Often we feel a disconnect in our organizational communities and we blame the culture or leaders.

This webinar shows that by thinking like a Social Architect we can identify:
a. what’s actually missing
b. how to heal the ‘the fractured communities’

Just like an architect designs spaces to live in, a social architect focuses on the social spaces that form the fabric of our communities.

It is important to pay attention to the connection between who we are (the Self), how we show up (the Social Self) and the collective potential we are capable of (the Collective Self). This is the fabric of our interconnected nature.

During this webinar I addresses how we can identify and heal two major disconnects that often lead to dissonance in our change projects. I zoom in on what it takes for a person in charge (‘change leader’) and for a team member to heal those disconnects. Spoiler alert: there is work for both!

In short, this is where the crux of organizational change management lies. When an organizational change program has long been approved, the team has been working overtime; and even when the first deliverables (e.g.: the business case, target organization model, process design, etc.) have been validated. We think we have the ‘X’ is on the map. We are convinced that the project is going to be a walk in the park.

But’ it won’t, because future business owners, key-users and users have not been involved yet. Nevertheless we have indulged ourselves in a great sense of control and accomplishment. The advise is to get rid of this false sense of certainty as soon as you can. Future owners of this program are still sleeping and it’s time to wake them up.

Waking them up means involving them early on. Not just by sending emails or organizing a town-hall meeting. At best that will annoy people, not wake them up.

We need to create opportunities for people to choose to be accountable.

For instance, a program that I have been involved in recently intended a capacity increase by outsourcing some activities and reorganizing their functions in order to streamline their way of working with that of the outsourcing partner.

In such an effort we might as well wait for a full functioning organization to be cast in stone and for all business processes to be fully configured and documented before involving any target audience. But we chose not to wait and we had some reasons to do so:

• We don’t know what we don’t know. Part of the effort consisted of implementing an IT service management platform. Those things don’t run by themselves, so we started to identify in an early stage all the people who are going to perform the roles in the processes. This is what it comes down to:
  • We are impacting a large organization (+20k staff) with quite some business units, so the first step is to have a single point of contact assigned per business unit. The appointment of these persons is done top-down by a business sponsor who has sanctioning power within the organization. These are the entry points
  • Next, we started having regular meetings with them.
  • Then, the time has come for a concrete assignment: we needed the names of the people within their business unit who will be driving the future business processes. This is an opportunity for them to choose to take accountability.
• They don’t know what they don’t know.
  • When confronted with an assignment and a deadline, things all of a sudden get real for the team and they start to involve their colleagues. Those colleagues get back to you with a request for more details.
  • At this point you may start to think that this assignment thing was a bad idea because it starts to look really messy. To the contrary: the s**load of questions and the bunch of totally new people questioning you look like a B-movie where they are a chief inspector and you are the suspect of a criminal offense… Well… believe it or not… those are good signs. Things are moving in the right direction.
  • The black box of your target audience all of a sudden starts to light up and if you look very carefully you will see a pattern. Who are the opinion leaders and the real decision makers? What keeps them awake at night? All of this is valuable information, both for them and for us. Change happens at the speed of making sense.
• Building credibility, one pebble at a time.
  • Do multiple iterations of this and you become a pro. In fact, all of a sudden you will become so invested in the challenges of your target audience that your own superiors need to remind you of the boundaries of your function description. Again, these are good signs.
  • Almost invisibly, you have adopted the cultural frame of reference of your target audience. This is what a relationship of trust is all about.
• Building readiness one pebble at a time.
  • Even though it may look like you are losing yourself into details that are outside of your original scope, you are increasing the change readiness of your target audience by bringing structure to the conversation and the steps ahead.
  • The weirdest thing about this sense-making process is that people create the social reality of the program by talking about it more often. Make sure you are part of those conversations. Better even: prepare the conversation starters. The stories that get told over and over strengthen the beliefs of how the reality around us is constructed.

What actually happens with this approach is nothing more than a series of well-planned opportunities for people to choose to be accountable.  The reason I refer to it as throwing pebbles in the organizational soup is because it refers to the same dynamics as the parable of Stone soup. Have a look at the below video to find out more about that particular story.

Throw those pebbles in the soup as early as you can. They are the little provocations, the frictions that can turn into meaningful conversations. And when that happens, be the best version of yourself because that organization is revealing a little of its vulnerability to you.

Needless to say there are also downsides to this approach: it’s messy and it sometimes looks like you are taking a step back instead of advancing. But the biggest disadvantage is that you will not be able to play hero firefighter or crisis manager at go-live because you will have connected and empowered a lot of people and their teams (so if you are more of a firefighter project person, inverse the advice and brace yourself at go-live).

