Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

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INTRODUCTION

by Peter Senge

TELLING A STORY

For many years I have told people that, although there are a lot of books on leadership, there is only one that serious students have to read—Servant Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf. Most recent books on leadership have been about what leaders do and how they operate, why the world makes life difficult for them, and what organizations must do in order to better develop leaders. These books are packed with seemingly practical advice about what individuals and organizations should do differently. Yet few penetrate to deeper insights into the nature of real leadership. By contrast, Greenleaf invites people to consider a domain of leadership grounded in a state of being, not doing. He says that the first and most important choice a leader makes is the choice to serve, without which one’s capacity to lead is profoundly limited. That choice is not an action in the normal sense—it’s not something you do, but an expression of your being.

This, too, is a book that anyone who is serious about leadership will have to read. Synchronicity builds directly on Greenleaf’s thinking and goes further, especially in illuminating the nature of the choice to lead and the deep understanding or worldview out of which such a choice might arise.

For Greenleaf, being a leader has to do with the relationship between the leader and the led. Only when the choice to serve undergirds the moral formation of leaders does the hierarchical power that separates the leader and those led not corrupt. Hierarchies are not inherently bad, despite the bad press they receive today. The potential of hierarchy to corrupt would be dissolved, according to Greenleaf, if leaders chose to serve those they led—if they saw their job, their fundamental reason for being, as true service. For this idea we owe Greenleaf a great debt. His insights also go a long way toward explaining the “leaderlessness” of most contemporary institutions, guided as they are by people who have risen to positions of authority because of technical or decision-making skills, political savvy, or desire for wealth and power.

Joe Jaworski takes Greenleaf’s understanding further. He suggests that the fundamental choice that enables true leadership in all situations (including, but not limited to, hierarchical leadership) is the choice to serve life. He suggests that, in a deep sense, my capacity as a leader comes from my choice to allow life to unfold through me. This choice results in a type of leadership that we’ve known very rarely, or that we associate exclusively with extraordinary individuals like Gandhi or King. In fact, this domain of leadership is available to us all and may indeed be crucial for our future.

I believe this broadening of Greenleaf’s original insight is so relevant today for two reasons. First, Joe’s book shifts the conversation beyond formal power hierarchies of “leaders” and “those led.” Increasingly, hierarchies are weakening, and institutions of all sorts, from multinational corporations to school systems, work through informal networks and self-managed teams that form, operate, dissolve, and re-form. It is not enough simply to choose to serve those you are formally leading, because you may not have any formal subordinates in the new organizational structures. Second, Joe’s book redirects our attention toward how we collectively shape our destiny.

In the West we tend to think of leadership as a quality that exists in certain people. This usual way of thinking has many traps. We search for special individuals with leadership potential, rather than developing the leadership potential in everyone. We are easily distracted by what this or that leader is doing, by the melodrama of people in power trying to maintain their power and others trying to wrest it from them. When things are going poorly, we blame the situation on incompetent leaders, thereby avoiding any personal responsibility. When things become desperate, we can easily find ourselves waiting for a great leader to rescue us. Through all of this, we totally miss the bigger question: What are we, collectively, able to create?

Because of our obsessions with how leaders behave and with the interactions of leaders and followers, we forget that, in its essence, leadership is about learning how to shape the future. Leadership exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances. When people operate in this domain of generative leadership, day by day, they come to a deepening understanding of, as Joe says, “how the universe actually works.” That is the real gift of leadership. It’s not about positional power; it’s not about accomplishments; it’s ultimately not even about what we do. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.

Exploring such a view of leadership through a book is almost a contradiction in terms. Because this territory can’t be fully understood conceptually, any attempt to digest and explain it intellectually is at best a type of map. And the map is not the territory. To understand the territory, we must earn the understanding, and this understanding doesn’t come cheaply. We all earn it in our life experience. I think this is one part of what Buddhists mean by “life is suffering.” We have to suffer through life, not in the sense of pain, but in terms of living through it.

