Circular Leadership

For now, we think of circular leadership as the ways in which we work alone and together to serve justice. Justice is a practice of finding balance between individual rights & responsibilities; and collective rights & responsibilities. It encompasses 4 topics: action, credit, ownership, and pay.

Action

We work alone all the time. We wield our personal power, ideas, and commitments to carry things forward independently, and we dream in our heads with radical freedoms that are unique to us. Genius also emerges when people join together and bring their unique contributions into coordinated, collectivized forms of action in which the sum is greater than the parts. In coordination and collectivity, our own needs, ideas, powers, skills, and actions come alongside others. We are also accountable to others.

Somewhere along the line, coordinated action comes with drastically consolidated power in which accountability is not equally shared across all members of a system. Important and unique ideas get suppressed, oppressed, and subsumed into the vision of a small group of people at the top of a hierarchy. In other words, you act, but your actions might reflects someone else's beliefs — a form of structural power inequity — and you might still bear the brunt of responsibility. This often happens to BIPOC communities or people with less wealth.

Credit

We come up with ideas when we're by ourselves. These ideas belong to us and are expressions of our unique identities, experiences, and insights. Genius also emerges when we blend our unique identities towards common creation. In that process, we often find that the lone genius is more myth than reality. Indeed, when we’re working alone, how much of our thinking has been informed and influenced by what we have read and heard throughout our lives? Is there really an original idea?

But somewhere along the line, as power consolidates in hierarchies, credit is not shared. The contributions of individuals with less structural power are erased, and their ideas are represented and appropriated by others. This often happens to BIPOC communities or people with less wealth.

Ownership

Individuals have the right to freely and independently express, carry forward, and earn from their ideas. Intellectual property laws in modern times have been largely designed to incentivize innovation, and there is evidence that it has spurred new art forms, scientific achievements, and inventions that might not have been possible without it. It has also played a role in building wealth for individual artists, entertainers, athletes, and other creators of color. In an era of extreme wealth inequality, we think intellectual property rights can, in part, serve justice.

But somewhere along the line, as power consolidates, ownership is not equally shared. The ideas and creativity of BIPOC communities are stolen and appropriated, and the benefits of their own ideas do not come to them, while access to technical support in navigating complex laws favors people with wealth. Life saving technologies are also out of reach of those who need them to survive, and we apply the concept of ownership in a way that has centered human possession-ism and false dominance, corrupting our relationship with the planet we call home.

Pay

Individuals have a right to freelance, move from job to job, and earn on their own in a way that fits their unique expertise, interests, and capacities. In service to coordinated action, coordinated creation, and collective benefit, we often find that it makes sense to coordinate our incomes to pool and distribute salaries, health insurance, and other collective goods.

But somewhere along the line, as power consolidates into hierarchies, income and benefits are not equally shared. We have extreme pay gaps, advanced and further worsened by individuals with power who perpetuate a narrative that their inherent value — including their opinions, intelligence, expertise, and way of leading — is greater.

What do we do?

To serve justice, we’re asking where and how small systems can design for balance between individual and collective action, credit, ownership, and pay. We're also deeply questioning the very concept of ownership. For example:

• Can MJN’s systems be designed to loosen — or erase — the boundaries between leaders and followers and acknowledge that they probably were never so distinct in the first place?

• When, if ever, is consolidated power necessary, and why?

• How do we foster individuality, not individualism, as system norms?

• Given that copyright law has helped communities of color build wealth in an unequal world, how do we design to enable people to benefit from their intellectual property — without privatizing ideas that should be in the creative commons to serve justice?

• Can MJN have collective goods? What do they look like?