Professor Sonia Ospina - Institute for inspiring children's futures inaugural lecture

Good evening everyone and thank you very much for being here. I am delighted and privileged to be able to share with you some of my thinking about relational and collective leadership tonight. Thank you Jennifer for this invitation and for organising this. I thought I would start, first, by asking you to think for a moment about a time when you experienced leadership at its best. Think about a word that describes good leadership, one word. Sorry, I know that's hard but one word. OK. Hopefully you have one word now. Please raise your hand if you thought of an adjective describing an individual characteristic of a good leader, authentic, courageous, listener. Alright, so about one third I would think. Raise your hand if you thought about an action or an activity, like listening, engaging others, influencing others. Alright, so verbs, actions, that's about another third. OK. What about if you thought of some kind of relational condition, like collaboration, group work, engaging others. Alright. That's a smaller group, but still there. In fact, what we have here is exactly the gamut of possible ways in which we can think about leadership. It is because we are going through a transition from thinking about the individual dimensions of leadership, which are in fact incredibly important for leadership to happen, but moving towards also thinking and considering the collective dimensions of leadership. We're moving from heroic to post-heroic leadership. I tried to look for some images about leadership in Google Image, this is what I found. Most of the images are like this, but I also found images like this, alright? In fact, we have kind of like both of these kinds of ways of thinking about leadership in our heads, because what we are going through is we're experiencing a change in our mindset that is really quite revolutionary. Like all revolutionary changes, it creates confusion because we're in the middle. We're not there, we're not here. In fact, we have very clear that we need a new type of leadership for the type of work that we want to do. Nevertheless, we continue to operate under the expectations of the old frames and moulds that keep us back as we try to move forward. Change is inevitable because the world is changing. More importantly, at the core of this transition in leadership mindset is an acknowledgement that addressing problems, especially in public services, is something that we cannot do alone. In a shared powered world, no-one single person, no-one single organisation will be able to solve the type of problems that we need to solve and that we're facing in our times. Here's how management scholars talk about a shared powered world. You may be familiar with this I'm sure, it's the shared powered world in the context of public service. I'll just let you some time to read it. It's a very turbulent time as you can see. Notice, the shared powered world is not that everyone has power, it's that power is fragmented. It's in different places and each group or person has a little bit of the power that may be needed, but nobody has all the power. In that sense, we really are in a confusing time. We're want less command and control, and then when we try to do this, we also want to be less dependent on positional authority. Then, when we try to do this, we face some of the obstacles that all of you are facing as we go, as you do your work here. This is what leadership is about right now. This is the way it looks like. This is the way it feels like. An existential moment that I think we're all sharing, at least many of us, including myself, feel it this way. You can consider this in the context of the work that you're trying to do here in Scotland, to be the best place to grow up and bring up children. That's a big aspiration, and when you think about it, or I read in the websites, you want a child-centred approach but you really do not want a leader-centred approach. You want a collective approach. You want a system-centred approach and that's easier said than done, right? If you think about getting it right for every child... You're doing really interesting and innovative work. I was very impressed when I looked around, when I discussed this with Jennifer. What I realise is that you're actually doing work that is collective leadership but you haven't named it collective leadership. And so, I thought it would be interesting and fun to bring some of those frameworks to you to name some of the things that you are already doing and think about what that does for you. What kind of insights does that bring for you? The real point, if I think if we look at this from the lens of collective and relational leadership, is to think about what kind of leadership do you need to go from here to there, to getting it right for every child. We know you're not there, right? We're not there, right? What you want to think is about a type of leadership that helps to create the conditions for a system to be full of leadership. Some colleagues, and Barbara has written some chapters with one of these colleagues, talks about, "What we need is leader-full environments. Environments that are full of leadership." The question, really for you, is how do we engage all people who are stakeholders in making sure that we get it right for every child? How do we make sure that politicians, public service managers, the children and their parents, the social workers that are proposing decisions about the children, the solicitors, lawyers that make those decisions, how do we bring all these together to really engage together in this kind of approach rather than each of them thinking about their own? This of course is not a simple question, but it is very much worth considering and so, what I want to do is to kind of like walk you through some of the frameworks that allow us to think about that question. With that in mind, then I've done most of the framing. I have one more point I want to make about the framing. What I want to do in the rest of the presentation is talk a little bit, or have a presentation about why do we need a different kind of leadership? You know it in your guts, but I want to articulate it more