I used to think that commitment in a group is a behavior that is recognizable at face value: either people collaborate or they oppose an initiative. We tend to believe that commitment and resistance are easily observable. But there is more than meets the eye, because what really matters is whether the behavior you observe is authentic or not.

Remember the model that we presented in the previous article, where we underscored how the Self (who we are), the Social Self (how we show up) and the Collective Self (our collective potential) are linked. Our identity is shaped by the communities we are actively part of, and our ability for connectedness with other communities gets shaped by this identity in turn. If all goes well, the ongoing iteration results in a resonance of the three levels; a constant interplay of altering and sense-making.

But it turns out that this ideal flow of energy is not always working. Sometimes the flow gets interrupted and people get into trouble. In this article we will try to articulate what kind of trouble people can end up in and how we can make sure they get out of that trouble.

Authenticity is Key

Authenticity is the resonance between who we are (the Self) and how we show up (our Social Self). Without it we don’t have a framework to hold our-‘Self’ accountable, and accountability is what we need to build Social Architecture. The authenticity of a behavior is something we can sense or pick up easily in any interaction, both: digital or in real life.

• When there is internal resonance between who I am and how I show up, my behavior is authentic and I am accountable for what I contribute to a community.

• When there is internal dissonance between who I am and how I show up, my behavior is inauthentic, and this is draining energy from myself and the people around me.

The interesting part is that we need community to be fully authentic. Here is why: when you take apart the elements of what makes a person authentic you will end up with three parts:

• Who you are
• What you are here for (your purpose)
• What you are truly unique at (your gifts)

But the last part (your gifts) only becomes visible to yourself when you put yourself out there. The discovery of what we are truly unique at begins at the edges of our comfort zone and in interaction with the world. So authenticity only makes sense in a social context, because this is where it gets articulated.

Building a Diagnostic

Things get more real and our responses can become more effective when looking at the resonance between the Self (who we are), the Social Self (how we show up) and the Collective Self (the potential of our community):

• Authenticity or personal intent is all about the Self and the relationships we have built with our inner layers. How well are we internally wired and aware of who we really are, what we are here for and what we are truly unique at?

• Collaboration on the other hand is all about the Social Self and how our behavior resonates with the potential of a community (the Collective Self).

Let’s take a closer look. In the drawing below, the vertical axis displays Authenticity and the horizontal axis shows the level of Collaboration. As a result there are four quadrants:

1) Commitment

What happens when our intention is authentic and there are no restrictions in the context for us to behave accordingly.   What we see is a full alignment between the Self, the Social Self and the Collective Self:

• Internal Resonance: the inner alignment between ‘who we are’ and ‘how we show up’ is called authenticity

• External Resonance: the external alignment between ‘how we show up’ and the intent of the community is called connection.

2) Resistance

Think about the common types of resistance that can be ticked in a check-box. Typical examples include: Need more detail, Giving a lot of detail, Not enough time, Impracticality, Confusion, Silence, Moralizing and Pressing for solutions (taken from: Peter Block – Flawless Consulting).

The point is that these behaviors demonstrate a ‘no’, but it is an authentic ‘no’. This is what we are witnessing on the level of alignment of the Self:

• Internal resonance: People are staying true to their inner Self and have the courage to be vocal about it in how they behave on the level of their Social Self.

• External dissonance: Courage is the right word to use here, because rather than staying out of trouble and fitting into what the social script of the community dictates, these people search for a way to express their concerns about the disconnect.

Every person has a different way give expression to the dissonance they feel between their true Self and the social script of a group, but in essence we should try to see it for what it is: a courageous attempt for reaching resonance between the inner world and the outer world.

Both, commitment and resistance are authentic: how people show up is in sync with who they are. It takes maturity and courage behave in sync with your true Self when the social pressure to conform is high. This is why the quadrants of commitment and resistance are seldom crowded.

Both spaces require a great deal of vulnerability and courage. It gets more crowded when we look at the places where there is a disconnect between the Self, Social Self and the Collective Self.

3) Stockholm Syndrome

The Stockholm Syndrome – also known as ‘capture-bonding’ – describes the behavior of hostages who become sympathetic to their hostage-takers. The name is derived from a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, when several victims began to identify with their hostage-takers as a coping strategy.

It is the same kind of fear of repercussions that we can find in some organizations.   People lose their sense of Self as if they were in a hostage situation and start to behave against their unwilling intent. From the outside they gladly collaborate and commit to the social script of the group, so their behavior is a false ‘yes’. Here is what is going on under the surface:

• Internal dissonance: There is a disconnect between what people really want – their true Self – and how they show up; their Social Self comes across as inauthentic.

