Understanding leadership in relation to this network: organic models

In another thread, the comment was made regarding leadership, in relation to our community:

Minas Tirith said:

In my opinion the concept of "leader" is outdated and doesn't work in a true STO community (that we aspire to become). It's a network of people that have different strengths and can support each other, putting others behind on the ladder, but not leading many in a hierarchical sense. Still, sometimes I think, that some people are more active, and Laura, in a way, is a "leader", too, here ... so, still a lot to ponder ...

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This brought to mind the concepts of leadership I have read about in Gerald M. Weinberg's book Becoming a Technical Leader. There are quite different and contrasting ways of viewing and defining leadership. The typical academic "understanding" of it tends to be limited to a simplistic, hierarchical way of seeing it, though, and few are exposed to other models. Leadership does not necessarily have to be hierarchical - and Weinberg contrasts the more well-known hierarchical and "linear" approach with the "organic" approach.

The role of models of leadership in understanding it

Becoming a Technical Leader said:

In order to recognize leadership in a group, you must have a model that somehow matches the group's culture. [...] Someone once said that the central dogma of academic psychology is that there is one and only one correct solution to every problem--and the psychologist knows it. Any psychologist who believes that simple model will have trouble defining leadership in a way that works in real-world situations. For one thing, such a person would never recognize Martha as a leader. {The last thing refers to the quoted example placed at the end of the post.}

There are many models of how people behave in the world. Even within the discipline of psychology, there are dozens of major models and hundreds of minor variations. The sociologists' models differ from those of the psychologists, as well as from the anthropologists, the economists, the executives, and the janitors. The reason there are so many models is that each of them is useful, but only in some contexts. The problems arise when we try to apply a model that doesn't match the situation in front of our eyes.

[...] To be an effective leader, you will have to have many models at your disposal, and be able to switch approporiately from one to the other as the situation demands. Most of the models I favor may be considered organic models, in contrast to linear models, but there are times when I can be quite appropriately linear.

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Organic vs. linear models of leadership

Weinberg goes on to compare and contrast organic and linear models of leadership. Linear models are what most seem to have in mind when they speak of leadership - these tend to reduce people to roles, with 'leader' being one of those roles. One example of a linear model is the threat/reward model: "there is one and only one right answer, and anyone who cannot see it must be either dumb or bad." "When we operate out of the threat/reward model, we tend to see the leader's role as issuing threats and doling out rewards."

By contrast, organic models basically consider every member of the group, and every factor that affects it, in terms of its relationship with the whole. "It is impossible to change just one thing at a time." The organic model "allows different people to find a common basis for working together in complex situations. People who abide by the organic model tend to see other people as sharing the same life force, the same spiritual base, and the same kind of relationship among their unique individual parts. They don't compare people to some standard, so they are not tempted to shape people to some ideal image. Such people tend to see the job of a leader as getting people in touch with their own inner harmony."

"Linear models get their name from the assumption of a linear relationship between events; that is, one effect stems from one cause, and vice versa. Organic models may be characterized by "systems thinking": the belief that event X is the outcome of hundreds of other factors, including the passage of time."

The attitude towards change often differs depending on the kind of model used. "Under the influence of the threat/reward model, we may try to assure our security by struggling to keep all people and relationships forever the same. If we do feel the need to change, we usually direct it at someone else. And we usually try to change them by "removing" their "bad" behaviors."

By contrast, "People holding on to organic models need security just as much as everyone else, but they obtain their security by taking risks and by tolerating ambiguity. [...] Organic models expect and accept change as a normal part of the universe. Some organic models go even further, and welcome change as an opportunity to go into the unknown and grow. They have faith that growth is a natural process by which our wonderful potential is realized, in the same way a seed must grow to realize the wonderful potential of the flower."

Linear models are the typical way of managing very-large-scale things, like big corporations or entire societies, from the top-down. On the very large scale, the simplifying (and dehumanizing) assumptions of linear models make things much easier to reason about, predict, and manage - and to some extent, as a way of managing the complexity, it is often needed in order to be able to get anything done at all. But this only works as long as the situation is stable. As soon as things get chaotic or do not fit the model, attempts to apply it fall apart. It seems that very-large-scale management brings the need for linear models, and in turn, overly relying on such models brings entropy into the picture.

Organic models describe the way things naturally work in non-hierarchical small-to-mid-size groups and communities, where everyone knows everyone, and everyone is seen and treated as an individual. "Leader" may not even be a distinct role - whoever contributes to the whole is a leader, contribution by contribution.