formally and why relational leadership represents an answer to that need. Then, take some time to talk about specific example that I know well, because it's part of my research, about how relational leadership has been used in a particular context and ask you to think about how does that connect to the type of work that you're doing here. I do have to caveats that I want to make sure that I put on the table for you. The first caveat is that, I will not be able to give you formulas about how to do leadership effectively or answer the big questions that you have, because relational leadership is contextual. It is about making meaning in the moment, in the context and with the system that you have. And so, there're no formulas. When my students ask me, "Give us some formulas," I'm like, "No. There are no formulas." Of course, in this world of marketing and packaging and... it's hard to not say, so we've created four Cs and a couple of things here and there that I'll show you. Really my deepest belief is there are no formulas. It is about getting yourself on the ground and thinking about these in the context of the urgent matters that you have in front of you. I would suggest it's about being in the world in a particular way that allows you to move through that. That's my first caveat. The second caveat is, I'm think I'm going to say anything here that you do not know or have not experienced in your own work. I'm not going to pretend that I'm an expert in child services and policy, I'm not. I'm actually learning. Now I have a doctoral student who wants to do care policy and so I'm learning more about this. But what I would like to try to do for you, is to place your ideas and experiences in a framework that helps you think about this differently, that helps put you in the balcony and look back at some of the work that you're doing. Then perhaps, unleash your imagination about what are some other things that come up as you think about your own experience in the context of these ideas. My goal here is to name some experiences that you've had and see what happens with that. With that in mind, I'm going to start with the first part of the presentation formally, which is about thinking about why new leadership and why relational leadership? There's a shift about how we're talking about organising right now and we have said it's the situation that has moved us from a world characterised by fixed and order rules, compartmentalised functions, hierarchal structures, where management is supervisory and evaluative and where there is really an unsymmetrical influence as a way we have thought of and understood leadership. This is shifting to a world where there's a lot many more interdependent stakeholders, working in teams, trying to figure out how to do it. In this context, management is facilitates mutual adjustments has less authority. Scholars talk about this, and the diagnosis they bring is, in both sectors private, public and actually there's a decline of traditional managerial authority and a parallel emergence of alternative forms of authority. This is happening out there, right? In fact, in the new reality in public service, it's about collaborative governance. This is a new way of thinking about this, where again, we're pushing for this ideas. They haven't completely come up, but you will recognise some of the stuff, the work that you're doing in the context of collaborative governance. I want to read to you the definition of collaborative governance. This is from Emerson, Nabatchi and Balogh. They say, "Collaborative governance is the processes and structures of decision-making in public management and policy, that engage constructively multiple actors and cross public agency boundaries, jurisdictional boundaries and boundaries between the public, private and civic spheres to attain a purpose that otherwise would not have been possible to produce." This idea of collaborative governance is very much in our new way of thinking about there, and in fact, you will recognise some of the examples that are typical of collaborative governance around the world and perhaps here. The idea of more information coming out of government, open government, participatory budgeting, deliberate dialogues around some of the issues, we have service delivery networks, co-production of services. We have lots of formal collaborations happening to try to address particular issues. We have coalitions and networks of social actors, perhaps in partnership with some of the public employees who are also wanting to influence public policy. In general, we have also the private sector entering with new ideas of shared value initiatives et cetera, et cetera. In this new context of collaborative governance, there are two issues that I want to highlight as the background to the points that I want to make here. The first one is, that in this context, public service delivery requires managing complex configurations and systems. It's really a lot about the systems. The second one is, that the state and it's representatives play a different role than they did before. They play more of a brokering role and this demands more collaborative and inclusive public management as such. So we have this idea of the state as a broker. When you are a broker, you need to develop different kinds of capabilities here. Benington and Moore talk about the need to develop, the capacity to analyse and understand interconnections, interdependencies, interactions. This is all about whole-systems thinking. Creating the conditions for others to be able to take up their own leadership because your understanding is that each of these interconnections, interdependencies, and interactions requires obviously more than yourself in the picture, right? It also requires a new public leadership. What is interesting is the argument is this new kind of leadership must persuade stakeholders to accept that they themselves are part of the whole system and therefore, they're part of the problem. And I would say, therefore, they're part of the solution, right? The idea here is, how do you bring all those potential stakeholders into this work? Now, it's very important to think and realise that this creates a paradox for people in public service because on