• External resonance: How people show up looks like commitment from the outside. Often this is the best way for people to stay out of trouble and people will go a long way into fooling themselves that this is what they truly want.

This occurs in organizations where the social pressure to conform and the emphasis on control is high. And the return for this behavior is high, which explains why this quadrant is so crowded:

• For leaders this is a comfort zone of control and predictability. Traditional forms of authority do well with this type of commitment.

• This is also a comfort zone of innocence for many employees and community members, because as long as everyone tries to fit into the social norm, no one can’t be blamed when things go wrong.

The price we pay for this type of commitment is that the potential of the Self remains underutilized because it is disconnected from the world. The lack of authenticity results into a lack of accountability.

4) Burn-out

If we stay long enough in the comfort zone of the Stockholm Syndrome we will become convinced that we don’t have the resources to do things, or even think things, for ourselves. This is why, when we move to an environment where the social script of the Collective Self does appeal to our inner Self, we feel trapped. Trapped by the limits of a Social Self that we have been constructing over time and that turns out to be inauthentic.

This quadrant describes people with a good intention who are somehow hindered to follow their will because they are paralyzed by opinions and politics. On the level of resonance this is what we are looking at:

• Internal Dissonance: there is a disconnect between the personal intent and the way people show up. This loss of authenticity strengthens their belief that they are incapable of pursuing or accomplishing what they believe in.

• External Dissonance: from the outside their response looks like opposition or indifference, but in fact, what we are witnessing is a false ‘no’.

Burn-out begins as soon as we oppose something we desire deep inside. Over time we have constructed a facade that does not represent who we are (often because it was unsafe to be our-‘Self’). And when the opportunity is created to rise to the occasion, we feel locked-up by a Social Self that is neither authentic with who we are, nor connecting with the collective potential. This awkward tension is unbearable and will eventually lead to burn-out.

How bad is it?

Commitment, Resistance, Stockholm Syndrome and Burn-out; they are different levels of the same thing, when we look through the lenses of authenticity (internal resonance) and collaboration (external resonance).

Sadly, the inauthentic quadrants represent the majority of the populations we meet in an organizational context. Here is a very unscientific estimate of what the situation looks like in most organizations:

We don’t want to make a judgement about how bad it is for those who live in the inauthentic quadrants, because the return for not being authentic is that you don’t have to be accountable either. In short: it’s a personal choice.

What we are interested in are the types of commitment that unlock the potential of a community and what we can do to leverage this process. This is where the insights of the Self and the Social Self are useful, because they depict exactly where the disconnects occur.

The Paradox of Accountability

Everyone is here for their version of “Why”. We all have a universal hunger to be needed and when we find a community that genuinely responds to that  need we tap into an inexhaustible source of energy within ourselves. To quote the Dalai Lama in a recent article:

Being “needed” does not entail selfish pride or unhealthy attachment to the worldly esteem of others. Rather, it consists of a natural human hunger to serve our fellow men and women. As the 13th-century Buddhist sages taught, “If one lights a fire for others, it will also brighten one’s own way.”

Belonging occurs when we tell others what gifts we received. When that happens in the present moment community is built. Here is what it takes to restore the disconnect of authenticity:

First of all, a personal commitment to be accountable for appreciating the gifts in others. We need community to discover what we are truly unique at. When we construct our Social Self on the unique gifts we have to offer we can be a producer, a helper and find dignity.

Second, when we are in a position of authority we have a special opportunity to invite the authenticity in the people around us. We attach a specific meaning to invitation,i.e.: that we are constantly looking for opportunities to offer people a choice, so that every time people opt in, they are here by choice.

The fact that refusal is possible makes a participation valuable. This is the paradox of accountability. Our job is to make explicit that refusal carries no cost. This builds a framework for people to become accountable for how they show up. If one decides to be here by choice they will make sure their Social Self represents who they really are.

There is no point in being accountable for a Social Self that isn’t you, right?… this is a pathology that we have earlier referred to as the Stockholm Syndrome. And this brings us to a second disconnect, which is all about the question: is it safe enough for people to be who they really are?

The Paradox of Protocol

Accountability is one thing, but when the social pressure of context is high on command an control the status differences are so high that genuine communication becomes rare and collaboration is reduced to compliance. In other words: we are blocking a climate in which people feel free to express relevant thoughts and feelings. This is called a lack of psychological safety and it can have serious consequences ranging from medical errors to defective launches of space crafts.