To wrap this section up:

Becoming a Technical Leader said:

In the extreme cases, the threat/reward model of leadership may be characterized by the words "force" and "judge," and the [organic] seed model, "choose" and "discover." In the seed model,

Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.

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[...] Instead of leading people, as in the threat/reward model, organic leadership leads the process. Leading people requires that they relinquish control over their lives. Leading the process is responsive to people, giving them choices and leaving them in control. They are empowered in much the same way as the gardener empowers seeds--not by forcing them to grow, but by tapping the power that lies dormant in them.

Leadership in the seed sense is creative and productive through other people. It is an organic definition, because it works through creating an environment rather than confining itself to a few focused actions--threats or rewards--in a few specific instances to create a few specific results.

To people ensnared by linear models, this organic model of leadership may seem vague and wishy-washy, but it actually lends itself to more precise quantification than the more conventional models. It's especially useful in technical work because, unlike the more linear models, it allows us to take innovation into account.

Innovation is concerned with redefining a task or the way the task is done. Linear definitions of leadership assume that observers have a perfect understanding of the task. Such definitions filter out innovations that the observer hasn't seen before or doesn't understand. Such blinded observers obviously cannot see the possibility of leadership through innovation. In an age of high technology and discovery, such constraining definitions are practically useless.

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The "MOI" model of leadership

In Chapter 2: Models of leadership, a model called "MOI" is presented. This stands for "motivation", "organization", and "ideas or innovation". The idea is that for change to occur, the environment must contain all three.

The motivation is whatever drives the people involved; the organization, the existing structure that enables the ideas to be worked through in practice; and the ideas/innovations are the "seeds" to be cultivated.

Weinberg notes that "Leadership can sometimes also mean preventing change. If you want to stop some change from occurring, you must do one of three things to the environment:" - he then lists:

• M: kill the motivation---make people feel that change will not be appreciated; do everything for them so they won't feel the need to do things for themselves; discourage anything that people might enjoy doing for its own sake.
• O: foster chaos--encourage such high competition that cooperation will be unthinkable; keep resources slightly below the necessary minimum; suppress information of general value, or bury it in an avalance of meaningless words and paper.
• I: suppress the flow of ideas--don't listen when you can criticize instead; give your own ideas first, and loudest; punish those who offer suggestions; keep people from working together; and above all, tolerate no laughter.

This is a good description on the whole of various things that humanity is facing as a result of its pathological leadership. The general gist of the "preventing change" list is also something to watch out for, when it comes to destructive influences that may enter and try to act on the network.

There has to be a balance between motivation, organization, and innovation in order for leadership to be effective. Weinberg points out that we all have the potential for all three, and thus for leadership, but that in each of us, some elements are better developed than others. Anyone can improve as a leader by working to build the strength of their weakest links.

A little bit more about the book

The book contains a lot of material on all three MOI aspects. When it comes to motivation, issues of communication and unconscious beliefs, or "survival rules", enter the picture. One very short chapter presents a model for the communication process along the lines of what's found in the book Crucial Conversations, except this model is more elaborate and presented using just a single example. When it comes to "survival rules" (in our terms, programmed responses of the adaptive unconscious), journaling is recommended as a way of discovering and gradually rewriting them.

For those curious about the book, you could think of it as a kind of modern-day How to Win Friends and Influence People for techies - though non-techies will probably also find it fairly easy to read. It contains many short chapters that go through a very wide range of things related to the psychology of readership, and is often quite humorous, with plenty of the author's personal anecdotes and examples. As with other such reading, it is probably only useful in combination with practical experience - and personally I think I've only got a small amount of the understanding possible out of it.

An illustration of how the conventional view of leadership is flawed

I'll also include the following quote, which both illustrates the problems with how leadership is usually seen, and shows one simple example of leadership according to the organic approach. While the problem being solved in this example is a particular technical one, I think the same principle applies to all manner of problem-solving done in this group.

Becoming a Technical Leader said:

Psychologists and management theorists have dozens of models of leadership, with a typical one of their texts offering this explanation:

There are two principal ways to identify the leaders of a group:[list type=decimal]
[*]asking the members to identify which members they regard as the most influential in directing the group, or
[*]asking observers to name the most influential members, or to record the frequency of effective influencing actions.
[/list]

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Altough they appear to be scientific, these models are based on the opinions of the members of the observers, and on their ability to observe "effective influencing actions." Over the years, I began to see some flaws in this approach.

