Welcome to the relational age! Whether on a global scale, within the private sector, between governments or non-governmental organizations in local communities, we are seeing and experiencing people coming together, indicative of the "burgeoning interest in collaboration in every sector of society" (Gray, 1991). In the business world, words like 'strategic alliances' and 'partnership' abound in many annual reports and are becoming common forms of interorganizational relationship. And in the public sector, the emergence of the civil society on both a local, national and global level indicates the trend of people coming together and helping each other solve problems, either in their own backyards or in other parts of the world (de Oliveira & Tandon, 1994; Wood, 1995).
Our ability to succeed through cooperative and collaborative ventures, partnerships and alliances, depends on our ability to build constructive, reciprocal relationships by linking people together as equals. To do so may require us to change how we think about organizing. What does it mean "to lead collaboratively?" How might the concepts of cooperation and collaboration change our approach to leadership? How do we construct our organizations to honor inclusion, relationship and collaboration? What do organizations built around cooperation and collective effort look like? How do we move past our individual interests to form a common and collective partnership?
The following story points to some distinctive lessons to build in forming and managing collaborative alliances through the honoring of relationship and allowing alternative paradigms around leadership, organizational form, and collaboration to emerge.
In the two years preceding the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, a series of 'preparations committees' were held every six months, and included for the first time in history the involvement of tens of thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots groups, and others banding together to promote their local or indigenous concerns. However, not all environmental sectors were equally represented in the preparation process for Rio: mountains were not recognized as an environmental sector in need of any particular attention and were considered covered by other ecosystems such as biodiversity and the forests. In spite of covering one fifth of the world's surface, being inhabited by 10 percent of its population, and providing 80 percent of the world's fresh water surface, mountains were not singled out in these preparations nor were they recognized for their unique cultural and ecological challenges. Not until the last meeting preceding the Earth Summit, that is.
Recognizing the need for special attention for mountain peoples and issues, a group of academics, environmentalists, and summit-preparation insiders passionate about mountains worked feverishly to establish a separate chapter to address issues pertaining specifically to mountain cultures and environments. Chapter 13 of Agenda 21, Managing Fragile Ecosystems: Sustainable Mountain Development, also known as The Mountain Agenda, was accepted and acknowledged at Rio, but in this haste it did not receive full treatment during the meeting, nor did it benefit from the inclusion and participation of a broader constituency of NGOs that so many of the other sectors enjoyed in the two years preceding the meeting. Yet no clear mechanism or motivational force existed on the momentum of Rio in spite of what had become apparent: the real impact for development of mountain-specific policies and global-level advocacy could only be realized through collaboration.
A more extensive study, "The Mountain Forum.. A Case Story in Global Organizing, " by Kathryn Kaczmarski and Timothy B. Wilmot, is also available through the GEM Working Paper Series (see bibliography).
A number of organizations stepped forward to act as conveners, hosts, and contributors for a global meeting in Lima, Peru in February, 1995 that would include more than 120 NGO leaders, academics, donors, policy-makers, environmentalists, and other organizational representatives for framing the proposals. Accomplishing such a meeting would be no small task in light of the fact that few participants had ever met each other, or even knew of the existence of the organizations represented. However, it was clear to all that developing a consensus agenda for mountains on a global level presented the enormous opportunity for establishing an ongoing network of new interorganizational relationships and activities.
Due largely to the diversity of participants and complexity of their task, the first three days of the conference were characterized by various groups of stakeholders seeking influence and wanting to be heard. While many participants enjoyed the historic first opportunity to engage in issues of concern to the international community, and the opportunity to form new partnerships and alliances, many others doubted that the conference would achieve any consensus on recommendations. Through the turmoil, novelty, and confusion emerged an NGO-style approach that included diverse perspectives and eventually built collaborative recommendations for the UN. The participants succeeded in developing a consensus mountain agenda consisting of nine thematic areas, and developed recommendations in smaller groups concentrating on each of these areas. This process allowed for the kind of input and transformation that had occurred during the two year preparatory process for Rio with other sectors, and for the mountain community to find a unifying voice at the global level.
At the same time, the participants of this NGO Consultation went beyond other sectors in chartering The Mountain Forum, with the purpose: To provide a forum for mutual support and the exchange of ideas, experience and peoples to raise mountain issues on local, national, regional, and international agendas and to promote policies and actions for equitable and ecologically sustainable mountain development. It was the birth of the first, truly global, intersectoral alliance for the preservation of mountain cultures and peoples. The congregation split into regional groups and elected representatives to serve on the Initial Organizing Committee (IOC) of the Forum, which was charged with focusing on the ongoing development of a global mountain alliance through greater inclusion of the NGO community. The circle of representation had significantly increased and the membership had shifted to be more diverse and inclusive.