So how do we bring psychological safety back to groups? The research of HBS professor Amy Edmondson and MIT professor Edgar Schein relies on decades of evidence that all points in the same direction: in order to cultivate an environment of psychological safety, the focus should be on reducing cultural and status differences that are causing a paralyzing power-distance. In the below video we can see that Edmondson stresses the need for inclusive leadership which lowers the cost of  speaking up.

This means that we intervene on the level of the protocol that makes it safe to connect with the Collective Self. With protocol we mean: being explicit about the language, the boundaries, the agreements, the roles, the group-rules, the scenario’s, the checklists, the rituals, the behaviors that are OK and those that are not; in other words: all the elements that determine the social script of a room.

Protocol offers protection when status differences are too high. It provides safety for the way we show up (the Social Self) and increases the chances that members of a community will start to contribute to the Collective Self.  This is the paradox of protocol – a word that at first sight seems to signify ‘command and control’. There is one big disclaimer though: protocol only works when it is established through legitimate authority; i.e.: the inclusive leadership that Edmondson talks about in the above video.

Making it Work

The best shot we have to restore or avoid disconnects of authenticity and connection is to work on personal accountability through invitation and psychological safety through protocol. But first we need to remind ourselves of the two inexhaustible sources of energy that make every community tick; they are:

• The universal need to be needed
• The universal need to belong

The only way to tap into the potential of the most underutilized resources of an organization is to pay attention to keep that movement going:

An ongoing flow between who we are, how we show up and what we contribute to the collective. The iterations are at least as important as the establishment of the links. Reaching resonance is an ongoing process.

But more often than not, the flow gets interrupted on two specific places:

• gifts of members go unrecognized
• status differences are too high

In order to restore it we need to invite authenticity of the members so they have framework to become accountable. At the same time we need to provide psychological safety in order to restore the social script of the community. There is no better way to summarize what the true work of a Social Architect consists of: cultivating accountability and providing psychological safety.

Are you serious about collective engagement? About what it takes for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts? Are you after the potential that is only available when it is accessed collectively? Then you need to be serious about Social Architecture:  because without it we are stuck in Flatland where the whole at best equals the sum of its parts.

Getting started

When we want to define leadership we need to address how we show up in the first place. But before doing so, we dive one level deeper into identity because ‘who we are’ is inseparable from ‘how we show up’. Once we see the construct of what defines us, and how it drives us, we can investigate how it connects us.

It turns out that leadership is not a science , so there is no generally accepted definition to begin with. From Wikipedia we learn that it is the ability of an individual or organization to “lead” or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations.

It pretty much depends on how you look at individuals and organizations; so let’s start there. These are the basic assumptions we make:

1. Organizations are communities to develop, not machines to fix.

2. People are resourceful.

3. Intelligence is the ability to interact.

As we will be tracing leadership through the lenses of the collective potential of an organization, it is helpful to understand what it is composed of and what the governing dynamics are.  Here is the plan: the below drawing gives an overview of what we need to investigate before we address leadership.

Let’s start somewhere in the middle, since leadership is about how we show up.

The Social Self: How We Show Up

There is a simple and effective way to find out how people express their identity: just by asking them who they are. Imagine you are at a dinner party and there is no one you have met before. How will you introduce yourself? Chances are that you will identify yourself by means of your affiliation with a group or a community.

For example: ‘Hi, my name is Luc and I’m the brother of the host of this party.’ Another example: ‘Hi, my name is Luc and I come from Belgium; I am an independent organizational change practitioner.’ Or how about: ‘Hi, my name is Luc, I am the dad of Marie, Jolien and Dries; we live in the town across the highway.’ These are three ways I have introduced myself in the past on three different occasions. When you pay attention you will note that there is a recurring pattern that is visible in the above examples; i.e.: how we expose our identity:

• First, we derive our identity from the groups we belong to (my family, my profession, my nation,…). Our membership is based on the boundaries of those communities; so we know who is in and who is not. The fact that I feel part of a community or that I feel like an outsider provides the boundaries we need to construct our identity.
• Second, the communities I am most likely to identify with are those in which I play an active role. In other words: those places where I make a personal investment of some sort (time, attention, vulnerability) and where I feel I am making a difference.
• Third, the identity that we display is different when we are in a different situation, because there are other things that are setting us apart or make us belong together… When I am at a dinner party in another country I will be more likely to refer to the group of Belgians as ‘us’, but as soon as we are on our way back I will look for other cues to set me apart from some members and pull me closer to other members of the Belgian cohort: age, gender, shared hobbies, education, etc… The situation I am in defines the boundaries and therefore determines who I am at that moment.

