Collaborative leadership

In The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007 Duncan J. Watts argues against the overstated importance of charismatic leaders to induce change. Very interesting article that shows that the ability to influence others is after all far less important than their tendency to be influenced.

Our work shows that the principal requirement for what we call “global cascades”—the widespread propagation of influence through networks—is the presence not of a few influentials but, rather, of a critical mass of easily influenced people, each of whom adopts, say, a look or a brand after being exposed to a single adopting neighbor. Regardless of how influential an individual is locally, he or she can exert global influence only if this critical mass is available to propagate a chain reaction.

[...] Cascade size and frequency depend on the availability and connectedness of easily influenced people, not on the characteristics of the initiators—just as the size of a forest fire often has little to do with the spark that started it and lots to do with the state of the forest. If the network permits global cascades because it has the right concentration and configuration of adopters, virtually anyone can start one. If it doesn’t permit cascades, nobody can. What seems in retrospect to be the special influential quality of a particular person (or group) is, therefore, mostly an accident of location and timing.

In other words, it's better to be on time than to be right, and leadership is mostly about resonating with the spirit of the time and revealing the hidden and untapped energies of people. Leaders are like sparks igniting latent energies eager to be revealed in a population of already connected people. So it's largely driven by circumstances after all, and by the level of social capital in the network in particular. You can't do much as a leader if the social network of your organization is broken. You have to rebuild it first. by weaving people together by climbing the ladder of collaboration. The leaders who "make it happen" are harvesters of the seeds planted by others. So why do we worship them so much? Maybe just because we need gods, and we want them to be winners, even if winners are first and foremost people with unusual flair, people who know exactly when their time has come.