the one hand you have the demands of the bureaucratic model that are intact, they're all there. You have the need for clarifying rules and roles, preserve the public interest, the rule of law and it's all about vertical accountabilities. You have to manage that. On the other side, you have to manage demands of an open and network governance model that is happening with the networks as soon as you get partnerships and an alliance with others who are different from the bureaucracy, you're there. In that model, you want to take risks, you want flexibility, you want adaptation, you want collaboration. It's all about horizontal relationships of accountability. It's all about, "We're in this together." So here you have these two energies that kind of pull you in two different directions and you need to figure out how to honour both of them, how to live with both of them, how to bring them together in the way that's about the result. It's about the children at the end, right? Managing paradox becomes a really very important part of this kind of work. If you think about it then, that's what the new leadership is all about. What we're talking about here is an environment that is about facing the unknown, and so we have situations of rapid change and turbulence, competition over scarce resources. We have the idea of the shared powered world we talked about. We have diversity, which is about different disciplines, different jurisdictional levels, different types of social identities, all trying to figure out what they can bring and how can they bring their different logics to work here. Then we have the idea that the expectations from younger generations but even some of us in older generations, that we want our work to mean something. We want it with purpose, we want to be able to control some of it. That's also there and this idea of participation and meaning. Finally, the idea of paradox, which I just mentioned before. All this really is about complexity. In this context, a leadership scholar, Ronald Heifetz, and his colleagues have explored what are the implications of complexity thinking for leadership and for different kinds of leadership. I'm going to tell you a little bit... Some of you may actually be familiar already with Heifetz model of adaptive leadership. Basically what I think is interesting about the way he's framing this, as the beginning of a conversation about relational leadership, is really that he makes an interesting distinction between when you have technical problems that you have to solve and you have adaptive challenges. The technical problems are, for example, an open heart operation, where it's complicated, it's sophisticated, you need to do all these things but it's predictable and solvable. You know what are the steps you must follow, you know what the problem is and you know what is expected to happen. You know exactly the steps and you know it's... like the surgeon is the leader, and he's going to do the work and everyone else is working... Or she... and everyone else is working in support. One, two, three, we're done. This is a technical problems, where highly sophisticated, highly risky but technical. You know, if we manage everything well, it happens. Adaptive challenges on the other hand, is something different. Adaptive challenges, examples of these, of adaptive challenges here are children's malnutrition, poverty, inequality, right? When you have an adaptive challenge, you don't know what the problem itself is and there is no agreement about what the problem is. And so, part of what needs to happen is that people need to figure out and agree on what kind of problem we're talking about. Only by agreeing on the type of problem will we be able to agree on the type of solution. Alright? When you have an adaptive challenge there are no tools there. In fact, some of the tools that are there may get in the way when you tried. Adaptive challenges, you normally know about them because you've tried things and they haven't worked, right? Solving it requires changing your assumptions, thinking about what are new methods and new tools. You really need to figure out how you can change your internal mental models and those of other people outside, to be able to think differently about this. Adaptive challenge really requires a different kind of leadership. It's about supporting people to be able to make this change in their own mental models, and to be able to figure out how to be together as they jump into the unknown, right? Leadership is less about influencing others but more about working with others to figure out together how to address these adaptive challenges. The other thing is, leadership is therefore, a type of activity, a type of collective activity. It's a type of work, collective work, that mobilises peoples and organisations around the adaptive challenges that they are facing. It's about creating a supportive environment for people to be able to change their models, and engage in different ways of acting. Some people have talked about this, especially people who do complexity theory, that in today's environment, the most creative and innovative work happens at the edge of chaos. So what does this mean? It's a time, a place in the wave where order is on the... you're not doing this in a orderly fashion. In fact, if you stay with order and predictability, you're stuck and uncreative. It's not either at the other extreme where you enter into chaos and then nothing can be done and you're lost, right? It's at the edge, as you're entering into chaos. That's the moment where something interesting is going to happen. Helping people move to that edge of chaos becomes a different kind of leadership. It requires a leader that will accept that he or she will lose some of the control that they have, because it really is about getting in there, into hard work with all together. Here's some of the characteristics, that some people from complexity leadership theory talk about, that are needed for a leader in the context of leading at the edge of chaos. So you can see, it's about process orientation. It's about boundary crossing. You need to be completely under it. You need to be very resilient. You need to just keep going over and over. You need to be