inviting leadership – Penny Scott phoned from the BowenIsland/Vancouver ferry last week to share this from fellow Chicagoan John McKnight, a leader in the development of Asset-Based Community Development…
Service systems can never be reformed so they will produce care. Care is the consenting commitment of citizens to one another. Care cannot be produced, privileged, managed, organized, administered or commodified. Care is the only thing a system cannot produce. Every institutional effort to replace the real thing is a counterfeit.Notice, too, that as systems degrade, the results show up as complexity of issues, real or potential conflict, increasing urgency and a real diversity of people and perspectives needed for resolution — exactly the conditions wherein Open Space Technology works best! It doesn’t cause the chaos, it merely acknowledges the truth of it — and gives us room to deal with it peacefully and productively.Care is, indeed, the manifestation of a community. The community is the site for the relationships of citizens. And it is at this site that the primary work of a caring society must occur. If that site is invaded, co-opted, overwhelmed, and dominated by service-producing institutions, then the work of the community will fail. And the failure is manifest in families collapsing, schools failing, violence spreading, medical systems spinning out of control, justice systems becoming overwhelmed, prisons burgeoning, and human services degenerating.
Having just posted an updated version of my own paper, InvitingOrganizationEmerges, I will hasten to add that while really open space and genuine care cannot ever be produced by a system, they always be invited by anyone of us who already really cares. This, it seems, is the real work of leadership today… to invite care. And the only way to invite it is to be it… and be willing to be caught in the act.