Let’s have a closer and more analytic look at this pattern. If we were to make a logical deduction of how people give expression to who they are, it would come down to the following equation:

Social Self = f(Personal Investments, Boundaries, Context)

The Social Self, or in other words ‘How we show up’ is a reflection of the communities we are actively part of. The best way to visualize this is a 3D graph, where each layer represents a different context.

We choose the boundaries and the level of personal investment that are most appropriate to blend in with the social script of the context we are in.  But the most elegant part of the Social Self is hidden in context switching; i.e.: being part of one context does not cancel out our membership of another context at the same time. We are all of our contexts, all of the time, at the same time.

Always remember: never mistake what you see for what you get; how people show up is just one layer of the richness of layers that a person embodies. What we see is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Self: Who We Are

You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. (Rumi)

Before we can move on to the Collective Self, we need to investigate the space where the layers of the Social Self find their origins. We call it the ‘Self’.

Joseph Chilton Pearce, who passed away at the age of 90 in 2016, spent an entire part of his life on the researching the the development of the self. We are especially interested in Pearce’s concept of a matrix, the Latin word for womb, which he defined as:

A source of possibility, a source of energy to explore that possibility, and a safe place within which that exploration can take place.

Matrix is the closest we can get to the origins of the layers that form the make-up of our psyche.

Every child’s first matrix is literally the mother’s womb, but nature’s blueprint for human development provides for several matrix shifts: from the womb to the mother to the earth (an ever-widening circle of the terrain surrounding the mother) to the self (becoming one’s own matrix) to increasingly abstract matrices of higher consciousness.

Progress into a new matrix is made only by standing on the old, i.e., a child can move into exploration of the earth matrix only by standing on the safe place provided by mother. Also, moving on to a next matrix does not cancel out the previous matrix; as we grow older we embody more and more of those layers through so-called matrix-shifts. So, again, let’s apply some logic and try to boil this down to an equation:

Self = f(Awareness of Self, Empathy, Bonding)

Here as well, the best way to represent this graphically is in three dimensions, where each matrix is a layer that we embody as we move from one level of intelligence to the next.

The research in neuroscience and development psychology points out that early bonding during the first 18 months of childhood has a lifelong impact. The failure of an adult to bond socially and to become an active member of society, is the failure of not having established that bond as a child on which the later social bonds must be built.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out that our intellectual and creative development depend on our emotional development; i.e.: our capacity of bonding. His research shows that our cognition is limited by the emotional system. If we want to develop higher levels of intelligence, we must first of all have a thoroughly developed emotional-cognitive system during childhood.

In other words, the first layers of matrix seem to be fundamental for all further development of the Self and the Social Self. Instead of ‘The Social Self’, Damasio uses the label ‘autobiographical self‘ to refer to an individual’s lived past and anticipated future. These form the basis of our Collective Self – in his words: ‘the instruments of culture’, i.e.: religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.

The Collective Self: Our Collective Potential

We think we see the world as it is, when in fact we see the world as we are. (Stephen R. Covey)

What keeps us awake at this level is the potential of collective engagement: how do we show up in a way that it opens up possibilities that are not available to us as an individual? The first  two dimensions of Status (how power is distributed) and Kinship (how I relate to other members) define the Social Script of an organization.

We referred to this as Flatland. We then introduced the third dimension, called Sense of community (how people engage collectively), because with the social script of kinship and status alone we can’t get any further than ‘1+1=2’. Sense of Community allows us to see spaces of engagement with possibilities that are not available to us as an individual. Possibilities that can only be accessed collectively.

All layers of the Collective Self create a sense of community through a balance of social status and kinship across different communities.  Here is what the equation looks like:

Collective Self = f(Status, Kinship, Sense of Community)

The graphical representation of the collective self is one that we have addressed in earlier articles on community development, but never before have we made the link explicit with the Social Self and the Self.

This linkage and the awareness that we are talking about the exact same dimensions and dynamics on a different scale is essential to understand before we can move onto leadership. If we fail to see how the Self, the Social Self and the Collective Self are linked, we will draw false conclusions as to what leadership means in a Social Architecture.

Bringing it all Together

Now that we have a deeper understanding of the Social Self we know that it is deeply rooted in the way the Self develops and that it starts before we are born. It’s also important to understand that the mechanics that apply to context switching are rooted in the mechanics of matrix shifts. So both the structure and dynamics of the Social Self reflect those of the Self.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our model of the Collective Self contains an aggregation of the three dimensions, the layers, and the way they work. Earlier we pointed out that Social Architecture is being intentional about a third dimension called Sense of Community. The bigger picture now shows us the importance of bonding to that end, or to put it in a more acceptable language: our capacity for connectedness.

