Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Julie Andrews and sustainability
Believe it or not, the two most famous roles that Julie Andrews ever played - Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins - help to inform us about creating more sustainable communities and organizations.
In their 2007 book The Starfish and the Spider, authors Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom talk about the differences between the increasingly prominent decentralized organization (the starfish) and the classic centralized organization (the spider). In the book, they talk a great deal about catalysts - individuals that instigate change in a more decentralized way than the stereotypical leader. Catalysts enable others to build capacity and lead themselves, rather than becoming dependent on a single leader.
To illustrate the idea, Brafman and Beckstrom discuss the differences between the aforementioned roles of Julie Andrews. In The Sound of Music, Maria helps the von Trapp family become a functional family. That's great and wonderful, but at the end of the day (or the movie), she has to stick around to keep things running smoothly. The von Trapp family needs her to lead them.
Contrast this with Mary Poppins. Mary flies in and helps out a dysfunctional family unit as well. The difference here is that when the Banks household is up and running on their own, Mary can pop her umbrella up and fly off, knowing that they are able to lead themselves.
In moving towards more sustainable communities and organizations, there need to be many more Mary Poppins in the world than Maria von Trapps. The scope of issues that we face requires nothing less than collective action on a huge scale. If we have too many people acting like little von Trapps, sitting around and waiting for someone else to act or tell them what to do, then we won't get to where we need to go. On the other hand, if there were more Mary Poppins in the world, then we'd have a lot more capacity in our communities and organizations to address complex challenges together.
That's what we're trying to do with our work at Intelligent Futures. We're trying to channel our inner Mary Poppins and help communities and organizations solve their own issues. Just don't expect us to dress the part. We don't look good in hats.
- John, February 18, 2009
Labels: capacity building, organizational change, sustainability
¶ 8:58 AM
Post a Comment