committed to the idea that diversity is good, even though it creates a lot of problems for you. It's good as long as you figure out how to work it and you need to be committed to continuous learning. Finally, you need some self-awareness, maturity, and authenticity because this is not for the faint of heart. This is hard work and it's hard work that you're not doing on your own. You're doing with others who are carrying also that anxiety of leaving, dropping their mental models and moving next. Really, leading at the edge of chaos demands different kinds of capabilities. If you look at these, our education system isn't really training us to do this. This is really more about an industrial model of leadership. The way we're thinking is more in terms of an industrial model of leadership, while this is more a post-industrial model of leadership, right? Some people have argued, you know, the industrial model of leadership, which came up at the moment of the big transformation of the Industrial Revolution, really was rationalistic, technocratic, quantitative, linear, scientific in language, management-oriented, goal-achievement dominated, cost benefit driven and utilitarian. Now, all those words are there for us still. A lot of this thing is still happening and so, part of what we're trying to figure out, when we think about relational leadership in more collective forms, is that in a post-industrial society we must balance the important orientation that we have in the left side of our brain, which is what has dominated, the paradigm that has dominated our educational system and our leadership. Then it's equally important to start bringing in this orientation from the right side of the brain. To some extent, post-heroic leadership is about bringing the whole self into the work, right? With this is mind, then we can look at the evolution of leadership theories. You will see here, a move from industrial to a post-industrial model of leadership. Theories gradually... you know, trait, behaviour, contingency, transformationally, gradually moving away from the exclusive focus on individuals, towards a more collective perspective. Leadership schools focus more on seeing leadership not as trait or a behaviour, although it is also a... when it is enacted in people, there are traits and behaviours that help to do it, but it's not just that. There is much more happening here. Post-heroic leadership emphasises relationality, defines leadership as the work to create conditions for more collaborative behaviour, for stronger horizontal relationships of accountability, for stronger bonds amongst stakeholders with very, very different perspectives. You will be familiar with lots of new adjectives that now get added to the leadership theory, that has also become an industry in itself, right? You add a new adjective and now you're going to become famous, right? These are all different ways in which we're doing it. Some have called it... Rightly so, this about leadership in the plural, right? What is common to all these, is that in all these emergent approaches, what you have is the idea of the visible leader as just one piece of the puzzle. Under the water there is all this stuff happening and there are all these other people who are important in the work of leadership. You can also think about it as part of a larger whole, where what you have is a visible leader that's working with others. The real point here is that in both cases, leadership is defined as a collective activity. It's a whole-system approach to leadership because now it's not an individual but it's an individual in relation to others who are in different parts of the system and that you have to identify well so. Systems thinking becomes really important. With systems thinking comes some of those right side of the brain capabilities. I'm going to read you a couple just to illustrate. Seeing the big picture. Understanding the circular nature of complex causal relationships. Finding meaningful connections between and within system. Valuing multiple perspectives. Considering how mental models effect present and future. Seeing the value of process rather than quick conclusions and seeing the importance of context. All these are capabilities that we need to develop if we really want to lead in the context of a whole-systems approach. One last point here to make, if we add something is, this way of thinking about leadership really represents a shift in paradigm from a leader-centred approach to a systems-centred approach. Our colleagues from the Centre for Creative Leadership, with whom I've worked in the past, they push this paradigm a lot more, to say that leadership is really a collective achievement. It's not something that you're carrying around and exist out there, it's something that emerges as a group tries to figure out how they are going to get up their... the requirements for collective action, direction, alignment and commitment. Leadership emerges as the group makes sense of the problems that they are dealing with to find the right direction to the work. It's not the leader here, "This is the direction. I'm giving you the vision." It's, "What are we doing and how do we figure out how's the best way to move forward?" Then, once you have the direction, it's about aligning the contributions and the flow so that everyone knows exactly what should be happening and will do the work at their best. Then, it's about making sure that people stick and commit to each other and to the vision of the future. Basically, what this approach to leadership says is that leadership is the intentional work that brings DAC into existence. It brings direction, alignment and commitment into existence. Is there a role for the formal leader here? Yes, there is. It's to create the conditions for people to be able to find DAC together. So you see, this idea of creating the conditions is starting to become like a mantra that are... Very quickly, I thought I'd give you a little story that shows how DAC gets created. How many of you have heard about this Munchhausen Movement in Rotterdam? OK, so I don't have as much information about it. I read it. I thought this is fantastic, this illustrates very well what this story is about. There's a small group