At the UNCSD session in April, the Lima report was received as a brilliant NGO document, especially due to the fact that it was able to be produced in such a short period of time following the NGO consultation. The secretary-general of the CSD, along with representatives of governments and UN agencies, lauded the efforts of the consultation as one of the "salient achievements" of the high-level meeting and as an example of the innovative partnerships that are evolving among governments, agencies, and NGOs and called for the continuation and emulation of these efforts as a model for other sectors.
While the two mandates for the Forum that came out of the Lima event were clear-advocacy of the mountain agenda, and mutual support and exchange of information-what was not so evident was what a truly global alliance among so many diverse and remote participants would look like. Participants spent much of the first two days envisioning and discussing the different kinds of images they had of this social innovation, such as a web, a movement, solar system, a morphic field, a federation, and others. A collective image of the Forum began to crystallize as a coalition of organizations strung together by geographic region, but with no identifiable center and no formal secretariat. The emphasis on organizing based on regional or geographic 'nodes' was seen as the best way to bridge the local and the global and serve the interests of both. Within this coalition, boundaries would fade and no hierarchy of organizations or positions would exist, as consistent with the consensus that a relational network of mountain NGOs, agencies, and governments was necessary to function successfully at the global level.
Moreover, in this new form of organizing, membership would be broad and completely open to individuals and institutions-non-governmental, governmental, and private sector-and reflective of the basic operational values of The Mountain Forum: open, democratic, decentralized, accessible, transparent, accountable, and flexible. In addition, an electronic information network would act to serve the entire mountain community. This server node would provide Internet access and support mutual exchange of information but do so without assuming a position of management or authority.
Throughout these deliberations several interesting sensitivities became apparent, such as the language used to describe the Forum, and the notion of an organizational center. Participants objected to the use of words such as 'secretariat' and 'center', indicative of old organizational forms not in the spirit and image of the new alliance. Another sensitivity involved leadership. Surprisingly, no one leaped to assume a position of authority. There was a collective awareness of the fragility of the emerging organization, and that a singular or individual position of leadership or control could shatter the mutuality and shared influence that was characteristic of the dawning alliance.
Leadership in this story can be seen as holding from underneath the emerging infrastructure of the global alliance....... Hence, leadership was always enacted by a group, and members of that group shifted over
time according to the nature of the task required.
In sum, the meeting had produced the results desired at the outset: a delineation of the functions of a global alliance and the shape that such an innovation would take, which was agreeable to an international community of mountain NGOs, interagency, and government organizations. The meeting closed with much hope expressed among participants for the future of the Forum. Impressively, all had been able to set aside their individual interests, and through an innovative collaboration, create and serve something larger than themselves.
Shifting Leadership at the Group Level. Always under the purview of the larger group, it is clear that leadership also shifted as the collaborations evolved. For example: Chapter 13 of Agenda 21 was initiated by a small group of academics and environmentalists; during the Lima meeting the NGO community at large adopted a position of leadership; and, a smaller group of NGO and inter-agency representatives and donors was tasked to design the Forum. Hence, leadership was always enacted by a group, and members of that group shifted over time according to the nature of the task required. Having played their part, members in the leading coalition, such as the academics who began the effort at Rio, relinquished the reins and allowed the organization to continue under the stewardship of new leaders. Equally important, no one acted alone. Leadership for any segment of the story was always held by a group, again indicative of the collective construction of leadership.
A Network with No Center. In line with the ethos of supportive leadership and a regionally-based infrastructure, this global alliance emerged with no organizational center. For in this story, 'the mountain' is the center, the sun of the solar system around which the alliance revolves. The lack of an organizational center is also indicative of the highly relational nature of the alliance. It is the space in-between that is honored-in between the local and the global. An open and flexible structure was seen as essential to an organizing form requiring participation, inclusion, and the mutual support of relationship to sustain the system. Hence the alliance will depend on establishing and maintaining relationships through the network for its survival, complimented by a change in regional node representatives at least every two years.
