Organic models of leadership: Bridging the gap in thought to STO

[Asolsutsesvyl]

Nowadays, there is an ancient yet 'new' concept of leadership called "Servant Leader".
[...]

It stumbled upon me as our team is adopting what today's known as "Agile Way Of Working".
Where the role of a 'leader' is designated by the role of "Scrum Master", and a scrum master actually only act as a 'coach' to the team, serving the team as facilitator and be the first in line to remove blockage.
[...]

I read a discussion among programmers elsewhere, fairly recently, about "agile" and related terms. One person wondered if there was real meaning to it, having encountered lots of marketing-speak (indistinguishable from nonsense, and skeptical because of how meaningless buzzwords usually are), but got some answers from others comparing it to the old, often-complained-about management styles of the past, making clear that it reflects a real shift. Some good stuff has been brewing and changing since the 00's in the world of programming.

Hope it works out well for you. Myself, I've so far remained a hobby programmer.

(Edited version of an article I originally posted 2014-10-27 on the Cassiopaea forum, where it's been a fine topic in theory but not really relevant to the kind of thought put into practice.)

In recent times, the administration of this community has discussed renewing commitment and ideas for running it, before taking a big new step. The ideas here may be interesting in relation to the vision of something that grows and unfolds more organically, instead of being rigidly managed by a hierarchy.

Close to 7 years ago, in another community, I read a comment in a discussion about leadership that reminded me of concepts of leadership I'd read about in Gerald M. Weinberg's book Becoming a Technical Leader. There are quite different and contrasting ways of viewing and defining leadership. The typical academic "understanding" of it tends to be limited to a simplistic, hierarchical way of seeing it, though, and few are exposed to other ways of modeling it. Hence a dismissal of the traditional idea of "the leader" sometimes extends to a lack of seeing a clear alternative...

In my opinion the concept of "leader" is outdated and doesn't work in a true STO community (that we aspire to become). It's a network of people that have different strengths and can support each other, putting others behind on the ladder, but not leading many in a hierarchical sense. Still, sometimes I think, that some people are more active, and Laura, in a way, is a "leader", too, here ... so, still a lot to ponder ...

(How things have developed in that community is a topic discussed in another thread.)

Leadership does not necessarily have to be hierarchical -- and Weinberg contrasts the more well-known hierarchical and "linear" approach with the "organic" approach.

To the first point, a hierarchy can exist in STO as well.  In fact, it does.  

When you consider that "Angels" act in a hierarchical manner, the concept of higher densities, etc.  A negative hierarchy is more of a master/slave mentality whereas a positive hierarchy is more of a more advanced/aware / less advanced/aware with the goal of helping the less advanced/aware individual become more aware.

I agree that it's not fully black and white. It becomes a bit clearer later on (because hierarchy is not always a matter of the "threat/reward model", for instance), but never fully, in the article.

(That said, I don't believe in traditional religious or spiritual ideas of "the hierarchy of angels" and similar. I think it may be a human attempt to make things understandable, analogous to how dogs may try and fail to understand humans who do things like physics or software programming or various other things. The scale of densities make the gap to the next density "roughly" as large as the gap in comprehension between dog and man. It's even trickier for the density above that, with two such differences stacked on one another, or more accurately, the difference after the first difference cannot be fully understood because the first-order difficulty applies to understanding the second-order difficulty...)

To write something short and sketchy about the stuff that I left out, I think that power and responsibility must be in balance when there is a hierarchical difference in position, in order for the dynamic to be basically constructive. Imbalance is harmful, whether it's power beyond responsibility (i.e. exploitation, or treating others as toys), or responsibility beyond power (i.e. overextension, and possibly martyrdom).

Weinberg, too, makes it a matter of context, and notes that there's situations calling for being "appropriately linear". But organic leadership is held up as the ideal in a way I agree with, and as anti-ideal I had in mind how it's usually not given a chance, or too-easily destroyed after having begun as something great.