of public managers working with different vulnerable populations start talking about the frustrations that they have that are associated with the fragmentation of the services. They start talking about this, and at the heart of the conversation they realise there's this moral outrage about the fact that the system itself is creating the obstacles, and creating the problems that it's trying to solve in the first place, right? They say, "This is unacceptable." They're making meaning about this, they're pushing a different way of thinking about this, and they're actually saying also, "You know, we're being pushed for just more efficiency and sometimes that happens at the expense of cli- uh, clients who are falling through the cracks, right? And that is unacceptable." By making visible, and engaging in conversation about this frustration together they are naming what is intolerable to them as public servants and they're finding a new direction to the work that they're going to be doing together. They agreed to support each other in assuring that every client of every one of thems, the ones that are part of these group, gets appropriate services. They would not say no to each other as they reached for support when they needed something in the system. They said, "We're not gonna break the law, but we're gonna go beyond the rules whenever it is necessary." They agreed to meet six times to tell stories about how they're dealing with this problems, to help each other support it, and to tell stories of success mostly. In the process they develop a strong network that gives them more information about the system, that gives them more access to other relationships that they didn't have before and suddenly they have a much more robust set of resources that they can use to do their work. Some scholars have talked about this as setting up chains of cooperation at the smallest scale of collective action required for the client. This is very locally contextualised but the people from different parts of the system are coming together to help and support each other. What has happened here? They found direction to do the work in an integrated manner. They've aligned their work as a group, so that they add flexibility and resources and support each other. In telling the stories, they also help people realise that they can make a difference, that this can happen. Something different can happen. They encourage other people to join because they start hearing the stories and they want to come and hear too. People from different parts of the system actually join. They've created direction, alignment and commitment for a smooth integration of systems for their clients at the local level of action. Obviously, this is a work in progress but it gives you a sense of how leadership is emerging and how leadership becomes this collective activity, where everyone plays an important role. With that in mind, so a new relational way of thinking about leadership would be to say that leadership is what happens when a group of individuals are able to coordinate their actions to achieve something that they see as desirable for human well-being. I would say, it's when people see their individual efforts and they convert them into collective action that then is perceived by the group as collective achievement. When that happens, leadership has emerged. This is what good leadership looks like. Of course, there's a leader. There are always leaders. A leader is someone who intentionally creates opportunities and engages others to facilitate these contributions. Leadership can happen everywhere in the system. With this in mind, then let's go to the promise of relational leadership in this last part. We've basically come full-circle to the usefulness of a relational approach, with big shifts happening in society and in public service. Thinking of the formal visible leader as playing a very different role and noticing that leadership may emerge in different places in the system. What I wanted to do is very, very quickly and then like, you know, I can talk more about this in questions and answers if you want to, but talk about the work that I've done that Jennifer mentioned about leadership for social change, where we worked with organisations in the United States who were really trying to figure out to break the systemic barriers that their clients had. The question that we were asking, using a relational approach and collective approach to leadership, is what does the work of leadership look like to produce change when organisations that have scant financial resources but that have a strong conviction that change must happen to ensure the well-being of communities? How do these organisations, which actually have very little resources, produce extraordinary work? How does that happen? We developed a series of frameworks that I don't have time to share them all with you, but what I will say is, then I started thinking about does this apply? If these are social change organisations in civil society, does it apply to the public service? I've spent about five years thinking about this and writing a little bit about this. What I would say, is that tackling adaptive challenges in public service requires the same systemic approach and we can learn from these organisations and bring some of this stuff to the work that we're doing. In terms of thinking about whether this was the case, my colleague and I, Erica and I, Erica Foldy and I, looked for other research that happened there and asked, "Well, are there any commonalities that happen in different con- context?" We came up with these four meta-practices or conceptual buckets. This is one of our four Cs for marketing as you can see, right? Where, in fact, lots of people in different contexts doing research were documenting something connected to cognition, so this was about changing mental models. Words like, visionary leaderships, sense-making, envisioning, catalysing, we call it reframing discourse. I'll tell you briefly about it in a moment. Also, there was something about connexion, which is about dealing with diversity and figuring out how to use that diversity. And so, there was relating, representing and mobilising member organisations and networks promoting group