Here’s my email to Leadership Reno County alums this AM, 9/23/13:
Hey All,
Yes, it hit. Fall is here. Soup weather is close (sure it’s in the 80’s this week, but when you’ve had a summer like we’ve had, 80’s feel cool). Soup is a big illustration for helping us make progress on the issues we care about. We served soup Friday night at home. My boys were picking out the veggies and saying they didn’t like the way it tasted and we reminded them that the elements of the soup no longer have individual tastes, but taste differently in the soup.
That’s what our community’s like. On any given issue, there are lots of different viewpoints/individuals that see things a certain way. The challenge in community life is coming together for progress. In the KLC world, we define these viewpoints as different factions on an issue. We’re: “using the term ‘factions’ deliberately to uncover conflicts in the system. Factions refer to groupings of people who assume differing, and often competing, viewpoints and perspectives on an adaptive issue. More importantly, factions represent below-the-surface loyalties, values and potential losses…faction mapping can be useful in diagnosing the situation, especially in pushing against one’s own default interpretations and assessing the degree of disequilibrium existing in the system.”
In seeking to diagnose our situation and the factions that exist, we may ask questions like:
- How does the adaptive challenge look to people in these factions? What story are they telling themselves?
- What are their loyalties (peoples, ideas, etc.), values, and potential losses?
- What would success look like to people seeing an issue from a different viewpoint?
I say all this to say that our leadership in our community is like vegetable soup. There are lots of competing flavors vying for attention. They each have a value, loyalty, and want success to be found a certain way. Our acts of leadership must engage these groups, consider them, and use this information in diagnosing the situation, so that our skillful interventions are most effective.
Leadership isn’t easy, but when we’ve walked through diagnosing the situation effectively, we can indeed be used to move others to accomplish difficult work, and we just might walk away from our diagnosis smelling like that onion or flavor that we didn’t understand before. Hope this helps you make progress this week…