For instance, a company recently retained me to help a group of computer programmers improve their problem-solving techniques. The company was losing thousands of dollars of sales each passing day because of a subtle error in its software product. Until the programmers could find the error, the product was useless. To help the group, I videotaped them as they struggled to find the error.

In one hour of observation, the "effective influencing actions" of the four programmers looked like this:

Code:

Arnie    112 actions
Phyllis   52 actions
Weber     23 actions
Martha     0 actions

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Martha's actions were easy to record. She sat like a zombie throughout the entire hour, studying the printout of the erroneous program. She said nothing, made no gestures, and didn't even smile or frown. Without question, she had no influence on the group whatsoever.

After consuming an hour with their effective influencing actions, the other group members were no closer to solving the problem than they had been when they started. All of a sudden, Martha lifted her eyes from the listing, pointed a finger at one line, and said, ever so quietly, "This word should be '87AB0023', not '87AB0022'." Then Arnie, Phyllis, and Weber resumed their agitated discussion. They terminated the meeting ten minutes later, after they had convinced themselves that Martha was indeed correct.

When I asked the group who had been their most influential member, they all said, "Arnie." Then I played the videotape, asking them to be especially alert to the method by which their problem was solved. After watching the tape, Arnie, Phyllis, and Weber changed their answer to "Martha." Why? because in terms of solving their problem, the table of effective influencing actions should have looked like this:

Code:

Arnie    0 actions
Phyllis  0 actions
Weber    0 actions
Martha   1 action

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Without Martha's contribution, the meeting would have gone nowhere, yet non-programming psychologists would have probably missed Martha's role entirely. When such nontechnical psychologists observe our workshops, they are consistenly befuddled by the dynamics of the team as they solve their technical problems. It's as if the psychologists were watching people from another planet, people whose culture and language look and sound superficially like ours but are entirely different.

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This illustrates how leadership tends to be seen: power dynamics, who seems to be the most "visible" and/or imposing. (Another important part, though not illustrated in the above, is who seems to be the most able to reward or punish.)

By contrast, in this network, what counts is what is done for others. Sometimes it is highly visible, but sometimes it is not. It may or may not look impressive. Bringing about any creative change or contribution is leadership.

Reminded me of the Yoda scenes in the film Star Wars, active vs neutral or inactive states. with the loudest voice geting heard usually the emotionally expressive always beat the intellectually expressive, a competition using that "child's dictionary" to express themselves as they try to win the game of control and beat any opposing voices less vocal than their own. Yoda just shakes his head knowing what will happen. The time isn't yet ripe for change until the path of pain has been followed by young Skywalker. Pain and loss will quiet both loud voices eventually if he's to follow the positive use of energy.

Seems the issue of balance is usually brought into the equation of SMC development, with the two leadership styles of MOI determining which side one is positioned on. That MOI was a nice simple summation of the positive vs the negative, both seeking balance though in quite different ways, and it is rather easy to see the negative MOI version expressed as the dominant 'leadership' style in our society as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, until the game resets in bankruptcy... though if they have friends in the govt that will bail them out with unlimited funds the game can seem to last way past its date of expiration, which keeps their loud voices heard in the forum of public opinion to drown out all the others. Such uneven competition then leads to the inevitable 'as above, so below' making all others follow their lead, only without their govt support, so they get taken over in time as the loud voices don't want/allow others to truly compete, just support their lead, which is where the competition is for the linear or pyramid types, growing monopolization of everything and everyone like any addict in search of their promised land. Any idea of sharing would be a goal for the positive MOIs but only a temporary stratagem for the negative MOIs, Game Theory style, which reminds me of the film 'Hunger Games', at least as it was designed in the beginning, as it seems by the end that the positive leadership potentials start to emerge and force a change as any 'idea whose time has come', usually revolution.

STO vs STS as usual it seems... 'as above, so below', with the SMC development a matter of getting everyone positioned for their roles in the group, their proper 'fit' at the moment as their experiences change who and what they are and their ability to Do. Seems a choice in how one wants to express their cooperation with others, in real choice or forced choice as Laura has written about often enough.

What about heterarchies? When I first read it made sense moving away from a top-down STS pyramid as it considered the concept of network as the connectivity principle.

This principle was firstly applied to organic/biological aspects of nature, but it is also used under social contexts.

Extract from Wikipedia:

_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy

Sociology and political theory

Anthropologist Dmitri Bondarenko follows Carole Crumley in her definition of heterarchy as "the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways" and argues that it is therefore not strictly the opposite of hierarchy, but is rather the opposite of homoarchy,[6] which is itself defined as "the relation of elements to one another when they possess the potential for being ranked in one way only".[7]

David C. Stark has been contributing to developing the concept of heterarchy in the sociology of organizations.

