I've had some phun at the expense of the various predators seeking to exploit Katrina and in a very few places noted someone who had written something sensible, something that wasn't just venomous political opportunism or a predatory sales spiel for their used and damaged intellectual merchandise long past its sell-by date. Here's one that makes useful commentary that can be appreciated even if you disagree with parts of it since it makes a sincere attempt to grapple with the issues rather than merely profit from someone else's tragedy.

At the end of the day, for social learning to effectively take hold, for actions to be implemented in a timely way, a new kind of political leadership style is needed. We are all craving this -- us "pragmatic idealists", tired of blind and binding ideological party politics. Yet what exactly a new kind of politics might look like is dimly perceived. We see glimmers of it here in the blogsphere, and at the fringes where decentralized democratic experiments are happening. But I think Don Michael also sheds some light on what the distinguishing qualities of these leaders might be. For starters, they would acknowledge that we're living in a complex world with many uncertainties. They would adopt a "learning approach" to problem-solving. (More later). For these leaders, "some loss of control doesn't upset them. They accept error more easily as part of the human condition, as something to be learned from. And they believe that control, such as it is, is best exercised through participative processes that share power and purpose."

Unfortunately, in many political quarters, what we're getting is the opposite: leaders who are "too certain" of their actions, leaders who are fearful of not having all the answers because they must be "decisive and resolute", leaders who would feel threatened to open up their decision making processes beyond a small circle just when a more decentralized, collaborative approach is needed. As Michael predicts, recent disasters have only entrenched the old norms and old approaches to problem-solving. At least, this seems to be the short term trend... but one that is about to break very soon under its own unsustainability. . .

Suffice it is to say, if we want a new style of politics -- a perennial, timeless cry, I think -- it's incumbent upon us, not the existing sunk base (th them (because they are too trapped in their worlds) to put forward a clear and compelling new vision of what politics might mean in the future. We need to continue to incubate experiments in "politics as unusual" in places where politics isn't called politics. Because pretty soon, if Don Michael is right, the call for new approaches will come and we better be ready. But at a deeper more timeless level, these new leaders will only emerge if they are rewarded for their honesty, courage, wisdom, and humility. Will people tolerate a leader, for instance, who says "I don't know the answer?" So this isn't new; the classic chicken and egg dilemma.

The post has an old fashioned aroma - a twentieth century focus on leadership, planning, power and control - but it recognizes that there is a problem and that more of the same with greater vigor is not useful. It dips one little toe into the bracing waters of subsidiarity. It is worth reading as a sort of missing link, a fossil that shows one species midway to becoming another, like a whale that still has legs, hasn't completed its evolution back from the land to the sea. Seeing both morphologies in a single beast is instructive.

An "action learning" process varies from the traditional policy planning methods, which assume linear change with plans that can anticipate all the variables at play. Action learning processes are more emergent and dynamic than "plans" which sit on a shelf waiting to be reconstituted. While they try to imagine future scenarios and avoid being reactive, they start with a certain discipline in seeing the world. Action learning process are always surfacing and testing assumptions -- facts as as unknowns, and adapt them as the landscape changes. Most planners, by contrast, minimize or ignore uncertainties because they aren't measurable and leaders don't like to acknowledge them. (Remember they have all the answers.) Action learning processes also embrace multiple sources of knowledge and insight from all key stakeholders, not just experts which can get trapped in their disciplinary silos and ignore local wisdom or key information at the fringes of the problem area. In short, this is a bridge into a different kind of problem solving that's inclusive, pluralistic, and manages uncertainty in a more robust fashion. Only then will we be more adaptive and resilient in the face of disasters. The good news is that this new approach to problem-solving is being developed in many places, in many experiments, around the world. Leaders just need to be educated and made aware of this, and then find the courage to try this process out.

Pretty good stuff. The problem is firmly grasped but the prescription is antique. It isn't that "leaders" need to be educated and given a spine transplant, it is that "leaders" are the old fashioned and ineffective way to organize society. They never have actually lead, and if they tried they lead society to ruin. A more informed and robust grasp of the value of group decision making for effective problem solving reveals that there is no such thing as a leader in a well functioning society. There may be someone or a small group speaking first at any given time, but they aren't the leaders. They are those who happen to have a useful heuristic for the current stage of the problem solution. That will change in short order as the nature of the solution advances and they yield to another with a heuristic better suited to the moment.

That beast has not yet evolved. The one we have - the beached whale - is doomed but not dead. Nicole, the author of that post, bridges the divide if you squint a bit since she talks new talk using old framings and assumptions. She gets the whale off the beach but it's walking on the bottom of the sea rather than swimming gracefully. This may be useful, perhaps even more useful than describing to the beast that has not evolved yet.