learning, boundary-spanning activities, we call it bridging difference. The third C is capacity, which is really about making sure that people who want to do leadership, have the capacity to do it. That they have actually... that they know how to do it. It's not just wanting to do it, it's about getting the capabilities that are needed. We call that... They talked about continuous learning, enthusing and empowering members of a network. We talked about unleashing human energies. The last one is consciousness, is this self-awareness, self-reflection, caring about your own footprint in the world, being conscientious about how you interact with others. We didn't give it a name, but we say it's leadership as a new way of being and relating in the world, which is the only formula that I'll give you. Is to think about how can you be differently in the world and relate to others differently in the world. With this is mind, here's the social change leadership framework that we created. No time to go in details on this one. Just suffice it to say, but what these organisations do is to figure out what kind of strategic work do they need to do to leverage the power, to change something out there in the world? If you think about it, let's see... If this works. I didn't try it before. Nope. OK. I won't try it now because I'm running against time. What you see is a lift problem of the... in terms of systemic exclusion, that creates a vision of urgency for the well-being that gets translated into a vision of the future, which is the change, the long-term outcomes that you want to change. This is nested in a world view that defines the type of actions that you would bring in. It defines the types of activities that are permissible or not. It's about the values that the group is bringing together and all that nests the type of work that needs to happen to create the collective capacity for people to be able to leverage power outside. What we've discovered is that the... You know, you have to manage the non-profit organisation, so you need to deal with the technologies of management, strategic management, all that stuff. You also need to deal with the core organisational tasks. If this was a hospital it would be about health managing and curing patients. In a school it's about education. In social change organisations it's about organising and advocating and helping to produce community. It is what we try to do in looking at this, is how does leadership happen in this context? So how does that process moves from the one side to the other one? I thought I'd illustrate, very briefly, some ways in which this particular organisation, the Young Women's Freedom Centre, from Oakland does it. Here's what they're trying to do. This is from their website. Just so that you have a sense of what are the kinds of actual work that they do as their critical task, they work with young women who are either in the juvenile system, so the juvenile justice system, to prepare them for when they leave the system. They do training in gaol. They work with young women in the streets, prostitution, drug sales, gangs, to help prevent them ending up in gaol. They do internships and organising with them. They also have a 12 week re-entry peer support for young women and girls, who are being released from custody and they work with them. Also, the young women who have been part of the programmes are groomed to be hired by the organisation to do some of the peer work and actually several of their executive directors have been women who have come out of the system. With this in mind, we identified these three types of relational practises. We didn't make them... We made them up from the data. We didn't enter with them into us. So let's... an example of each of these to close this presentation. The first one is reframing discourse, which is about challenging the existing mental models that contribute to make up or reinforce the problem. Here the issue is that you cannot change the world with the same mental models that help create the problems that you want to change. You cannot use the same language that helps to reproduce the problems. You have to create an new language. This, in itself, is already creating change, alright? Then you have to convey it to others. You have to figure out how you help produce cognitive shifts in all those other important audiences that are connected to you. It's not about framing. It's not about marketing. It is about reframing, challenging, pushing the envelope. So, how do they do it? This is a lot of stuff that I could tell you, but notice in this slide, the idea of women who have been misunderstood, right? What does that already say about how their reframing what this is all about? This is about women who are growing up in poverty, who face tremendous challenges, who end up in gaol because of these issues and then are treated like criminals. Or, young women who need correctives because they've been misunderstood society and continue to be misunderstood by society, alright? They're trying to survive at all costs, under conditions of poverty and then they do mistakes. We don't need to punish them, we need an opportunity to grow and heal. That's what we need. The intentional message is to bring in a new language and a new way of thinking about it. Once you think about girls this way, the whole reframing has happened. Now, you have a direction that's very different. Examples, well, intentional message, right? So, language. Notice the word freedom in the title? That's really making reference to the civil rights, the idea of oppression, the idea of liberation from oppression. The peer advisors are called self-determination coaches, right? That already tells you it's something different than... Right? It's flipping the idea of who's responsible for the problems that these girls, these women are facing. It's not their parents, it's not themselves, it's the system. It's the poverty itself that's doing this. This is a systemic problem and we need to attack it as a systemic problem. That already tells you a different way of reframing. I thought I'd stop for one second and I'm going to take three more minutes here. What must be reframed to make Scotland the best place to grow up and bring up