Leadership to the Power of 8: Leading Integrally in the 21st Century

July 7, 2005, © Marilyn Hamilton BA CGA PhD, Editor www.integralcity.com

Introduction

In July 2005, discord separated the G8 countries from the Live8 musicians. The G8 countries wanted economic agreements, while the Live8 musicians wanted action to end poverty. To create harmony, both the G8 and the Live8 needed Leadership to the Power of 8.

What is the Power of 8? It is the global level of complexity anticipated by the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and identified in the research of Clare W. Graves. The Power of 8 describes the emergence of life conditions that are global, complex, interconnected, ecological and adaptive.

Three books published in the last two years, paint a picture of the world to the Power of 8:
• “Collapse” by Jared Diamond (2005) proposes 5 ecological factors that cause societies to fail or survive.
• “The Pentagon’s New Map” by Thomas Barnett (2004) recounts how technology and telecommunications have changed the environment for countries in the connected “Core” and marginalized countries in the disconnected “Gap”.
• “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman (2005) narrates how 10 “flatteners” have leveled the world’s economic playing fields and 3 convergences have shifted the scale of global change, thus transforming the conditions for thriving human systems.

Leadership to the Power of 8, reveals the leadership that is required in a world that is spherical (de Chardin, 1959; Fuller, 1981; Diamond, 2005), connected (Barnett, 2004; Hamilton, 1999), collaborative (Friedman, 2005; Wheatley, 1992, 2002), integral (Wilber, 1995,2000a, 2000b, 2004; Graves, 1981 Hamilton, 2003c; Hargens, 2004), emergent/evolutionary (Graves, 1981; Beck, 2000; Beck et al , 1996), contextual (Diamond, 2005; Graves, 1981), dynamically adaptive (Bloom ,2000; Capra, 1996; Jacobs, 1994, 2000; Margulis and Sagan, 1997), and cyclical (Adizes, 1999).

Leadership to the Power of 8 transcends and includes (Wilber, 1995) all the leaderships to lesser powers (1 to 7). At every level leaders engage with reality through the lenses of I, WE, IT and ITS (Wilber 1995). Leadership to the Power of 7 has been described elsewhere by Graves (1981), Beck et al (1996), Wilber (1995), Hamilton (1999, 2000, 2001), Wheatley (1992, 2002), Knowles (2002), and Stevenson (2002). Capra (1996) reminds us that living systems have the ability to:
1. survive
2. adapt to their environment
3. reproduce/thrive.

With this ground prepared, Diamond, Barnett and Friedman lay the foundations for understanding a world where the eighth major human values system is emerging in response to life conditions to the Power of 8. Taken together, the insights of this trio call forth the Leadership Equation for living human systems to the Power of 8.

The Integral Leadership Equation
Graves’ student, Don Beck, articulated the universal leadership equation as “How does who lead whom to do what with what group of people for what purpose?”

Stated at the Power of Eight, this integral leadership equation becomes, “How do leaders lead
people in the Flat Core or Unflat, Disconnected Gap to survive, connect with their environment
and thrive in an ecologically sustainable way?”

Ecology & Survival
Diamond (2005, p. 11) identifies five factors as integral to a framework that defines whether an environment will support a human society:
1. Climate change
2. Environmental damage
3. Society’s responses to environmental problems
4. Friendly trade partners
5. Hostile neighbours

Diamond refers to these as five strands. However, they could be recontextualized in a single
system (holon) in their relationship with one another as shown in Figure 1. Here society (3)
within its friendly (4) and hostile (5) peers is embedded in the environment (2) which is
contained in the climate (1)

Figure 1: 5 Factors Contributing to Ecological Survival
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Legend:
1. Climate change
2. Environmental damage
3. Society’s responses to environmental problems
4. Friendly trade partners
5. Hostile neighbours
 

Diamond teaches us that leadership to the Power of 8 ignores any of these factors at its peril. Whether we are aware of these five factors or not, they are continuously interacting on each other and co-creating our life conditions for survival.