One way “to live into” these subtle territories of leadership is through a story. When Greenleaf wrote Servant Leadership, he “entered” through Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, an autobiographical account of one man’s journey in search of enlightenment. Along the way, the narrator’s loyal servant, Leo, sustains him through many trials. Years later, when the man finds the esoteric society he is seeking, he discovers that Leo is its leader—so the servant is the leader, and leadership is exercised through service.

Here also Joe enters through a story: his own. The result is an unusual book—rare among leadership books and rare among business books—a personal, reflective account of one person’s journey. This may present some difficulties for readers used to “expert” accounts of leadership that give advice and propound theories. Yet Joe’s insights about leadership and the process by which he came to those insights are inseparable. His life has been his vehicle for learning, just as his learning has been about how leaders must serve life.

Furthermore, this is not just Joe’s story, for Joe’s personal story is interwoven with epochal events in which we all participated. This story begins when his father, Leon Jaworski, became the Watergate special prosecutor. During the investigation, Colonel Jaworski became deeply disturbed by the growing evidence implicating Nixon and his closest aides in the Watergate conspiracy. The only person he felt he could talk to without fear of compromising the investigation was his son Joe, also a lawyer. Father and son asked each other the same questions the nation would soon ask: How could this have happened? How could we have come to this—our highest and most trusted officials acting like common criminals?

Living with these questions eventually led Joe to a remarkable series of undertakings. After several years of wrestling with his calling, he decided to leave the prestigious international law firm he had helped build. He struck off into completely foreign territory—public leadership—and created the American Leadership Forum (ALF). The vision of ALF was to establish a national network of talented and diverse midcareer professionals committed to bringing forth a new generation of public leadership. Today, ALF programs operate in a number of communities and regions in the United States with successful results. After almost ten years, Joe stepped down as chairman of ALF and accepted the position as head of the scenario planning process for the Royal Dutch Shell Group of companies. In this job, he helped shape what many regard as the premier planning process of any large corporation.

For me, Joe’s story represents one person’s journey taken on behalf of all of us who are wrestling with the profound changes required in public and institutional leadership for the twenty-first century. Our lifelong experiences with hierarchy cast a long shadow, making it difficult for us to think outside the framework of hierarchical leadership. Abuses of hierarchical authority like Watergate, sadly, are still with us today, eliciting deep concerns about our collective capability to lead ourselves. The ALF saga shows what a small group of committed people can do to positively affect public leadership.

Especially interesting for me is the juxtaposition of the ALF and Shell experiences. Joe’s years at Shell provide a unique inside look at how Shell’s planning process operates, including the first public presentation of the two long-term global scenarios that are now guiding thinking among Shell managers worldwide. Large multinational corporations like Shell represent a new form of social system in the world, with immense power, for good or ill, to influence the future. Today, the global corporation transcends national boundaries and has an impact in the world that goes beyond even that of governments. In this book, we begin to get a glimpse of how this power might positively influence the future. In particular, we see how the scenario process can nurture creative new ways of thinking about and influencing the future both within and beyond the corporation itself.

MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE PEOPLE

My contact with this book also begins with a story. It was autumn, 1992, and I was in London on the way home from a European trip. I was meeting Joe for breakfast, having not seen him for some five years. In the meantime, he had left ALF, where I had helped in the early start-up period from 1980 to 1983, and he had already been working for Shell for two years. Coincidentally, I had known two of his predecessors in the position, Pierre Wack and Peter Schwartz, as well as Arie de Geus, the former head of all planning for Shell, and had some idea of the extraordinary nature of the job Joe now held. So I was eager to see my old friend and get caught up on his activities.