children? What are some of the mental models that you have to challenge to be able to think differently about the specific work that you're doing? I'm not going to ask you to tell me back, but I thought I'd shut up for a moment. Let you think. The second type of leadership work is bridging difference. This one is easy to grasp because we're all trying to do it. The key point I'll make here, is that it is about valuing the importance of diversity and difference. Understanding that when the social workers are doing their work here and arguing for some stuff, and when the solicitors are doing their work here and arguing for something different, that there's a logic and a value in each of those two. What you need to do is not to get a rid of the difference, it's to bring and bridge the difference so that people can see each other and can figure out, from their own perspectives, what can happen. Now that both of you know that you can keep being who you are, but now you're in this together and you've equalised yourself in the context of others, right? A brief example from this organisation is, so first of all, you have to do bridging towards the outside. This statement tells you that this is a problem for everyone. It's not just for these girls, this is really... We must invest now, in improving our tomorrow. It's everyone who has to be part of this. Some internal bridging that happens. Well, Latino, black and white young women think of themselves as having very different experiences. In fact, they may have belonged to gangs in the street where they're killing each other. They get engaged in storytelling sessions about their experiences and they start realising that they're more similar than different, right? There's this whole process, by which they start seeing the humanity of each other in a different way. That's really important. Moreover, more equitable mechanism that make sure that everyone starts to see themself in the same way. And so, what we have here is, for example, that the board of directors of this organisation is all made of young women. Right? They're all young women, some of them who actually have gone through the experience itself, right? You've created already a different place from where people are connecting and they're bringing their difference, what makes them unique, to help the problem, right? Bridging outside audiences is about connecting with others who care about these young women, and so they don't demonise government officials when they have problems. In fact, they congratulate them when they work with it and they actually reached out to the general justice public officials and said to them, "You know what? You don't have the resources or the capacity, and the knowledge to figure out how to help the girls who are coming out into the world to be ready. We can do it. Let us do it." They managed to convince public officials, so now they do training inside the gaols. Who are the teachers? The peers. The peers are the ones who are doing some of this work. So you see, they're reaching out to the system itself. Important to ask, who's perspectives must be bridged and how to make Scotland the best place to grow up and bring up children? Again, a systemic perspective will give you a sense of what are the different places where you have to do this collective work. To finish, unleashing human energies, which is really about, "If we want to be leaders, how do we create the capacity for us to be leaders?" It's about learning and unlearning. Here the emphasis is really on actually the people who are experiencing the problem. The perspective that's developed here is the need to develop self-efficacy and confidence that you can control... Self-efficacy is confidence that you can control over your life and have capacity to figure it out. This is something that needs to happen with social workers who are treated very badly in our systems, for example. How do we develop their self-efficacy? Self-efficacy is about the faith that you can actually change the system and control your own life. With the Young Women's Freedom Centre, notice what they say in the website, "We lived through adversity, survived by our, our ability." This is about understanding that knowledge is power. There are various forms of knowing that can marshal power. Personal experience is the legitimate source of knowledge, authority and expertise. There is abundance of knowledge and expertise in the group of people who are actually engaged in the problem itself and in the frontline employees who are engaged with them. It really is pushing down the leadership and distributing the leadership down to the points of the most micro level points of it. The last example about them is this idea of participating in a city commission on prostitution of young women. The girls, the young women, who are part of it, have to prepare themselves, have to learn about policy and then they go and tell their stories, but it's beyond their stories. It's about making suggestions and solutions, and so they end up having an influence in what public officials are thinking, in terms of creating policy for the city. Again, who's energies must be unleashed, and how to make Scotland the best place to grow up and bring up children becomes an important point. With this, I'll let you thinking about how can we move from this kind of leadership to this kind of leadership. And to think about the most important implication of thinking about the promise of relational leadership is that with heroic leadership you have to go through repeated efforts to influence others, one follower at a time. With relational leadership, you have a more sustainable approach. It's developing an ongoing learning community that grows by itself and develops different source of leadership that go beyond those that are in the heads of the visible leader. Now, process becomes sources of leadership. Conversations become sources of leadership. You expand the opportunity of sources of leadership and then you bring that down, all the way to the bottom of the hierarchy and let those ideas and those capacity to lead from the bottom up. You have both from the bottom up and from the both down. I'm going to stop there, and I'm sorry I took a couple of minutes more.