Exploring Social Leadership

I wrote the ‘Social Leadership Handbook’ in 2014, and as i write that it seems crazy that it was so long ago. There were two ‘firsts’ in that 1st Edition: it was the first time i had attempted to pull a series of disparate ideas into a specific stance and description, and it was the first time i had used a model in my work.

In general i am not big on models: not that i don’t find value in them, or appreciate what some people share, but rather that whilst abstractions can be useful, they can also trap us in comfort and the delusion of simplicity, understanding, or control.

Nonetheless, i created the NET model, which allowed me to explore nine central features of Social Leadership: in the first section on ‘Narrative’ we looked at ‘Curation’, ‘Storytelling’ and Sharing’, followed by a second section on ‘Engagement’, which considered ‘Community’, ‘Reputation’ and ‘Social Authority’, then a third and final section called ‘Technology’, which explored ‘Co-creation’, ‘Social Capital’ and ‘Collaboration’.

The story runs as follows: we start by looking around us, at our systems, and choose our space – we ‘curate’ ourselves. This is about taking an active stance – to consider where we, and our systems, are, and where we think they should be.

It’s about asking ‘what could be’, and considering what to challenge or change. ‘Storytelling’ was my earliest investigation of how Social Leadership is tied up in stories – indeed as i often recount, the whole book was very nearly called ‘The Storytelling Leader’. This thread has remained central to my work – to consider stories and storytelling as a thread that runs through my work on Social Learning, Change as a Social Movement, Innovation, and Culture. Finally in that first section, ‘Sharing’, which in retrospect was about contextualisation and our Social Currencies, although i did not have the understanding or language to express it as such in those early days.

That first segment is really all about the ‘self’ within the system – the idea that we start inside, choosing our space, finding our discomfort, identifying the boundaries and tensions (although that? language of ‘boundaries’ and ‘dynamic tensions’ did not enter my work until 2018). The second segment is about context: our communities (where we lead – in the arms of a community), and the ways that our reputation pivots into our Social Authority. Indeed: that dynamic, of reputation into authority is the central point. Our reputation (as a story written onto us, and within us) is the foundation of the authority we are given by our community (although later, after the ‘Landscape of Communities’ research project with 5,000 people, and the publication of ‘The Community Builder Guidebook’, i would come to make that plural – our communities).

The final segment, which was unsatisfactorily called ‘technology’ represents a tension of the Social Age itself, in that technology gives us the space, but it’s not really about technology itself. ‘Co-creation’ was an early exploration of sense making processes (what i would now call the creation of meaning and building of our Social Context), ‘Social Capital’ is more a feature, of how power is held, and how it is dynamic (which latterly i’ve explored in the Power and Potential book), and finally ‘Collaboration’, which is really about how we work together, but in different ways: how we liberate a new ‘invested’ model of engagement.

Phew… we made it through. There is much that i still love about that work, but even by 2017 my thinking had moved on. When i wrote the 2nd Edition (which was really the version that exploded), i rewrote around 40% of the content, and expanded it with a full set of new illustrations. And that is where it has remained: still regularly my highest selling book, and something i am proud of.

I’ve written over a dozen books since then, almost all of which take specific aspects of Social Leadership and break them apart. I’ve run research with over 100,000 people, and worked across more than fifty countries to share this work. And so both it, and i, have changed.

This year i will be revisiting this work. It may be to produce a 3rd Edition, or to write an entirely new core text on Social Leadership. For the moment, i am trying to dedicate a couple of blog posts each week to simply capturing my current thinking as my vocabulary continues to evolve. Where it leads, i am unsure.

Whatever happens, i suspect i will evolve the model. Some aspects i now recognise more as ‘features’, whilst others are descriptors of action. In the original book i wrote mainly about the ‘self’, but since then i’ve significantly developed my work on the context of the SOcial Age, and the notion of the Socially Dynamic Organisation. I suspect that a new book should focus on Social Leadership, but at least acknowledge that broader work. Ideally i would see a triangle – the ‘Socially Dynamic Organisation’, the ‘Social Age Guidebook’ (on context), and a ‘Social Leadership Handbook’ on leadership at the intersection of these systems.

#WorkingOutLoud on Social Leadership