The point is that long before community can be manifest in outward relationships (the Social Self, and ultimately the Collective Self), it must be present in the Self.

Neuroscientists and experts on child development are pointing out that accessing a higher evolutionary layers of collective intelligence can only take shape when the foundations of a matrix are present:

• a source of possibility,
• a source of energy to explore that possibility, and
• a safe space within which that exploration takes place.

When we investigated what it takes for people to be accountable we placed out bets on legitimate authority, a form of power that is based on voice, predictability and fairness.

More Leadership, Not Less

The question we are up against is this: is legitimate authority by one leader enough do justice to the untapped potential of the Collective Self? You may be afraid to know the answer… it isn’t. As you read the title of this paragraph you may think that we meant to say ‘more powerful’ leadership, but that is not the case either.

We need more people who assume the the leadership-role.If we want to tap into the potential of the Collective Self we need to flip the assumption that leadership resides only with one individual. Leadership is what we must seek within all members of a community. The legitimate authority to lead in a Social Architecture can emerge from anyone in an organization—and it may even be more likely to emerge from people who do not hold positional power. To say it in the words of Peter Block (taken from his 2009 book Community, the Structure of Belonging):

Leadership that engages citizens is a capacity that exists in all human beings. It is infinitely and universally available.

A critical assumption here is that people are resourceful. This goes against a widespread assumption that people are defined by their scarcities rather than their gifts, so the organization must take care of them. These practices disempower people and take away the opportunity for them to hold each other accountable. Instead of asking “What can we create together?”, we end up helplessly asking “What’s In It For Me?”.

Many of us have been persuaded by institutions that we do not have the resources it takes to do things, or even think things, for ourselves. There are quite some unspoken reciprocal expectations that bosses and subordinates have from each other. Many people have been convinced of their own inadequacy, and any leader who wants to invite them into a co-creation endeavor must be aware about an invisible hook: there is no better way to trigger the parenting control-response in leaders than learned helplessness.

It takes a deeply grounded Social Architect with a source of identity independent of how popular he or she is with the group to hold a space in which people can discover their resources while those same people resist, angrily accusing the leader of not answering the“What’s In It For Me?” question.

In the face of learned helplessness, traditional leaders will do what they are taught to do: not create space for others, but fill the space themselves—fill it with their own words, their own skills, their own deeds, their own egos. This, of course, is precisely what followers expect from leaders. This is the forcefield that is constantly pulling us back to the two-dimensional Flatland, where 1+1=2 (at best).

Being a Social Architect

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

There is a name for what Social Architects experience during this prolonged period of patient waiting. It is called “suffering” (which is the root meaning of the word “patience”).

• Suffering is what happens when you see the possibilities in others while they deny those same possibilities in themselves.
• Suffering is what happens when you hold a space for community to emerge but others lack the trust to enter the space and contribute.
• Suffering is what happens while you wait out their resistance, believing that people have more resources than they themselves believe they have.

In Flatland organizations traditional leaders do not want to suffer. So we create and maintain institutional arrangements that protect leaders from suffering by assuming the worst of members and encouraging leaders to tell them what to do.

Yet, this is exactly the path neuroscientists are telling us to take: the creation of a safe space that enables bonding on a collective level. In fact, leadership for Social Architecture consists of creating, holding, and guarding a trustworthy space to enable that third dimension of collective engagement.

Therefore, it seems more accurate to talk about holding space; because it’s not about leading; instead it is about unlocking the capacity in people to become leaders. That is why Social Architecture is only for those the few whose heart is spacious enough to hold:

• the belief in human resourcefulness of people
• the reality of their resistance, and
• being labeled as ‘weak’ by their peers

This is the invoice Social Architects need to pay for practicing their craft; knowing and trusting that it is their own vulnerability that invites the vulnerability in other members. Also: knowing and trusting that this is the only path to accessing the higher evolutionary intelligence of the collective self.

Precisely because this invoice is so high, Social Architects need to be cautious about the intent of the communities they want to be in service of: it better be a change that matters to them.

Practicing Social Architecture

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. (Anaïs Nin)

Let’s assume you are successful as a Social Architect. This would mean that members of a community accept the invitation to contribute and share what they have to offer to other members. Three things will start to happen:

• Active participation. They will want to make investments of time, attention and vulnerability and will expect a return in terms of influence. In other words: You start producing things; you are no longer a spectator or a consumer. You begin to contribute.

• Accountability. They will have to deal with the fact that there is no one to blame for their choice to be here. They become accountable.

