Leaders from the Economic Periphery

LEADERS FROM THE ECONOMIC PERIPHERY

Countless leaders from the economic periphery are applying the same learning principles and methods used by their counterparts in the world of established organizations. Bringing vision and deep listening to on-the-ground settings, these community leaders catalyze forces for systemic change that larger organizations cannot access. “The essence of my capacity to serve as a leader,” says Sayra Pinto of Roca, “is that people know that I am one of them, that I have traveled the road they have traveled, suffered the fears they suffer, and that I know just how smart and capable they really are.”

The community leader I have probably known the longest is Mwalimu Musheshe, who started the Uganda Rural Development and Training project (URDT) in the early 1980s with the idea of using learning principles and practices to stimulate rural development.[8] Working in what was then one of the poorest parts of the country, Musheshe and his colleagues taught people how to formulate their visions and how to build shared visions, how to recognize mental models that held them back and how to resolve differing views through listening to one another, and how to think about their villages as systems. They combined all of this with practical on-the-ground projects like digging better wells and building more secure granaries. “Most of all we had to help people shed their inherited sense of fatalism,” says Musheshe. “The attitude that we could do nothing about our future was in fact our biggest obstacle.” At the time of Senge’s account, he described the area where they had concentrated their efforts as one of the most prosperous rural regions of the country, and reported that URDT was starting the first women’s university in Uganda so that women have opportunities for leadership on a larger scale because they have been limited by the lack of higher education.

By tapping and nurturing local leadership capacities, leaders like Pinto and Musheshe establish a foundation for enduring development, something that has eluded countless wealthy northern countries in their efforts to help poorer countries. “The development sector is still engaged in a large-scale mechanistic and hierarchical approach to addressing the challenges of poverty and so-called under-development,” writes Marianne Knuth, founder of Kufunda Village, a demonstration site and learning network dedicated to sustainable agriculture in Zimbabwe.[9] “In the name of material development, villages and communities have to adopt less communal ways of relating to each other. In the name of development, problems are fixed for a community without recognizing the need for ownership in the development initiative by the community itself … And so it often is that many of the larger-scale development initiatives fix a problem for a short term, only to have the problem return years later (abandoned boreholes, broken-down toilets, or community pumps for which no one has taken ownership after the intervener has left).”

Interestingly, Knuth does not see that Kufunda is doing something unique. “We are one of a great many experiments around the world, a growing movement of people and organizations, in education, business, design, architecture,” she says, pursuing “a shared inquiry around how we can come back to a more life-giving way of working.”