​​"Leadership is Convening"
​​Dialogue, Deliberation and Systemic Transformation 
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​​Image courtesy of www.NewStories.org
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​​One of Ben Roberts' favorite quotes from Peter Block's Community:The Structure of Belonging (pp.85-6)
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  • ​​In communal transformation, leadership is about intention,
  • ​​convening, valuing relatedness, and presenting choices. It is not
  • ​​a personality characteristic or a matter of style, and therefore it requires
  • ​​nothing more than what all of us already have.
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  • ​​This means we can stop looking for leadership as though it were scarce
  • ​​or lost, or it had to be trained into us by experts. If our traditional form of
  • ​​leadership has been studied for so long, written about with such admiration,
  • ​​defined by so many, worshipped by so few, and the cause of so much
  • ​​disappointment, maybe doing more of all that is not productive. The search
  • ​​for great leadership is a prime example of how we too often take something
  • ​​that does not work and try harder at it.
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  • ​​I have written elsewhere about reconstructing leader as social architect.
  • ​​Not leader as special person, but leader as a citizen willing to do those
  • ​​things that have the capacity to initiate something new in the world. In
  • ​​this way, leader belongs right up there with cook, carpenter, artist, and
  • ​​landscape designer. It is a capacity that can be learned by all of us, with a
  • ​​small amount of teaching and an agreement to practice. The ultimate do-it-
  • ​​yourself movement.
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  • ​​Community building requires a concept of the leader as one who creates
  • ​​experiences for others––experiences that in themselves are examples of
  • ​​our desired future. The experiences we create need to be designed in such
  • ​​a way that relatedness, accountability, and commitment are every moment
  • ​​available, experienced, and demonstrated. David Isaacs of the World Café
  • ​​calls this “relational leadership.”
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