No person steps in the same river twice.
The person changes, and the river changes.

For the last several years, I have been on a learning journey - not only in the formal role of graduate student but as a woman attempting to “pick up where I left off”, having traded the career that shaped my identity for 15 years for the stay at home mom and wife life at the end of 2012. When we moved to Virginia last July, I felt like I had arrived ready to restart the next chapter of my professional life but soon learned where I’d landed was not meant to be. On the surface, I had realized the dream I held for myself - the dream of returning to work, financial success, personal achievement - but in the process of living it, I learned that the woman who held those dreams and I are no longer the same. Things I once valued and needed to feel valuable are needed no more. The spirit that has carried me throughout my life is more content today looking inward at the new gifts I’ve developed and understanding how to apply them to the needs of the world outside of myself.

Though this year has been a struggle, I am clearer and more confident in my core values of empathy and compassion, and even identified a new core value, justice. I learned the hard way that, for the sake of my own health and well-being, and to ensure the gifts I am meant to share with the world are brought to bear, these values are never to be compromised. In this new era of global struggle with Covid-19, civil unrest, poor leadership at the highest levels of our systems, and this reawakening to the true socioeconomic inequities in those systems, upholding and acting on my core values is more necessary than ever.

At present moment, I’m sitting in my home office on a gloomy Saturday morning reviewing the events of the past week. I was a student in a Conversational Leadership workshop hosted by my friend and mentor of more than 10 years, John Hovell, and the remarkable and multi-gifted Donita Volkwijn. Though this definition is not all encompassing, Conversational Leadership can briefly be defined as ”appreciating the extraordinary but underutilized power of conversation, recognizing that we can all practice leadership and adopt a conversational approach to the way in which we live and work together in an increasingly complex world.”. Conversational Leadership is also a mindset, a personal commitment to a lifelong journey and practice of leading through conversation while knowing and yet constantly (often painfully) rediscovering one’s place in conversation as leader, participant, resource, enabler, even victim, rescuer, and persecutor.

While the model of Conversational Leadership is approachable and intended for use by anyone, the practice at times is prickly and requires one to stretch beyond expectations of structure and boundaries into a sort of aimlessness, requiring heightened levels of self-awareness, self-control, and what I would call parthood (which innovators Andrew Benedict Nelson and Jeff Lietner define as an understanding of “how your problems relate to other problems through shared actors, settings, or resources.”) John Hovell and I would agree this workshop was ‘advanced learning’, so while conversational leadership as a model is quite approachable, this workshop may not be appropriate for those not yet comfortable with the discomfort of challenging our tightly held beliefs about ourselves and doing so in a group setting. The workshop was, without question, one of the hardest things I have ever put myself through - more difficult than child birth, almost as painful as divorce, and more exhausting than waking up well before dawn week after week to train for a marathon. There were a few times I nearly quit. There were a lot of tears, but there was exponential personal growth. I can say with full confidence that the person I was at the beginning of the experience was fully released into history to make way for the woman who exited the room yesterday ready to make history with all of you in the form of Radical Communityship.

But first, what is Communityship? Communityship, as defined by David Gurteen, is “a process of social influence in which everyone in a community exercises leadership and works together towards a set of common goals.” According to Henry Mintzberg, this is not shared leadership, nor does it eliminate the need for leadership as we know it. As I understand it, it is simply a way for a community to move itself forward with lesser need of intervention from someone designated as a leader.

Taking that definition of Communityship and applying my own learnings and experiences as a technologist, a macro social worker, and a member of this ever changing and complex society, I would define Radical Communityship as:

a process that occurs when the members of a community explicitly agree to practice and support one another in the practice of radical self awareness, radical self love, radical candor, and conversational leadership with the intent of moving not only themselves, but society forward toward systemic equity and justice.

I believe with all my heart that now is the time to embrace the idea that the kind of leadership that will move our world forward is not that which is practiced by a small group at the top. Leadership is additionally the responsibility of every member of our communities. Only when we can develop relationships with our selves that are radically loving, aware, and honest can we lead our communities as communities through the practice of conversation, holding space, mutual support and action.

In the next few blog posts, I’ll look more closely at each component of Radical Communityship as defined above and would love your thoughts and insights in the comments below.

With Gratitude,
Jamie