As he told me about the exciting work of developing Shell’s new global scenarios, I became increasingly engaged. Then he told me about the book he was writing. In many ways Joe is a shy person, so writing a book about his life does not come easily. Yet he felt his story contained important lessons that could be shared only through a book. On the one hand, there were the fascinating stories of ALF, and now Shell. But on the other, below the surface detail of these activities, were the profound personal changes Joe had gone through, guided by a series of meetings with remarkable people such as John Gardner, Harlan Cleveland, and some of the leading scientists of our time. I was stunned when Joe told me about meeting the physicist David Bohm in 1980, a meeting I had never known about. As time had passed, Joe had come to realize that this meeting was pivotal, and that the conversation with Bohm had planted seeds within him that had taken years to develop and that now were leading him to a radically new view of how human beings could shape their destiny. When our breakfast ended, I told Joe I would do anything I could to help him finish this book.

I, too, had had a pivotal meeting with David Bohm. It was in 1989, as I was in the very final stages of writing The Fifth Discipline. David gave a small seminar at MIT for a group of us interested in his work on dialogue. At the time, I was searching desperately for a deeper theoretical understanding of a particular phenomenon I had observed in teams, which I felt was essential to understand the discipline of team learning. Over the years my colleagues and I had come to use the term “alignment” to describe what happens when people in a group actually start to function as a whole. We would use examples like extraordinary jazz ensembles and championship basketball teams to evoke a sense of what alignment was all about. But I knew at a deeper level I could not begin to explain how this mysterious functioning as a whole actually came about.

I also knew that what I was looking for was not available in mainstream contemporary management theories about teams. Many of these theories are essentially individualistic in nature, grounded in individual psychology or the psychology of groups. I felt deeply that this phenomenon of alignment was not individualistic at all, but fundamentally collective. I knew of no theory that in any way started to explain how the seemingly mysterious state of “being in the groove” (as the jazz musicians call it) or “in the zone” actually works. Theories based on individual reasoning, interpersonal interactions, or behavior patterns in groups seemed inherently inadequate.

In the seminar, as Bohm described his work on dialogue, I said to myself, “At least now I know I’m not crazy.” Bohm talked about the phenomenon of thought and how our patterns of thought can hold us captive. “Thought creates the world and then says ‘I didn’t do it,’” he said. He talked about a “generative order” in which, depending on our state of consciousness, we “participate in how reality unfolds.” Bohm’s theory went beyond interdependence to wholeness. Interdependence is something you can see. For example, a mother and a child are interdependent in countless ways you can observe. Such interdependence is a sort of window into a deeper domain of wholeness. Interdependence exists at what Bohm called the “explicate” level. But wholeness exists at the “implicate,” which is the unmanifest or premanifest level. When we are engaged in something that is deeply meaningful and are attuned to one another, human beings can participate in the “unfolding” of the implicate wholeness into the manifest or explicate order.

Now, this conversation in 1989 with David Bohm was a sort of seed planting for me as well. I knew I only dimly grasped what Bohm was saying, parts of which resonated deeply with me. Other parts seemed strange, foreign to any way I had been trained to think. Over the years, reading and rereading Wholeness and the Implicate Order, where Bohm lays out the basic theory, had helped. But when Joe started to tell me that morning about his conversation with Bohm, I realized that here was a very special gift. Later, when Joe showed me the transcript of the conversation (he somehow had had the presence of mind to tape the meeting), I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of Bohm’s way of explaining his thinking to Joe. In many ways, the personal nature of Joe’s questions seemed to allow David to speak personally as well. Having studied his work, I can say that there are subtleties to David’s thinking that I only began to understand through Joe’s meeting with him. I realized that, in a sense, Joe and the story he was and is living out had the potential to become a vehicle for communicating David’s seminal insights to a much bigger audience than he would ever reach with his own writings.

Perhaps in some way David and the other leading thinkers with whom Joe met sensed this as well. Otherwise, it is hard to understand how these meetings even would have occurred. By the time Joe met him in 1980, Bohm was already a famous physicist. Einstein had once said that Bohm was the one person from whom he ever understood quantum theory. Bohm had written the leading textbook on quantum theory in the early 1950s. Why would this man, who was quite reserved and protective of his p...