pretending?
