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Leadership – mass participation or elite sport?

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Leadership in Leeds

How does a community get the leadership that it needs to thrive?

Is it a question of finding an elite cadre of movers and shakers, networking them, hot-housing them and amplifying their power?

Or is it about offering the opportunity for anyone to ‘lead’ on whatever matters most to them, their loved ones and their neighbours?

Can we design leadership development processes that:

  • support and reward mass participation?
  • are inclusive rather than exclusive?
  • respect local starting conditions (values, cultures and issues)?

Certainly this kind of leadership development is possible.

By giving people space to talk about what matters to them and encouraging them to think through what they can do about it and whether they want to move from words to actions we can find ‘leaders’.  But they rarely see themselves as such.  They don’t see their agenda as being ‘leadership’.  They may see it as developing a ‘local community website’, or ‘starting an urban gardening project’ or ‘finding opportunities for young people to learn and earn in our community’.  There are plenty of people looking to do plenty of good things and the truth is that what we usually describe as ‘Leadership Development’  is unlikely to help them in their work…

The Purpose of a City: economic development or something more?

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Why do we choose to live cities?  What are they for?

Well, for many of us they are ‘Where the jobs are’.  We don’t choose to live in or near them.  We do so because that is how our economy is configured.  We are drawn into they city and ‘enslaved’ by it and the economy is exists to serve.  But many of us are, on the whole, happy slaves as the city fathers and their investor friends ensure we are regularly supplied with both  ‘bread and circuses’, superficial means of appeasement, from which they too can often make a handsome profit.

And, on one level, this is a purpose of the city.

To organise a modern population effectively and efficiently for the benefit of employers and those who bankroll and tax them.  They are above all else economic entities, where ‘culture’ and ‘community’ play secondary roles as part of the mechanisms for appeasement while the primary narrative is about the economy, productivity, profitability and gross domestic product.

As Margaret Thatcher put it “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”

But, we can look at a city differently.

We could choose to believe that “Head, heart and soul are the method; the object is to change the economy”

We can choose to see the city as a collection of people who have converged on a specific location because it offers them opportunities to do the things that they want to do, to be the person that they want to be and fulfil their potential.  In such a city the primary relationship would not be one of ‘enslavement’ to an economy but as a collaboration of powerful citizens in a participative democracy.  A city where citizens primary responsibility is to each other and to the future.  Where an economy is produced that serves people, both now and into the future.

Such a city would almost certainly not depend primarily on the development of its physical infrastructure, (Supercasino anyone? Or perhaps a high-speed train or station entrance to inspire the business folk?) but on psychological infrastructure.  A network of relationships, support and encouragement that valued people, regardless of wealth or education, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or age.  A psychological infrastructure in which help could be asked for and offered. A city in which collaboration, association and innovation in the pursuit of progress was everyone’s business.

Now THAT would be a city I would want to live in.

Poverty in Leeds

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How does poverty play out in the economic powerhouse of Yorkshire, the retail and tourist success story, the regenerated and rebuilt city, that is Leeds?

Well, here are some figures, collated by the Leeds Initiative and published on their website.

  • In Leeds there are 29,695 children aged under 16 who are living in poverty – 22.9% of all children in this age range
  • There are 33,295 dependent children aged under 20 who are living in poverty (22.1% of the children / young people in this age range)

33000 children, 1 in 5 of our children, living in poverty.

Poverty is not distributed evenly across the City, and these averages hide pockets of child poverty that are as high as anywhere in the UK.

On October 14th we are holding an Innovation Lab where the people of Leeds are invited to come and think about how poverty works in the city and what we can do to disrupt it, personally and collectively.  We would love for you to join us….http://povertyinleeds.eventbrite.com/