Political hierarchies and heterarchies are systems in which multiple dynamic power structures govern the actions of the system. They represent different types of network structures that allow differing degrees of connectivity. In a (tree-structured) hierarchy every node is connected to at most one parent node and zero or more child nodes. In a heterarchy, however, a node can be connected to any of its surrounding nodes without needing to go through or get permission from some other node.

Socially, a heterarchy distributes privilege and decision-making among participants, while a hierarchy assigns more power and privilege to the members high in the structure. In a systemic perspective, Gilbert Probst, Jean-Yves Mercier and others describe heterarchy as the flexibility of the formal relationships inside an organization.[8] Domination and subordination links can be reversed and privileges can be redistributed in each situation, following the needs of the system.[9]

A heterarchical network could be used to describe neuron connections or democracy, although there are clearly hierarchical elements in both.

The term hetaerarchy is used in conjunction with the concepts of holons and holarchy to describe individual systems at each level of a holarchy.

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In my experience, leadership is more effective when it is treated as a flexible role rather than a rigidly fixed hierarchical position. Different characteristics are needed to lead in different situations - and one leader rarely meets all the criteria.

In the example of Martha and others cited in the book for example, Martha was most effective in solving the technical problem. She would probably be a good leader in that situation. However, if instead of a technical debug effort the meeting situation is changed where the bug is out there affecting customer products and the meeting is with concerned and irate customers demanding an explanation and reassurance, Martha's style is not likely to be the most effective.

Management and leadership roles can be different in an organization. Management is responsible for finding the right leaders to fit the right roles and ensuring access to resources required to realize the goal.

Thank you Psalehesost, that was a very interesting read!

It reminds me of Gurdjieff who said (paraphrasing) that in our default sleep state, we speak when we should keep silent and we keep silent when we should speak. Maybe this is true also for leadership - we try to lead when we should follow, and we follow when we should become more active and lead?

I can observe this behavior in myself and I think many of these problems come from our programming and issues that we haven't dealt with. For example, if one has a father who always wished he had a son gifted in manual work and always looked down on his not-so-gifted son, these wounds could come to the surface in a situation where a group has to build or fix something. So maybe one (unconsciously) tries to "lead" in such a situation to "prove it" and gets into arguments etc. when it would be appropriate to just follow someone who is obviously better suited for the task and learn something in the process. It could be the other way around of course when someone could seriously improve a group's effort but is too paralyzed from his wounding to actually stand up and take initiative and/or is outweighed by some "would-be-leader" acting based on his or her own traumas. So it seems to me that "organic leadership" has a lot to do with controlling one's impulses, i.e. self-work.

obyvatel said:

In my experience, leadership is more effective when it is treated as a flexible role rather than a rigidly fixed hierarchical position. Different characteristics are needed to lead in different situations - and one leader rarely meets all the criteria.
...
Management and leadership roles can be different in an organization. Management is responsible for finding the right leaders to fit the right roles and ensuring access to resources required to realize the goal.

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I think these are important observations. Sadly, in today's corporate environment, this seems to be seldom the case. Usually you have "leaders" (including managers) who simply enforce their own pathological world via "carrot and stick" while cloaking this primitive and poisonous behavior in nice words and lofty concepts, osit.

Well in college I've seen and we've reviewed a lot, because we have like 5 classes about psychology in administration and that stuff. There's a lot of versions about what a leader is, and none of them seem to fit in anything except what you construct based on the context you are using the term "leadership".

I'm reading one of the recommended books in the forum list: How to win friends and influence people

To me this books is a complete guide on how to be a leader, and a very good member of society I really recommend it.

A leader for what I understand may not be the boss, or the one who chooses who does this or that, but the most socially capable so to speak. The book put a lot of examples of all types of leaders, from politicians, to business leaders, to people like Julius Caesar. All they had in common was that they respected people in several ways, they avoided criticism, put themselves in a humble position, avoided flattery and always were prone to give honest praise whenever they liked something they liked. The author says is basically feeding the hearts of others not with tenderness but with appreciation. He says one example may be of a parent (that is the leader of the family), and how whenever a parent is appreciative of the work done even if it's not perfect, they gain the trust of people.

