Future Here Now: Network Power, Hidden Leaders and Solidarity Economics

Signals

One of the underlying, deeply fundamental changes that is driving our future to become so different from how we have worked and lived in the past…. is also damn hard to explain.

We came up in a world that was organized around hierarchies. You worked for an organization and did what the boss told you to do. You went to school and followed the teacher’s instructions. If you committed a crime like my son did in fourth grade, you paid for it (he pasted the picture onto the page vertically instead of horizontally because he felt it looked better. The way his teacher responded, you would have throught he was tearing up the Magna Carta.)

Over the past 20 years or so, a lot of hierarchites have gotten flattened, rejiggered or just thrown out. Corporations eliminated whole levels of middle management, and the idea of the 1960s Organization Man, the obedient cog in the system, became as emblematic of a past era as beehive hairdos and poodle skirts.

What has been replacing that organizing model? Something that I find a lot harder to describe. More and more, we live and work in networks — but they’re not like telephone networks, they’re kind of more like bee hives, but not really. We connect and disconnect with other individuals and organizations based on what we or others need at any given time, we shift from one group of these connections to another and then back again, we expand and contract our relationships based on situations that we control, and situations we don’t control. It’s a network, but it’s a living network - one that moves and shifts and seems to sense in a sort of collective way. The relatonships within it — between collaborators, suppliers, members — aren’t at all fixed like a hierarchy, although some will last longer than others. The organizing principle increasingly governing our work, our organizations and our awareness of the world is less fixed, less directed, more responsive and fluid. And more uncertain, in the non-emotional sense of that world.

But because we learned to assume a hierarchy, that uncertainty can make us very emotional. As in, fearful and unsteady. Learning to thrive in this environment, versus the predictable world of the hierarchy represents one of the most significant challenges of becoming Future Ready.

Here are a few dimensions of how that shift from hierarchy to …. hive? is playing out today.

Running out of farmers? Create a hive of mini-farms. But you gotta do it right

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/next-generation-farmers-france/

Our aging agricultural workforce is placing pressure on most Western countries’ food security, and the enormous cost of getting started in conventional agriculture means that very few young people can enter the field unless they’re inheriting a working operation. France’s solution - fostering hundreds of manageable-sized farms that younger persons have a chance of being able to operate successfully.

Note, however, that moving to this hive approach requires more than just throwing open the doors to some plots of dirt. The new farms and their farmers are by no means just cut loose to figure it out (as we too often do with entrepreneurs in the U.S.). By signing up for this program, they become tightly embedded in a network of expertise, suppliers, peers and every other condition they need for a chance of success:

The so-called “Green Belt” project, which began in the French municipality of Pau, rents out modest, two-hectare plots of farmland near the city that are already prepared and equipped at an affordable rate for fledgling farmers.

“The Green Belt corresponded perfectly to our needs,” says Apesteguy, 30. She and Chevalier, 28, have run their farm in Rontignon on the outskirts of Pau since February 2022. “It’s very difficult to find farming land here. And even then we would have needed a bank loan, which we would have almost certainly been refused.”

Prospective farmers, who must submit detailed proposals for their farm projects, are connected with city markets and local restaurants for sales as well as a subscription service that allows deliveries of food crates to consumers. Through the process, technical advisers working for the Green Belt provide mentoring and technical support on the latest methods, such as robotic systems, new crop species and irrigation optimization….

For farmers like Apesteguy, the project — and, crucially, the wider support network it offers — has proven invaluable.

The farmers in the Green Belt have helped each other in the past if someone has had an accident or emergency, and they have regularly bought supplies en masse to cut costs. 

“If we are all alone, it can quickly turn into a nightmare,” she says. “But this has allowed us to install ourselves properly.”

In a hierarchy, you can force best practices from above. In a hive, you need this mix of expertise and an active, supportive community.

Solidarity Economies, 10 years in

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/building-the-solidarity-economy-a-decades-assessment

If you are not familiar with the stealthy but growing world of solidarity initiatives, which broadly include worker cooperatives, community land trusts and other types of decentralized ownership and benefit structures, you should take the time to read this article closely.

When you come from a hierarchy (and particularly a capitalist hierarchy) perspective, it might be easy to dismiss the occasional initiative of this type as a sort of hippie utopia exercise. But if you do that, you’re missing some of the most innovative and potentally powerful ways to address many of the toughest challenges we face as communities — the externalities of our capitalism-formed structures and assumptions.

Amidst a good summary of ongoing inititives nationwide and a critique of some of the barriers they are facing, the authors also point us to the fact that solidarity economies are another type of hive, and like the French farmers, building healthy networks in this new model requires concerted, long-term relational investment:

The work of building a solidarity economy is fundamentally relational. As Andres Del Castillo of CLVU observes, “Solidarity is not a way to show up in a moment, but a way to exist. It requires, especially for organizations, a lot of authenticity, a lot of vulnerability…being able to genuinely assess each other in ways that can feel uncomfortable. It just requires a deeper level of trust.”

Hidden Leadership <> Hive action

workfutures.io/p/a-paradox-of-leadership

Stowe Boyd is one of my favorite newsletter writers, and he brings a new dimension to routine topics that I value. In this article, he’s quoting an opinion piece posted by the New York Times called “What Football Can Teach Politics” (here is the link to that, if you have a subscription.)

I love this quote he uses from the football article:

One of the paradoxes of leadership is that the better you are at it, the less people tend to notice you. When leaders remain calm and consistent, and unite people over a sensible course of action, observers may be less likely to recognize their influence or give them proper credit.

And I love even more that he expands on that with this passage from the Tai Te Ching. Funny how the oldest writings sometimes say exactly the thing we need now:

True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.

To give no trust
is to get no trust.

When the work's done right,
with no fuss or boasting,
ordinary people say,
Oh, we did it.

That’s a very different definition of a leader than we have gotten from our hierarchy-laden heritage.

So what do I do with all this?

How can you start to live in the hive, rather than locking yourself into hierarchy thinking that is largely dying out? Here are a few bits to consider:

• If you manage other people, try to deconstruct a few of your fallback management methods. If you tend to discourage alternatives to your directives, ffor example, ask yourself why you are inclined to do that — and try to explore what opportunities for improvement you might be missing by shutting down ideas that aren’t your own.

• If you are managed by someone else, try to identify how much your organization strives to be a hive, and how much the way it actually works reflects hierarchy-based assumptions. Are you expected to manage your own time or do you clock in and out? Are you encouraged to be creative? What happens to your ideas when you are? Doing this might not solve your frustrations with your workplace, but they might help you understand more clearly something that’s bothering you, and build your awareness of how hive intentions and hierarchy assumpttions might be working at cross-purposes to each other.

• If you have any kind of leadership responsibility, even if it’s for a small committee or a rec league sports team or something, chew over that quote above and think about how that might point you to a different approach to leadership. It might mean that you do more of your correcting privately instead of in front of the whote group, or it might mean that you slow down the process a bit and encourage more discussion of alternatives among your team members.

What do you think?