Finding a Collaborative Language. The use of the 'right' language was a common theme throughout this story. Beginning with the label of 'forum', language has played a significant part in the struggle to describe the alliance being sought. As mentioned in the story, the words 'secretariat' and 'center' were found objectionable by members of the mountain constituency, carrying a connotation that did not fit with the vision for the Forum. Since words create the world, the struggle with language was a worthy one: organizing images and eventual actions derive from articulations. Finding the right words to give voice to our hopes and images is an essential step in creating a new reality.
For in this story, 'the mountain' is the center, the sun of the solar system around which the alliance revolves.
From this example many new learnings about global organizing have been uncovered which may never have been evident had people relied on existing mechanisms or fallen back on standard ways of behaving or operating. Perhaps this is the nature of allowing for organizing to take place as naturally as possible by connecting people together around a common interest, providing a little direction, supporting the emerging system, focusing on mutual relationship, and letting the rest be resolved as it unfolds.
Gray, B. (1991). Collaborating:
Finding common ground for multiparty problems. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Mollner, T. (1992). Business, the relationship age, and a new kind of nation. In A. Combs (Ed.), Cooperation: Beyond the age of competition (Ch. 19). Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach.
Wood, T. (1995, October 30). US. foreign policy is a private interest. The Plain Dealer, p. 9B.
Prior to joining The Mountain Institute, Jane spent 14 years with the World Bank, focusing much of her attention and effort on issues surrounding international environmental development. As Chief of Environmental operations and Strategy, she helped introduce environmental assessments and national environmental action plans into mainstream development work.
We have come to know Jane over the last two years since she assumed the leadership of The Mountain Institute and through her management team's participation in two Organizational Excellence Programs. Through this involvement Jane has become a friend and cherished colleague to faculty and students at Case, always willing to contribute to our learning. Most recently, she participated in a discussion of GEM's Executive Certificate Program, sharing her experiences and insights about global organizing with a diverse audience from around the world. What follows are excerpts from a recent talk with Kathryn Kaczmarski, who shared with her the previous story of The Mountain Forum to elicit Jane's interpretations and lessons about new forms of global organizing.
KK: Are there other ways to describe the leadership of The Mountain Forum, or are there other aspects of leadership that have made this as successful as it has been?
JP: I think one reason that the whole process emerged the way it did was because there was a very specific vision behind it from the beginning. Tage Michaelsen's (the FAO taskmaster) vision for partnership, the vision that I had developed in coming to The Mountain Institute, of creating a global mountain alliance, and seeing this as an opportunity to do that, and the absolutely fortuitous and brilliant piece of luck in having Oliver Chave being at SDC at that time, who had a vision of a mountain agenda.... For me the fortuitous coming together of vision and standing, of people who have the standing and the capacity to make it happen was really important in what eventually happened.
The second perception I have, Kathryn, is that with the core people-I mean it wasn't that we sat together and plotted and had a conscious plan to make this happen-but there was a recognition, I think, of a complementarity of vision and objective. And in the case of the principle partners involved, in every case you were dealing with mature leadership.
KK: And by mature you mean...
JP: I mean specifically that every one of us had the experience and prior learning we needed to deal with the challenges that emerged... [and avoid] the mistakes that less-seasoned, less-experienced managers would have made in trying to take credit and needing, for career development reasons, to have either the ego gratification or the recognition. But in each case you are dealing with a mature leader who was not only quite content to let that go, but had a very clear sense of the managerial wisdom in letting go of ownership.
As a new manager who had not worked on The Mountain Agenda before coming in, as head of a small organization that was putting itself on the map, taking personal credit for it would have been disastrous, both for me personally and for The Mountain Institute. We would have set ourselves up as a target for attack. And I think as it was, even consciously and deliberately at every turn giving credit to the group-having the maturity to realize that it was in fact the group that deserved and 'owned' the credit. Even with that it was hard not to become a target. And it required mature leadership-you don't learn that stuff until you've been knocked about a bureaucracy a few times, and learned it the hard way.
Third, I think this consensus style nurturing is a very feminine style of leadership. And I think it would have been harder for many of the senior men to accept both the small group process and the group responsibility coming from a man. They're all strong-many of them come out of 'command and control' hierarchical systems and had been spending years butting their heads together like a bunch of mountain rams! (Laughter.)... I think part of what we did was create a broader arena. For some of them who had been facing off with each other, they got into a great new forest and said, "hey, we'll go explore this way, you go explore that way," and it gave them more space in which to play to their own strengths and they didn't keep running into each other. I think that whether you call it a feminine style of leadership, or a horizontal or a networking or a facilitating style, it was markedly different from what had characterized the interactions of this group before.