Therefore leadership to the Power of 8 must:
• have a world view that is mindful of the largest earth-based climate systems
• understand that each of earth’s seventeen habitats (Fernandez-Armesto, 2002) has a limited carrying capacity for life of all kinds and that if we overtax it for our basic resources of water, food, shelter and clothing we doom our own survival.
• be mindful that our set of bio-psycho-cultural-social values is developed to the level of complexity equal to the Power of 8. These values represent the capacities of how we are able to respond to environmental problems individually and collectively; as organizations, countries, trading blocks and world governance systems.
• recognize, care for and counsel the health of friendly trading partners, because the conditions of our friendly trading partners are intimately connected with our health as organizations, countries, trading blocks and governance systems.
• recognize, care about and protect ourselves from hostile neighbours because they can directly affect the health of human systems (eg. SARS, Avian Flu), those of our trading partners (eg. DDT), the environment(eg. deforestation) and even the climate (eg. desertification/water).

Leaders to the Power of 8 can take action to:
• learn the science of climate change eg. global warming
• develop environmentally sensitive ecologically- based governance policies, where one size does not fit all, but policies are appropriate to the life conditions of the habitat.
• develop lifelong learning programs that integrally educate bio-psycho-cultural-social values that respond to the life conditions of cultures and environments
• influence trading partners to integrate ecologically sensitive policies for climate variance, environmental impact and continuous learning
• challenge and/or set boundaries for hostile neighbours to limit and correct climate, environmental and human systems damage.

Political Power & Connecting to Our Environment
Barnett (2004, p. 26, 27) refines Diamond’s map of the world by viewing “the global security environment [as] divided between those states that adhere to globalization’s emerging security rule set (the Core) and those that do not (the Gap).” Barnett defines rule sets as agreements about how societies function to provide security to individual and groups, for their bio-psycho-cultural-social wellbeing.

Barnett engages the discussion of human systems at the level of global security, ostensibly in military and economic terms. However, his definitions of the “Core” and the “ Gap” can be easily mapped onto Diamond’s ecological map.

The “Core” includes those countries who are “on grid” ie. where the power and telecommunications grid gives users a level of technological connection that is real time and where the rule sets of bio-psycho-cultural-social security ensure survival and connection for individuals and groups. On the other hand, the “Gap” includes countries where the infrastructure is “off grid”; where some or many aspects of the bio-psycho-cultural-social rule sets are out of balance with one another and with the rest of the world (both Gap and Core countries).

Figure 2 superimposes Barnett’s map onto the five factors of Diamond’s map.

Barnett reminds us that leadership to the Power of 8 must:
• recognize that the political power shift happened not because of military power but because of economic power
• rule sets need to be appropriate to the level of complexity of the society they serve
• rule sets need to integrally embrace security for the person as a bio-psycho-cultural-social living system
• recognize that rule sets now need to embrace the globalization of technology and communications
• balance work flows between movement of people, access to energy, long term direct investments of one country in another country, and security.

Barnett (2004, p. 198) sums up the needs like this: “...nothing in the global system should be allowed to prevent the flow of any of the resources from regions of surplus to regions of deficit. In effect, labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce.”


Leaders to the Power of 8 can take action to:
• meet the basics of life for the people in the gap
• ensure access to energy for the people in the gap
• educate people in the Core to the values of friendly trading neighbours
• educate people in the Core to think and act in terms of Whole (World) Systems Change
• educate people in the Gap about the basic values of Life (especially educate women to shift the balance of personal power between men and women)
• ensure security for people in the Gap from their own people
• ensure security for people in the Core from threats from countries in the Gap
• encourage countries in the Core to invest in countries in the Gap where the rule sets can be secured.
• Remove blocks in the Gap
• Improve Flow of people, energy, security and labor in the Core and the Gap.

Figure 2: The Connected Core and the Disconnected Gap
 

Economics & Thriving

While Barnett focuses on the agreements, societies need to exist at the Power of 8, Friedman charts the rate of change that has impacted the world from the micro to the macro level.