So I think a good leader is that one who really applies the concept of "external considering", knowing we are all humans and that can commit mistakes, and when someone does it and even twist the reality like a psychopath, or just a person who feels hurt when someone point out their mistakes, what a leader or social capable person does, is to be able to pardon and give hope to their people or employes. I guess that's the way to go.

Leaders are those who understand the limitations of others.

Prometeo said:

I'm reading one of the recommended books in the forum list: How to win friends and influence people
To me this books is a complete guide on how to be a leader, and a very good member of society I really recommend it.

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Thank you Prometeo for mentioning this book - I wasn't aware of it until now. I'm currently reading it (halfway through) and I must say it's really great and inspiring. I would recommend it to everyone for some down-to-earth, practical instructions on how to apply external considering in business and daily life. I already recommended it to an an acquaintance of mine with great success. Thanks!

Psalehesost said:

In another thread, the comment was made regarding leadership, in relation to our community:

Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.

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In my life experience, the only "leader" who I agree to follow, were those who were the doers of the process. The ones in the trenches with us instead of directing from "above". They were usually the ones who empowered us along without fear of losing their "power".

Navigator said:

What about heterarchies? When I first read it made sense moving away from a top-down STS pyramid as it considered the concept of network as the connectivity principle.

This principle was firstly applied to organic/biological aspects of nature, but it is also used under social contexts.

Extract from Wikipedia:

_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterarchy

[...]

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It seems a good fit. As obyvatel noted, some may be more suited for leadership in one context and others in other contexts.

I brought up the idea of a small-scale community as an example in my post - though not described in the book, it seems to illustrate the ideas of organic leadership very well. And there you can see heterarchy as well. Imagine either a small village or a tribe, where - in either case - everyone knows everyone. Each person has one or more roles - and for each role, some know it better: they may be the "elders", activity leaders, master craftsmen, etc., within that field. They may help others through their role - practicing what they know, teaching it, and/or directing others as they do it. Likewise, such experts need the services of others, who by comparison are the leaders in their fields. No one is necessarily "on top" of everything; but working together, the community functions like an organism.


A small note to add to the example I quoted in the first post. I left one thing out: Martha was the leader in solving the problem, but the others exercised leadership in another way, as well. Weinberg points out that, had the others been less understanding, they might not have accommodated Martha's working style - they may e.g. have tried to force her to join the unproductive talking instead of allowing her to concentrate on the problem by herself. They knew how she preferred to work, and allowed her to work in the way in which she was most productive.

More generally, like several people mentioned, external considering is also a very large part of leadership. Relating it to the "MOI" model of leadership in the first post, it is key to the "M" -- motivation. Weinberg even recommends the book How to Win Friends and Influence People in a chapter called "Learning to Be a Motivator". He notes, though, that some people (including himself at an earlier age) can react negatively to that book, because they have learned unconscious "survival rules" with which Dale Carnegie's ideas and presentation clash. If of interest, I can post on that issue.

In the STO way of living no leader is present. Exist the groups of people who doing their tasks. One of the group (workers) work over some thing or problem and other (observers) observing them and answer nad help when are asked.

But it can be mixed. Sometimes one person from the workers don't want cooperate with other people of his group, because want to impose his way of working, or don't connect with observers for summary and directions; this slowed down the overall job. When the whole group of workers don't cooperate with observers group than the workers group may wake up at some point: "What have we done?!"

The observers, in turn, may interfere in the work of workers, what interferes with the creativity of workers, even if the observers have right and experience, this is adverse. The observers need to have the correct observations and conclusions about workers and what they do, be in this matter unanimous within their group and and be ready to support when it's needed.

But in our world, it's that one individual or one group of people ("observers") forcing the way of work on the second group, often not knowing and not understanding the workers group who, in turn, don't want work in direction of similar aim and only be paid. I think it's common.

Just some thoughts.

lux said:

In the STO way of living no leader is present. Exist the groups of people who doing their tasks. One of the group (workers) work over some thing or problem and other (observers) observing them and answer nad help when are asked.

But it can be mixed. Sometimes one person from the workers don't want cooperate with other people of his group, because want to impose his way of working, or don't connect with observers for summary and directions; this slowed down the overall job. When the whole group of workers don't cooperate with observers group than the workers group may wake up at some point: "What have we done?!"

The observers, in turn, may interfere in the work of workers, what interferes with the creativity of workers, even if the observers have right and experience, this is adverse. The observers need to have the correct observations and conclusions about workers and what they do, be in this matter unanimous within their group and and be ready to support when it's needed.