KK: I want to explore that one a little further. I'm wondering if ...you mentioned creating a different playing field or creating a different space. Do you know how that happened? Was it because of the inclusion of the NGOs Was it because more women were then present in this arena?
JP: I think it had to do with height and scale. The initial group consisted of three or four people, and their expanded group was about seven. There was an inner circle and there was an outer circle, but they were pretty tight circles. That meant that there were in-groupers and out-groupers, and they controlled who came in. When we said, "it's not like that, it's a field, and we're all points connected in space, and look at all these other points, and they're all connected too," it changed the whole nature of the control issue-it diffused control as an issue, just by opening it up.
That was something...you know, when we met in Rome, and we initially talked about having a mountain meeting-I don't think a lot of this is conscious, but I think it just kind of happens-the initial reaction was, "well, that makes a lot of sense. You're the only one who's institutionally rooted. We (original Mountain Agenda members) couldn't do this. So why don't you be the one to take the lead and set this up?" And my conscious perception at the time was-kiss of death! Either we would succeed brilliantly in which case we would become a very visible target, or we would fall on our face in which case it would be said, "oh well, it's all their fault." And it would be very easy to say, "writeoff The Mountain Institute, write-off this new president -she doesn't know what she's doing."
I spotted early-immediately-the risk of taking that on. There was not one second in which I said, "oh well, that's really. . . how wonderful, how flattering, how great of you to ask!" My immediate reaction was that's not going to work! We could help to convene that kind of meeting but the planning group itself would have to be diverse and representative. And we would then have to charge the group with the responsibility for organizing the larger meeting, so it (the credit) never got pinned on a single individual or institution. And their initial reaction was "fine, raise the money, convene the group, and it will be me and my two buddies," and as we began to say "well, yes, you and your inner circle, plus an additional group of mountain NGO leaders as wide-ranging and diverse as we can muster in the time available," and the convening group, the planning group, ended up being 30 people.
That group then was charged with responsibility for convening the first international consultation of mountain NGOs and other partners, and for imagining the kind of structure that would need to be created for us to have a continuing voice and presence as a group in the international environmental arena. We (The Mountain Institute) were still pretty visible because we were the conveners of the group, but not the way we would have been had we been the sole organizers of the Lima meeting.
I think everybody has a yin and yang side, and the trick is to develop it as strongly as you can on both feet. And I think a lot of very male, very command and control, military, hierarchical (style was present), which is a style designed for a different purpose, and which functions very well for that purpose-but is not well adapted for the work we needed to do. So we invented a different way of being, and I think it was new to a lot of them (original members of The Mountain Agenda). Not what they certainly had experienced in academia.
KK: You know, the other piece I am struck by, when you were asked to convene, rather than to aim towards either one of those two extremes, being that you took it on and pulled it off successfully and became a target...
JP: or the hero!
KK: ...you used that opportunity to start to bring in more people, to make the circle larger, striving for a happy medium, so to speak.
JP: It's also very expedient in that, in my experience, the command and control type of leadership is tolerated in men but it certainly is not well tolerated in women. And you end up making yourself a target. I don't know, maybe it's because once we become targets we don't know what to do with it. Pushing the other guys off the mountain is not what comes instinctively to us and we set up a game that we almost always then lose. 'Cause we don't know how to play that game. Or we try to beat the boys at their own game, and lose the better part of our own strengths in the process. So I think there's some of that in it too.... It's not a style that makes me feel whole, it doesn't make me feel good about myself, it doesn't make me feel like I'm serving the larger agenda or the community or being nurturing or all those things that make me feel like I'm playing to my strengths and doing what I enjoy doing.
KK: Let's talk a bit about the organizing forms. The image that comes to my mind more and more is a circle, with the regions located around the circle, but no center to that circle. So it's almost as if, because the regions are there, there's something to hang your hat on, through their linkages.
JP: That's the way we've drawn it, and I think there's something very gratifying about that, because it also makes every dot on the circle kind of equal-but in fact I think it's more like outer space. There are stars, and some of them are near and some of them are distant. And some of them kind of exert a gravitational pull, and some of them don't. There's no particular structure to it. But I think a ring or a circle is as good an image as any other.