Friedman (2005, pp. 48 - 172) admits that while he (and most of the rest of us) slept in the last decade, the world’s perennial unlevel playing fields became level – the world is now flat. He identifies ten forces that have flattened the world:
1. 11/9/89 - The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the communist experiment.
2. 8/9/95 – The day Netscape went public and opened up the information world of the internet to anyone with a browser.
3. Workflow software, that enables distributed teams to work together regardless of where they are in the world.
4. Open-sourcing, that enables individuals who have developed open source software like Linux to compete with the world’s largest organizations – thus equating the value of “geeks” to the value of CEO’s.
5. Outsourcing, which enables organizations to source key business functions outside their normal boundaries, thus creating “extended families” of interdependent organization clusters.
6. Offshoring, which enables countries in the developing world who have the technological connectedness to supply competencies to the developed world on a more than competitive basis because of the disparities in compensation values.
7. Supply-chaining, where organizations (like Dell) source component parts and/or service of their manufacturing core products around the world.
8. Insourcing, where a key supplier extends its core competencies to deliver services and/or add value that had never been available before (like UPS doing accounts receivable).
9. In-forming, where information searching technologies enable intelligence-based value chains that create whole new capacities (like Google and its self-organizing advertising, searching, connecting capacities).
10. The Steroids: Digital, Mobile, Personal, Virtual – a collection of enablers that allow the performance of work any time, any where, by any one.

Friedman goes on to explain that the ten Flatteners coincide with 3 other factors that result in what he labels the “three convergences” (2005, p. 173). The three convergences are:
1. the “complementary convergence of the ten flatteners, creating a new global playing field for multiple forms of collaboration” (P. 177)
2. the human work systems that enable optimizing the implementation of the ten flatteners, so that collaboration and horizontal management engages whole new sets of skills (p. 179)
3. the entry into the developing world of half the world’s population in Russia, China and India producing a “scale of ... global community ... able to participate in all sorts of discovery and innovation [as] something the world has simply never seen before (p. 182).


Thus, what Friedman adds to our map of Leadership to the Power of 8 (see Figure 3), is the expansion of the Core by the entry of the three countries who have through their participation in the G8 and the enablement of the Core by the leveraging of the ten flatteners and the human work systems.

Figure 3: Leadership to the Power of 8: Core x 10 x 3

 

Leadership to the Power of 8, according to Friedman, will demand the wisdom of Solomon in the “great sorting out”. In the life conditions of the ten flatteners and the three convergences, leadership must:
• move from command and control to connect and collaborate
• redefine leadership, boundaries, identities
• balance new relationships
• create new governance systems (the rule sets of Barnett)
• reconcile the transition of jobs from the developed world to the developing world
• develop global labor standards
• develop social contracts for horizontal collaboration
• build bridges across traditional national boundaries
• renegotiate allegiances, loyalties, treaties, alignments
• reconcile cheap products with shifting job pools
• redefine intellectual property rights
• challenge the priorities of values worth preserving

By the same token, leaders to the Power of 8 can take action to:
• understand the changing landscape of work, politics, economics, security, technology, communications
• inform and engage their organizations in developing proactive responses to the Life Conditions at the Power of 8
• work on their own bio-psycho-cultural-social capacities to the Power of 8
• educate others on their bio-psycho-cultural-social capacities to the Power of 8
• enable connections and collaboration at all levels of scale: personal, teams, organizations, communities, cities, regions, nations, trading partners, world
• enable the ten flatteners and the three convergences to empower the Gap as well as the Core.

Friedman’s contributions to Leadership to the Power of 8, reveal the infinite qualities of adaptiveness that enable human systems to thrive (and reproduce themselves) in completely different ways. Whereas Leadership to the Power of 5 depended on competition, Leadership to the Power of 6 depended on equality, Leadership to the Power of 7 depended on complexity, Leadership to the Power of 8 transcends and includes all of these. Through interconnection and cross-collaboration on a truly global scale, we can see that living systems at the Power of 8 enable the global flow of people, energy, security and investments.

Summary
As leaders step into the leadership arena to the Power of 8, the rewards will be global sized, but the risks for survival will be equally large, as chronicled by Jared Diamond. As the global Gap becomes more differentiated from the Core through our trade and technology connections Leadership to the Power of 8 increases opportunities to improve flow of people, energy, security and investment and also remove blocks, as noted by Thomas Barnett. As the world becomes ever flatter and faster, Leadership to the Power of 8 becomes more complex in creating sustainable adaptive human systems that thrive, as described by Thomas Friedman.

Returning to the leadership equation, “How do leaders lead people in the Flat Core or Unflat, Disconnected Gap to Survive, Connect with their Environment and Thrive in an ecologically sustainable way?”

Leaders to the Power of 8 lead through informed ecological action, massive, continuous and integral connection, continual adaptation and respect for all living systems.




References

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