• Self-awareness. Next, as they interact with other members in the community, they will become aware of some gifts that they have to offer to the community. The interaction brings out potential in them that they may have been unaware of previously.

The interactions of the community bring out gifts in people that they were not aware of. This is what Social Architecture is capable of: unlocking a potential in people that they were previously unaware of. We are accessing a higher evolutionary intelligence when the matrix becomes operational in all its capacity to reconnect its members with their own potential. I think the best way to put it is:

We need others to be fully ourselves.

Ultimately Social Architecture creates the possibility for members to share more of who they are in the way they show up: they are starting to lead. This, in turn, affects the space and other members will start doing the same. That is how we build on the capacity that is already present in the community: leadership of each and every member. Those who aspire to be Social Architect need to keep the distinction clear between two things:

• The mechanical side of practicing the craft, i.e.: a mix of change management techniques and community management techniques. This will unlock and make the potential for community visible.

• The heart side of practicing the craft, i.e.: the extent to which you are prepared to do the work of suffering in order to tap into the potential of the Collective Self.

This is why a Social Architect needs a broad view in order to see people for who they really are: multi-layered bearers of gifts, who have the resourcefulness to recognize and acknowledge the gifts in others.

Social Architecture does not equal Leadership

We seem to have lost the notion that for organizations to become places where we can access possibilities that are unavailable to us as individuals, we need members to step in with their full Social Self. This is leadership.

It takes another role create the circumstances that invite the leadership of the Social Self in all members, to connect it to the leadership of other members and to hold the safe space in which the exploration of possibilities can take place. This is Social Architecture.

In short:

Leadership = how we take responsibility for the way we show up with our Social Self

Social Architecture = how we take responsibility for tapping into the potential of the Collective Self

When it is done right, i.e.: when members lead and when safe space is held, we access what neuroscientists call a ‘higher evolutionary intelligence’ of the collective self. Poets and storytellers on the other hand will refer to this exact same circumstance as ‘stone soup‘.

It is about how members engage in the construction of the narrative about their community and by doing so continuously reshape the story of who they are in turn.

In the end we have to conclude that Social Architecture is not about leadership and followership, but about holding space for leaders to develop. But just like flatlanders trying to grasp the concept of a third dimension, we needed to reverse some assumptions about leadership in order to get here.

Why can certain people get things done in in a group or organization while others, even when they invest the same effort, cannot get any traction for the same initiative? Why do some people in a low position of authority have more impact in their organization than some individuals who are higher in rank?

Is it their courage? Is it their character? Or rather their charisma? Nope. It is something that is infinitely more linked to the way they relate to the context in which they are active; i.e.: their legitimacy.

Legitimacy refers to how well one’s authority is perceived. This matters a great deal if you want to engage people in an organization. The purpose of this article is to pull apart the different aspects of legitimacy so we can better understand how to develop it in people. What is lying at the basis of legitimacy? How does one obtain legitimacy? And how do you keep it?

Disobedience and Authority

It seems that authority lies at the basis of legitimacy. In the broad sense authority refers to the social status one has within a group: The extent to which a government has a grip on its citizens, the pecking order in a group of primates, or even the reporting lines on an organization chart.

In his 2015 book ‘David and Goliath’ Malcolm Gladwell offers powerful examples to illustrate that legitimacy is based on three elements:

1. Engagement (‘Voice’): the need to feel like one has a voice: if I speak up, I will be heard;
2. Predictability: the expectation that the rules tomorrow will be roughly the same as the rules today;
3. Fairness: the authority has to be fair; all groups are treated equal.

He arrives at this conclusion by examining the civil war in Northern Ireland, where the repressive forces of the Brits were based on the assumption that authority is the result of a rational calculation of risks and benefits, not the extent to which their actions are justified. The initial intention of their presence in Northern Ireland was to support the police force temporarily in dealing with a local conflict. It turned out differently mainly because they were wrong about the justification of their own behavior.

To them, getting insurgents to behave was basically a math problem. They thought that if one are in a position of power you don’t have to care about how law-breakers feel about you; you just need to be tough enough to make them think twice.

They responded to disobedience with firm punishment. They had the force and the resources to do so. However it only made things worse. Gladwell quotes soldiers who were involved in the conflict and who assert that “most revolutions are not caused by the revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments.”

Inverse Cause and Effect

If we want to understand what lies at the basis of legitimacy we need to inverse some assumptions that we take for granted. For instance: we often think of authority as a response to disobedience. But disobedience can also be a response to authority.

Gladwell refers to a study of disobedience in classrooms that was conducted by the University of Virginia. They observed the behavior of children in the classroom as a result of the teaching style that was adopted by the teacher. Here, it was easy to see that when people in a position of authority (teachers) want others to behave (the classroom), it matters how they behave in the first place.

