Last week the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s oldest and largest Islamist organization, a group that has been banned, off and on in Egypt since 1948, won 47 percent of seats in the lower house of parliament.

Which leads me to ponder a question that has always intrigued me: how does a political party, or an individual for that matter, make the transition in identity (and action) from a radical activist position, outside the mainstream, to the head of government?

Major political transitions are seldom considered to be psychological as well as political events, but how could they not be? The citizens of the former east bloc countries didn’t just wake up one morning with a democratic understanding, attitude and behavior. Growing up in a totalitarian regime results in a state of mind, a set of behaviors that doesn’t shift when government does. Being a member of a banned, radical extremist group to suddenly being the party in the seat of power is a profound shift in identity. Looking at history, the track record for making this transition is not good. Many radical parties entered through revolution and proceeded to jail, torture, ‘re-educate’ or assassinate opponents.

It takes people years to grow into their sense of power, to grow from a young adult dependent on others to being the one responsible for others. Companies grapple with this all the time. Someone is promoted from front line or factory floor into a management position but doesn’t or can’t fill those leadership shoes: they see their new staff still as colleagues, and react competitively with the people they are meant to develop. And this is true everywhere, not just in the business world: parents struggle with this, often failing to recognize their higher rank and resorting to yelling, screaming, even violence when provoked by their children. Teachers who feel insecure or who need their egos stroked are every student’s nightmare. (more…)

The death of Vaclav Havel yesterday reminds me of the essence of politics, the greater sense of service and community that defines politics in its purest form. Havel, a dissident, playwright and the first president of the Czech republic after the fall of communism, believed in a politics was that was “a practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans.”

His rhetoric about community and relationship is missing in our current polarized and polarizing political climate. Long before people spoke of emotional intelligence, Havel was championing it. In discussing what he learned during his tenure as President of the Czech Republic, Havel says he realized that the most essential assets for any politician are

fellow-feeling, the ability to talk to others, insight, the capacity to grasp quickly not only problems but also human character, the ability to make contact, a sense of moderation: all these are immensely more important in politics.

Is there still room for such kind of politicians? Am I naïve to believe that politics could someday embody these ideals? Perhaps. Yet I hold out the hope that we can and will get there one day.

In the movie Bulworth, Warren Beatty plays Senator Jay Billington Bulworth a “suicidally disillusioned liberal politician who puts a contract out on himself and takes the opportunity to be bluntly honest with his voters.” It’s a great movie. And an even greater premise – that a politician doesn’t take on the problems of his constituents, but puts them back onthe people as problems of their own making.

It’s the primary season and next year is an election year, and I’m already dreading the prospect of sitting through two more years of hearing that our problems are the fault of Big Government. Doesn’t anyone else see that as a contradiction? Am I alone in thinking this creates the very problem people are criticizing,  making government responsible for the problems of big government? (more…)

I’m in Toronto this week doing a bit of training. With the Anima Leadership Institute, I’m offering a two-day training on Deep Democracy II: From Conflict and Collaboration. And on Monday, I’ll be speaking at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering’s Summer Leadership Institute on Tools and Techniques for High performance, Cross-Disciplinary Teams.

The case for collaboration doesn’t need to be made. It’s obvious that everything that needs to get done in an organization gets done through people working together. And to solve the pressing problems of today, we need cross-discipline collaboration. Complex problems stem from multiple causes, involve numerous stakeholders, and concern knowledge from across several disciplines. (more…)

I’m here in Denver at the 2011 Worldwork Conference – 260 people from all over the world, learning about the planet and its vast problems, and also learning how to facilitate and resolve conflict. Today I’m part of the facilitation team. Sitting here over my coffee, getting ready for the day, I’m reminded of my post, “Leading Under Fire,”  which I originally called Game Day. I’m reposting it here, and I think I’ll also give it a re-read, reminding myself of all my good points, as I get ready for the day. Enjoy!

Read the full post here.

