Cultivating the Conditions for Distributed Collective Leadership

By Jeff M. Poulin

The concept of a ‘collective’ is one that has been explored extensively in the fields of political organizing, leadership, and organizational structure. Defined as a group of individuals, who share a particular interest or outlook, working together on a long-term basis, collectives are often used in the cultural sector to provide a structure for a group of artists (i.e. an artists’ collective which shared a common space) to designate the formation, knowledge-exchange, and decision-making for evolving groups.

To learn more - and read much of the below theory in the context of our practice at Creative Generation - check out the blog I wrote in March 2022.

Understanding "Collective"

In 2018, Cassandra O’Neill and Monica Brinkerhoff provided a set of indicators for Collective Leadership in Nonprofit Quarterly: Collective leadership is a process where:

  • Members view their organizations as systems;

  • Operate with connected networks;

  • Share and/or rotate decision-making;

  • People are inherently capable and can be trusted to do the right thing; and

  • Success comes from the diverse perspectives and skills of many.

  • This model provides many benefits, including the efficiency and innovations towards the shared goals as well as the mutual growth and benefits of the members.

In 2020, the arts and cultural education field identified a necessary shift towards a model named “Distributed Collective Leadership to aptly support the future arts and cultural education programs – learn more about this landmark studying the next section.

There is a recognized power of the collective for its alignment to the organization's mission, vision, goals, and values. In his paper “Knowledge Beyond the Individual? Making Sense of a Notion of Collective Knowledge in Organization Theory,” German scholar, Achim Hecker, concluded an empirical study with three conceptualizations of collective knowledge:

Collective Knowledge as Shared Knowledge: Knowledge originates from the common experiences and knowledge-sharing activities of a group of individuals, enabling the group to coordinate their activities without centralized decision-making or explicit mutual communication.

Collective Knowledge as Complementary Knowledge: Knowledge is distributed among peers interacting in a complementary way; in coordinated social practice these disjunctive knowledge sets complement each other in such a way that they ‘add up’ to more than their sum.

Collective Knowledge as Knowledge Embedded in Collective Artifacts: Knowledge is incorporated into organizational artifacts rather than individual mindsets or actions; it is collectively owned, tangible representations such as documents and databases, but it is also more implicitly embedded in artifacts, such as operational processes, knowledge products (like papers, reports, audio/video presentations, etc), and the like.

Though Hecker’s paper treats these three conceptualizations as different and often exclusive, the model of Distributed Collective Leadership views them as integrated and all part of the collective work.

The Journey to Distributed Collective Leadership

Speaking to over 250 self-identified leaders in arts and cultural education around the world, the research team at Creative Generation found a field-wide desire to disrupt, reorient, re-imagine current concepts of leadership; this was originally shared in the October 2022 Young & Emerging Leaders Forum convened by the World Alliance for Arts Education. It was consistently observed that the current organizational structures of leadership do not support the nature of the work occurring in communities and schools today. Further, it was noted that leaders can be transformative to support new models of justice-oriented approaches to leadership development in order to aptly respond to the changing circumstances facing programs today.

Throughout this four-month inquiry, we uncovered a multitude of pathways, which enabled leaders to create the types of changes we observed as necessary in the future of our field. Study participants identified the need for individuals to engage in personal introspection to enable an environment which supports distributive collective leadership, a new approach to shared, distributed, and collective models of leadership for arts and cultural education work.

Our analysis revealed four inquiry-based processes, which leaders can engage in to achieve distributed collective leadership – these are found represented in the model below. It should be noted that these are called “inquiry-based” because they require a reliance on introspection and critical reflection, utilizing our own lived experiences as the primary source of our internal inquiry.  

In this graphic we see four processes, which have proved relevant in response to the multitude of pandemics in 2020 and have been refined with groups of educators from 2021-2022:

  • Unlearning (represented by a thought bubble): The process of questioning the status quo, norms, and current definitions of leadership; reflecting on how privilege and advantage have impacted your own positionality in the field; and interrogating the pathways, credentials, or assumed qualities of leaders in the past – read the series here.

  • Bridging (represented by a bridge between our current place and future place): The process of building connections between self and others; create pathways between communities of practice; and de-silo arts/culture, education, and allied fields of practice – read the series here.

  • Navigating: (represented by a winding river): The process of responding to broader issues within your context (community, nation, world); demonstrating flexibility among changing circumstances; and remaining resilient with goals and a vision for the future in mind – read the series here.

  • Holding Tensions (represented by two people on a see-saw): The process of balancing divergent or converging influences on your work; honoring differences and drawing on similarities between people and experiences; and doing the work, while seeking to make yourself redundant – read the series here.

These four inquiry-based processes can serve as guideposts for the ongoing shift in our view of leadership within the field…but also for how we might approach our ongoing response to the changing circumstances of the multiple pandemics facing our communities.

In one sense, we can view these as a means of professional development to upskill our way into leadership of our programs and organizations – or we can shift our view and think of every one of us as a leader and these four processes as a means of animating that vision to become the reality. This way, we can all affect the changes we wish to see as we cultivate the conditions for young creatives to thrive.