Starfish, Spiders and Distributed Leadership
Have you recently heard people refer to their organization as a “starfish” or contrast “starfish organizations” with “spider organizations”? If not, you likely will, because starfish and spiders have become all the rage in corporate circles.
The idea goes like this: Organizations can look like spiders, with the spider's eight legs representing organizational divisions and units controlled by a central head, or they can look like starfish, with multiple arms, each representing a separate neural network with no need for a central head. Cut off a spider's leg and you have a spider with one fewer leg. Cut off the spider's head and the whole spider dies, including all of the legs. But cut off a starfish's arm, and not only does the starfish not die, but it grows a new arm; the cut arm survives and may even turn into a new starfish. We want our organizations to be more like starfish — decentralized, independent and resilient.
We owe the starfish-and-spider analogy to authors Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, whose book, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, has caught the attention of organizations such as Google, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems and YouTube. While the book was released in paperback in 2007, it still seems to be generating some buzz, apparently because a recent NPR news story reported that the book struck a chord among members of the Tea Party.
I found Brafman and Beckstrom's starfish-and-spider analogy creative and thought-provoking, and the authors do a good job arguing that society is witnessing a revolution that favors decentralized, self-organizing entities. However, the book suffers from a serious conceptual weakness in that the authors contend that starfish organizations are “leaderless” organizations. With careful reading, Brafman and Beckstrom's conclusion that decentralized, self-organizing concerns are leaderless breaks down for several reasons.
First, the authors confuse technological innovations and systems, such as the Internet, with organizations and then offer them as examples of their premise. Second, Brafman and Beckstrom confuse decentralized organizations and open systems with an absence of leaders. To accept the premise that these are “leaderless” organizations requires subscribing to a very traditional conception of leaders as controlling, heroic and special people, rather than participants in the leadership process.
Finally, the authors repeatedly refer to “leaderless organizations” but consistently report on the visionary, influential people responsible for the existence and success of those organizations. Most people I know would agree that vision and influence represent hallmarks of leadership and that visionary influencers are, by definition, leaders. I found it peculiar that the authors' iconic organizations don't have leaders, but they do have visionary influencers called “catalysts.” That's one way to support your premise of organizations without leaders — just rename leaders as catalysts.
I think the starfish analogy is a good one. The world doesn't seem to favor rigid, highly centralized organizations anymore. We want our organizations to be like the starfish — decentralized and resilient, open systems. However, I would argue that the successful, decentralized, open-system organizations springing up around us are not leaderless, but instead organizations with distributed leadership.
Recent leadership research makes clear that people's understanding of what constitutes effective leadership is changing. In fact, research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership found that practicing leaders in the United States believe that people in our society have changed how they define leadership, and that our conception of leadership will continue to change for the foreseeable future. During the past 15 years, leadership scholars have increasingly formed and advanced a view of leadership as something that should be dispersed throughout the organization and prove sensitive to the demands of our emerging information society. From this vantage point, we seem to be gradually shifting our view of effective leadership from traditional, individualistic and leader-centric approaches toward more collective or collaborative models.
Many leadership scholars and writers seem to agree that leadership constitutes a relationship jointly produced by leaders and followers. They point out that many popular notions of leadership reinforce an outdated, heroic leader stereotype and fail to address either the reciprocal nature of influence in the leadership process or the plurality of modern organizational life. In real life, everyone in the organization bargains, exercises or withholds power, accepts or resists the power of others, negotiates understandings and agreements, and does what's needed to contribute to the organization's mission and future.
Clinging to the stereotype of a “leader” as a central figure engaged in top-down control and management is what I believe led Brafman and Beckstrom to conclude that their starfish organizations are somehow leaderless organizations. I contend that the authors did not identify leaderless organizations at all, but rather organizations that share leadership as a process and responsibility, distributing that responsibility throughout the organization. I do not mean that everyone in the organization simultaneously leads, but that in these organizations, multiple people have the potential to exercise leadership.
Leadership is not the possession of an individual and not a fixed phenomenon — it's a dynamic, emergent property. People constantly move in and out of the leadership role. By thinking of leadership in this way, we move beyond trying to understand leadership as the actions and beliefs of individual leaders and begin to understand leadership as a dynamic organizational process.
This way of thinking about leadership means that, at any given time, multiple leaders can exist in any team, unit or organization, with those leaders playing integrated and complementary roles. This leadership model emphasizes active development of leadership abilities for all members of the organization. The central assumption is that each member has some leadership contribution to make, which the organization will need at some time as its leadership needs shift and change.
Distributed leadership does not mean that we have done away with formal organizational leadership structures. In fact, those in formal leadership roles maintain responsibility to provide informal leaders with opportunities to lead at appropriate times and support them as necessary.
Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service, and an adjunct instructor in leadership studies for Fort Hays State University. Follow him on Twitter @guidegroup or via LinkedIn.
Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus
