Blog Entry

Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal’s conservative columnist, observed something interesting and important about Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech last Tuesday. “A mysterious thing happened in that speech Tuesday night,” she wrote. “By the end of it Barack Obama had become president.”

Given the state of our economic crisis, Noonan noted that the wisdom behind Obama’s policy decisions remain to be seen. Then she added:

But the larger point that Mr. Obama had to communicate, and it’s something forgotten or overlooked by political sophisticates, is this: Someone’s in the kitchen. Someone’s cooking. In a time of crisis, someone’s in charge. That’s what he had to demonstrate Tuesday night. And he did.

Good leaders inspire confidence in others by making it clear that someone is in charge, that someone is taking responsibility. How do we reconcile this with the notion of collective leadership, where the leadership role is shared by many people? In grassroot communities with no pre-imposed hierarchy, who decides who plays the role of the chef?

I’ve often observed a kind of paralysis symptomatic of the “missing chef” within communities that are attempting some form of shared or consensus leadership. No one wants to step on anyone’s toes, and hence, no one steps at all.

For guidance, we can look to parliamentary organizations, where decisions are made by majority vote and where there is typically a chair, whose power is primarily facilitative. There is some pre-imposed hierarchy, but the leadership is largely shared. The decision-making process is typically slow and deliberative, which is a good thing for weighty matters, and horrible for relatively insignificant ones. Imagine trying to get 100 people working on climate change to vote on where to go to dinner.

Robert’s Rules of Order offers a way around this problem through its principle of Unanimous (or General) Consent, which allows the chair to make decisions on behalf of the entire group “if these is no objection.” If someone raises an objection, then the decision goes through the standard deliberative process.

There are very strong parallels with this and a more grassroot form of organization: communities that emerge around Wikis, such as Wikipedia. We have a saying in the Wiki community: Wikis are do-acracies. The decisions are made by those who actually implement them.

The principle is equivalent to that underlying Unanimous Consent. The difference is that Wiki communities typically do not have pre-imposed structure. There is no chair who has been bestowed special powers by a 130-year old parliamentary process. In a do-acracy, anyone can exercise the principle of Unanimous Consent.

This decision-making principle did not emerge by accident. Wikis encourage this practice through a very simple mechanism: The “Edit this page” button. That amazing little button establishes a cultural norm that says, “There are no locks here. You hereby have Permission to Participate.”

Healthy communities empower their participants. Obama has made it clear that there’s a chef in the kitchen, but he has also made it clear that things will only get better if everyone does their part. Grassroot communities empower their participants by being transparent about what needs to be done and who’s doing them. A community that sees that there are an army of cooks at work in the kitchen is one that can be confident that something is cooking. This makes all the difference in the world.

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