Teachers can use their authority to control the behavior of the classroom, or they can engage the classroom into an interesting activity that prevents the classroom from misbehaving in the first place. What teachers label as a ‘behavioral issue’ is often an engagement problem they are personally struggling with. Voice, predictability and fairness make a difference here.

This leads Gladwell to state the principle of legitimacy: When people in a position of authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters first and foremost, how THEY behave. Not surprisingly, getting insurgents to behave turns out to be as dependent on legitimacy as children to behave in a classroom. Legitimacy is all about the ability to engage with the target audience and to build on their knowledge. And that turns out to be easier said than done…

Tribal Engagement

To find out what this means in practice, we zoom in on the work of major Jim Gant. In the e-book One Tribe at a Time, he investigated the approach of the US forces to “secure the population where they sleep.” through the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. Gant suggested to work with the tribal structures and traditions already in place and let the tribes protect themselves.

They employed a Tactical Engagement Strategy, which they called ‘one tribe at a time’. The first step of this strategy consists of communicating effectively, within the target audience’s cultural frame of reference. This includes studying and gaining a detailed appreciation of the tribes’ code of honor.

Tribal engagement is all about being on the ground and showing people trust and respect by truly joining forces with them. This is the true work of establishing legitimacy and it goes way beyond the narrow definition of tasks that is normally used when deploying projects. For example, the list of essential tribal engagement tasks includes:

• Establishing and maintaining rapport with the chosen tribe in the area.
• Providing a permanent presence that the tribes can rely on.
• Facilitating tactical civic action programs through the local government
• Report “Ground Truth” continuously.

In their own words:

“The world has to see the Afghan tribes and US soldiers working, living, laughing, fighting and dying together.”

In a project setting we would raise their eyebrows when looking at such a list of essential engagements. Most of these would be considered ‘out of scope’ or would be taken care of superficially. Yet these activities turn out to make the difference between legitimate and coercive authority.

Gant argues that in order to reach legitimacy, we need to work with tribalism, not against it. In the closing thoughts of his ebook, he quotes David Ronfeldt, saying

“Many so-called failed states are really failed tribes.”

Translate this to the world of organizational change management and you end up saying:

“Many so-called failed changes are really failed communities.”

And this is why Social Architecture is crucial to successful change; because it is essentially about establishing legitimate authority.

Fair Process

But tuning into and respecting the target audience’s cultural frame of reference does not necessarily mean that we always seek for consensus with the target audience. In their 2003 article ‘Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy‘, the authors Chan and Mauborgne explain that legitimacy does not depend on consensus about the outcome. Outcomes matter, but no more than the fairness of the processes that produce them.

The three principles of Fair Process that they distilled are surprisingly close to Gladwell’s list of legitimacy elements:

1. Engagement: involving individuals in the decisions that affect them.
2. Explanation: everyone involved and affected should understand why final decisions are made as they are.
3. Expectation clarity: requires that once a decision is made, managers state clearly the new rules of the game.

According to them, fair process does not set out to achieve harmony or to win people’s support through compromises that accommodate every individual’s opinions, needs, or interests. This is an important distinction, because it separates two types of psychological contracts:

• Distributive justice: People reciprocate by fulfilling to the letter their obligation to the company. The focus is on fair outcomes.
• Procedural justice: Fair process builds trust and commitment, trust and commitment produce voluntary cooperation, and voluntary cooperation drives performance, leading people to go beyond the call of duty by sharing their knowledge and applying their creativity.

It is the second type of psychological contract that we are after when we want to establish legitimacy. Have a look at the drawing they used to explain the difference:

Legitimacy leads to Accountability

Earlier, I have written about what it takes to reach the second type of psychological contract; i.e.: through invitation. The strategy of invitation confronts the target audience with the choice they make on whether to create something or to stay passive. Accountability is the price to joining and this is exactly where legitimacy links into it: legitimate authority is a necessary pre-condition for accountability.

So the next time someone asks you to diagnose why a certain platform is not gaining any traction with their community, the odds are that their own authority is not perceived as legitimate. They will be likely to respond in disbelief “What? After all that I have done for them?”

That is when you could suggest having a conversation about fair process versus fair outcomes. Further diagnosis could include having a closer look at their engagement strategy: have you been working within the target audiences cultural frame of reference?

They did not know it was impossible so they did it.

Mark Twain

The reason for time is that not everything happens at once.

Albert Einstein

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life.

Bertrand Russell

You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

James Baldwin

To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.

David Whyte