On second thought, I think it's more like laser light bouncing off a mirror, if you've ever seen that or set that up. If you don't put a mirror there to re-direct it, that piece of light just goes shooting off into space indefinitely, and nothing happens until it connects with another mirror and it shoots it back in another direction, and pretty soon if you get enough mirrors and aim them correctly, some of them shoot back at each other and some of them will split the light and shoot in another direction. And you get certain multiple rays-some of which connect and not all of which do. Some of that information just goes off and is lost in space. Okay?
KK: That's a great image. I hadn't thought about it that way, but it does make a lot of sense. In terms of this idea of a network with no center, do you believe that this partnership can go forward without ever gravitating towards having a center?
JP: Where I perceive the biggest risk is that two-thirds of the partnership is inter-governmental rather than nongovernmental, and ironically by that coincidence we've already limited the diversity. Also, the three key people in the interim facilitating committee come out of a Northern European tradition. I bring some gender dimension to that, but the group itself doesn't have a lot of diversity. Now the node managers-in both cases, one is Peruvian and one is Asian-really will help. The fact that Ricardo as the node server is Brazilian will help too. The fact that we've got some age diversity in the group is helpful. But I hope that when the responsibility shifts from The Mountain Institute to one of the other two partners that we don't change the character at that point. I'm not too worried about the first two years, but I think the second two will be critical.
KK: Okay. And in terms of-I call this category the nature of global collaboration-trying to think about what it takes to collaborate at a global level. Any comments here, perhaps in particular if there was something about this effort, or what the dynamic was that allowed people to be collectivist in their thinking, and their use of language as well?
JP: We were dealing in a multilingual context. The whole flap about the term alliance was because the French said an alliance is a military pact, and they didn't want it to have that military dimension. Our language doesn't even give us good words for what it is we're trying to do. And the good words we have in one language don't translate. So we end up with an Interim Facilitating Committee because we can't call it an Executive Committee. An Executive Committee is command-and-control. We're not calling them regional subnetworks, because a sub-network would be under a network, and a regional network isn't really quite what its name implies because members of that regional network are connected directly, not through the node, to members of the other networks. . . ugh! how would you do this?
Even the language we have to describe what we're doing, in creating, carving out areas of, allocating the burden of management equitably and saying, "all right, we'll take the global piece, you take the Asian piece, you take the Latin American piece," 'cause they're roughly equivalent in terms of how hard a job it is to manage that piece-is a struggle.... And it's really not managing pieces-it's facilitating, empowering, activating-but the more you get into the language the 'hokier' it sounds, frankly.... To use language that is as soft and connected-you know, how could you have 'the nurturing node?'....
And the new use of the word 'network.' Really, it's a recent phenomena in language, partly because of electronic networks, but partly because 'networking' as a verb. And I think what we're onto here is dealing with what I call solo climbers, with people who really want to summit and who are dealing with base camps and forward camps. And then I talk to some of our indigenous colleagues and they actually now are planning an expedition. They're not planning an assault on, they're not planning a conquest of-they're planning to travel to Mount Everest, and it's not even an attempt at a summit. They want to do an indigenous reverence to the mountain in which they will go with their prayers and offer prayers at various levels and various places on the mountain, and deliberately not set foot on the peak.
Part of this pertains to the discussions we've been having around the forum and around different leadership styles, but it does bring up the whole issue of language and trying to create something like this where your language is helping you to characterize accurately and in a non-controlling kind of way.
KK: And even non-dualistic, in a more relational way. I have one last question for you. Concerning The Mountain Forum: what would you like to pass along, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you share, to your peers in other NGOs who are looking at these kinds of alliances or forums or partnerships? Some imparting comments, or...?
JP: I guess for me one of the biggest learnings I've had, not in just this experience but in the experience in relationship to Appreciative Inquiry is the power of... both the power and the incredible discipline of holding the attention on the vision. I just feel... it's easy to get a concept of the vision and then get on with doing. And I think what we attempted to do, and the time period in which we attempted to do it, was so... I don't mean to over-dramatize this, but in terms of the capacity that we brought to the table-and the size of the task-it was awesome. And to do that, if we'd gotten too quickly into the tasks, I don't think it would have happened. It was... for me the management challenge was in developing a real shared vision, developing consensus about the vision, and doing this sometimes very difficult work of holding the vision: of holding people's attention to the vision of what we're trying to do-is very hard. People were onto their own agendas, and bringing that back consciously and deliberately so that we could go forward. I think that was the biggest learning for me- how much power there is in that.
Return to the Table of Contents