Martin Luther King, Jr., on the eve of his assassination, eerily voiced a premonition of his death:

I’ve been to the mountain top!… He’s allowed me to go up the mountain! and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight… that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!  And I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything…. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

King, like Moses, never gets a chance to see the promised land. It’s both a truth and a metaphor. It’s a metaphor for leadership: There really is no leader beyond our own yearnings and dreams. While we  hope to rest in the illusion that there exists someone wiser, greater, or more powerful who can lead us, our fate is to become the wise woman or man we crave.

Is it even possible to  elect a leader, or a government that lives up to our ideals? Or, are our ideals ours to become? John Dewey predicted this when he said that, contrary to popular thought, the work of democracy was not to achieve common good and harmony, but was the work of individual self-realization. This is, as James Baldwin said, the real work of achieving our country.

I came across this amazing (at least I think so) quote by Richard Rorty. Warning: it’s long, dense, somewhat inflammatory, and it has a rather “insider-ish” tone. He’s talking to his colleagues in academia. His self-awareness of power strikes me. He turns his own analysis of power onto himself and his colleagues to look at the biases of his role and profession. It’s a great example for all of us in power. It’s easy to fall prey to patronizing uses of power because you believe in your own cause so strongly.

It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions… It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own … The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire American liberal establishment is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students … When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank… You have to be educated in order to be … a participant in our conversation … So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours … I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents … I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stuermer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.

Universality and Truth, in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

In the wake of the recent G20 in Toronto, my friend Annahid and I were talking about the state of social change movements today. Annahid has been on the front lines of social change her whole life, and is founder and senior partner of Anima Leadership Institute in Toronto, which offers leadership programs for individuals, teams and organizations in support of transformative change, so she’s got a pretty good perspective on the movement. She was disheartened by what she saw as the same old divisive rhetoric, and the tendency to “battle might with right.” In an email exchange, she wrote, “the complexity of our current environments and systems means that no one individual or group can possibly have all the answers required. Our strategies and solutions instead must innovate in their ability to integrate different perspectives and knowledge.”

Annahid is hosting a series of talks on Animating Social Change, and asked me to speak about Deep Democracy. What social change innovation does Deep Democracy offer, she asked? Not so easy to say as I first thought, I discovered. Is it the creative techniques for working with conflict? The teleological view of disturbance and conflict? The embrace of non-consensual experiences? The way it views marginalization as both an inner and outer process? All yes, but something else, something’s missing. Then it occurred to me, Deep Democracy is not just an innovation, but a disruptive innovation. Clayton M. Christensen, in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, differentiated between sustaining and disruptive innovations. He describes disruptive innovations as ones that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Deep Democracy is disruptive because it puts individual development back in the center of the conversation on systemic change. The split between inner and outer, personal and political is radically revisioned in Deep Democracy. Here’s how I see Deep Democracy’s disruptive innovation: (more…)

I wrote recently about the polarizing tone of civil discourse, and find Michael Sandel’s recent TED talk on The Lost Art of Democratic Debate encouraging. Sandel, professor of political philosophy at Harvard, looks at the essence and moral questions that underlie issues, and believes that bringing our deeply held moral convictions into debate will add to the quality of our civil discourse, contrary to popular belief which holds we have to shy away from the deep feelings and convictions we have.

I started a Kids City Club for a group of fourth graders, as part of my work with the I Have a Dream Foundation in Oregon. Seven kids were chosen to participate in a series of activities to help them learn about government and how the city works. In one activity, we met with a city planner to learn about the redevelopment proposal for their local neighborhood, an economically disadvantaged slice of Northeast Portland with unpaved roads, no sewers or public parks, and numerous other problems.

They even made a presentation to the Portland city council on their ideas for improving their neighborhood. The kids did a great job, and the city council – the Mayor and City Commissioners (yes, Portland still has a commissioner style of city government) – was terrific. Council members really made an effort to make the kids feel at home. They asked lots of questions, gave them an extended photo op and a tour of the Mayor’s offices. (You can watch the presentation online thanks to Portland cable access). (more…)