Peer power leads the way

Peer learning and network leadership are two of the principle dynamics emerging in the twenty-first century workplace. Peer learning happens through reciprocal helping relationships between individuals of comparable status, who share a common or closely related learning or development objective. Unlike mentoring, which relies on a one-way flow of knowledge and advice from the mentor to the protege, peer-learning involves two-way learning and joint reflection. When done well, these partnerships can be very powerful and effective because peers understand each other’s goals, issues and pressures, have similar direct experience, are seen as credible, unbiased and trusted sources of information, have specific ‘local’ knowledge, speak the same language and can help each other distill information needed to make a decision. In essence, peer learning’s power comes from the fact that people are more likely to hear and internalise messages, and thus to change their attitudes and behaviours, if they believe the messenger is similar to them and faces the same concerns and pressures.

The individual model of leadership historically associated with strong organisations is directive, top-down and transactional, whereas network leadership is collective, distributed, bottom-up, facilitative and emergent. These two have always co-existed, and for much of the twentieth century, organisational leadership was the privileged form for organising resources and managing the delivery of goods and services. However, with the rise of the web came the greater capacity for people, resources and ideas to self-organise. This, coupled with complex global challenges such as climate change and resource depletion, which need urgent collective action, means that networked forms of leadership are coming to the fore.

Two new programmes by Mission, Models, Money (MMM) are helping to develop both peer learning and network leadership, not only because of their role in transforming the workplace, but because they are also the DNA of ‘systems change’.

re.volution’s objective is to address the issue of overextension and under-capitalisation – trying to do too much with too little, too often on our own. This problem is prevalent across the arts and cultural system in the UK and has been a focus for MMM for a number of years. re.think is concerned with global systems change. It aims to promote the power of art and culture in helping tackle the ‘bigger than self’ problems of climate change, resource depletion and social injustice, responses and solutions to which we urgently need if we are to find better ways of living on our finite planet.

Shifting people’s world-view in order to create new systems of influence is very hard to do. Leaders in the field, like Margaret Wheatley, teach us that it begins with small local actions. It emerges from connections among these local efforts, from the exchanges of learning and the forging of relationships. It is locally that we learn how to be the change we want to see in the world. It then goes through a lifecycle. Starting with networking, connecting people who are often so busily engaged in their own efforts that they have no idea what’s happening outside their immediate locality, it moves on to a second stage, where people realise that they can create more benefit by working together. Relationships shift from casual exchanges to a commitment to work together in some way. Personal needs expand to include a desire to support others and improve professional practices. Communities of Practice provide a powerful means to do this. In such a group there is an intentional commitment to advance the field of practice, and to share those discoveries with a wider audience. Communities of Practice make their resources and knowledge available to anyone, especially those doing related work.

The third stage can never be predicted. It is the sudden appearance of a system that has real power and influence. Pioneering efforts that hovered at the periphery suddenly become the norm. The practices developed by courageous communities become the accepted standard. People no longer hesitate about adopting these approaches and methods and they learn them easily. Policy and funding debates now include the perspectives and experiences of these pioneers.

The power and potential of peer learning and networked leadership in relation to both the twenty-first century workplace and systems change can therefore be understood in terms of their capacity to help us develop ‘collective intelligence’. NESTA defines this as an attribute of groups and systems of people that enables them to deploy their distributed intellectual faculties to behave more as if they were a single agent, thus generating outcomes beyond what could be achieved by their individual participants. The philosopher Jacob Needleman describes the same thing rather more poetically: “If the group is an artform of the future, then convening groups is an artistry we must cultivate to fully harvest the promise of the future.”