But in our world, it's that one individual or one group of people ("observers") forcing the way of work on the second group, often not knowing and not understanding the workers group who, in turn, don't want work in direction of similar aim and only be paid. I think it's common.

Just some thoughts.

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I think that's a somewhat oversimplified, black and white way of looking at leadership. Also, I think that the "observer" role you speak of actually involves leadership. Let's look at definitions of "organic leadership" and of STO:

Organic leadership: The process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.

STO: Giving all to those who ask.

Take the Cassiopaean Experiment as an example: for others, all of Laura's work basically amounts to creating an empowering environment, which "those who ask" can become part of. All who sincerely participate in this exchange (SOTT/Cass/FOTCM/etc. involvement) and building of a network - together, we're making this empowering environment, and to the extent each of us does, we're exercising leadership. This overall effort is also the most focused striving towards STO that we know of in the world at present.

The C's, in communicating things that help in the process, are also exercising leadership in the way it is here being defined.

You can also find historical examples that further show the complexity of leadership in relation to STO vs. STS: Gurdjieff and his activities already make the picture far less simpler; then consider Julius Caesar, and in the modern day, Putin. These show, in different ways, that leadership that is STO-oriented can involve a combination of the "organic" approach and the "linear" approach. Basically, the law of three applies: "there is good, there is evil, and there is the specific situation that determines which is which."

OSIT.


The above having been said, I'd like to point to something that relates to it - and which is also of more practical importance. A new thread was started recently, and in the terms of this thread, it can be said to be about how we can all exercise some constructive, organic leadership: 'Awakened conscience', DOing, and achieving CRITICAL MASS

I think connecting this discussion to what we know needs doing and what we know about doing it, practically, might help in furthering a useful understanding. (That goes for me as well!) Not necessarily by making it the exclusive focus, but by adding it as an important ingredient. Though I guess we'll all see where the discussion goes from here.

Psalehesost said:

lux said:

In the STO way of living no leader is present. Exist the groups of people who doing their tasks. One of the group (workers) work over some thing or problem and other (observers) observing them and answer nad help when are asked.

But it can be mixed. Sometimes one person from the workers don't want cooperate with other people of his group, because want to impose his way of working, or don't connect with observers for summary and directions; this slowed down the overall job. When the whole group of workers don't cooperate with observers group than the workers group may wake up at some point: "What have we done?!"

The observers, in turn, may interfere in the work of workers, what interferes with the creativity of workers, even if the observers have right and experience, this is adverse. The observers need to have the correct observations and conclusions about workers and what they do, be in this matter unanimous within their group and and be ready to support when it's needed.

But in our world, it's that one individual or one group of people ("observers") forcing the way of work on the second group, often not knowing and not understanding the workers group who, in turn, don't want work in direction of similar aim and only be paid. I think it's common.

Just some thoughts.

Click to expand...

I think that's a somewhat oversimplified, black and white way of looking at leadership. Also, I think that the "observer" role you speak of actually involves leadership. Let's look at definitions of "organic leadership" and of STO:

Organic leadership: The process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.

STO: Giving all to those who ask.

Take the Cassiopaean Experiment as an example: for others, all of Laura's work basically amounts to creating an empowering environment, which "those who ask" can become part of. All who sincerely participate in this exchange (SOTT/Cass/FOTCM/etc. involvement) and building of a network - together, we're making this empowering environment, and to the extent each of us does, we're exercising leadership. This overall effort is also the most focused striving towards STO that we know of in the world at present.

The C's, in communicating things that help in the process, are also exercising leadership in the way it is here being defined.

You can also find historical examples that further show the complexity of leadership in relation to STO vs. STS: Gurdjieff and his activities already make the picture far less simpler; then consider Julius Caesar, and in the modern day, Putin. These show, in different ways, that leadership that is STO-oriented can involve a combination of the "organic" approach and the "linear" approach. Basically, the law of three applies: "there is good, there is evil, and there is the specific situation that determines which is which."

OSIT.


The above having been said, I'd like to point to something that relates to it - and which is also of more practical importance. A new thread was started recently, and in the terms of this thread, it can be said to be about how we can all exercise some constructive, organic leadership: 'Awakened conscience', DOing, and achieving CRITICAL MASS

I think connecting this discussion to what we know needs doing and what we know about doing it, practically, might help in furthering a useful understanding. (That goes for me as well!) Not necessarily by making it the exclusive focus, but by adding it as an important ingredient. Though I guess we'll all see where the discussion goes from here.

Click to expand...

OK, it sounds reasonably :)