The potency of the Feminine for doing business in the New Paradigm
10 years ago I began to passionately explore participatory organisations and leadership. I devoured all books, courses and opportunities for practice that came my way, eager to crack the code of this new way of working. But even after working with some of the most brilliant people and organizations in the field, I found that, in most cases, the efforts to implement these new ways of working didn’t translate to large-scale operations, nor were they sustainable over time. And my thirst for understanding the new paradigm of leadership, stemming from a feeling that we were missing something fundamental, remained.
Then, three years ago, I came across a dimension of leadership that quenched my thirst: Lovisa Alséns take on Feminine Leadership. I discovered this leadership practice through Lovisa’s course “Awakening Feminine Leadership” — a course supporting women in discovering and owning their life-force, and bringing that life-force with presence into their leadership. And the more I and other women practice this way of being, the more convinced I am that this radiant feminine leadership is a key we need to unlock and fully unleash the next paradigm of business on a large scale. In this article I will share my thoughts on why.
In the industrial paradigm, an organization could live a long prosperous life on one invention built and sold by a quite rigid and uncreative machine-like organization. The key to success was steady, predictable and efficient production. With the emerging network society and attention economy, where relevance and the ability to adapt and innovate towards rapidly changing needs is key, the old machine model won’t work.
Participatory organizations’ superior ability to create and thereby stay relevant is what enables them to outcompete traditional machine-like hierarchies. The ability to create is two-fold: it is the ability to tap into the new and the ability to bring what you have tapped into, to the world.
….and this is where the feminine enters the picture. It was when I was introduced to an Eastern philosophical perspective on the masculine and the feminine through Lovisa’s course that it clicked for me. In this Eastern philosophy, the feminine is seen as the creative energy, the life force or the fuel of creation. It is through the feminine we can access that which we sense but do not yet know. In contrast, the masculine is what directs this energy into manifestation: the process of taking initiative, actualizing and getting things done. Creation is therefore the synergy of the masculine and the feminine — a synergy that lies in the core of any successful participatory organization.
When applying the described perspective to organizations, we however have to recognize the fractal nature of the feminine and the masculine. This means to acknowledge that they are equally crucial for creation; each individual, each project, each team and so on need both the feminine and the masculine to create. What is also true, is that the feminine and the masculine play more or less crucial roles in different phases of creation. The beginning of the creative process is feminine and the end is masculine. This implies that in a decentralized organization, the core needs more feminine skills and the nodes need more masculine ones*. Without the feminine leadership that connects us to the creative energy needed, we won’t succeed in building new successful businesses, no matter how much effort we put into evolving the masculine aspects of our leadership.
Without the next level feminine, we are cut off from the creative energy individuals, teams and the organization as a whole need to fuel the more evolved emotional maturity and cognitive complexity that self-management requires. Which is exactly what I have seen happen in most attempts to sustain a participatory organization over time. A pattern I see being repeated over and over is that loads of effort is put into practicing a next level masculine “doing”, or ways to take initiative; aware of all the mental models and with carefully designed participatory processes. But we are missing the feminine “being” that enables us to tap into the creative energy or life force needed for the initiatives to actually create something new. Many sense that the feminine is missing, but since we lack the practice that allows us to truly access the feminine, we instead feminize the masculine process and structures. Which usually ends with either an endless discussion with no results — a “green” flat organisation of only process and no real new creation, or the masculine getting so frustrated that it degrades to a detached “orange” hierarchy — leaving us back with the creativity stifling, command and control shadows of orange that we were trying so hard to avoid in the first place.
When the radiant feminine is present, however, the results are mind-blowing. I have seen how a present feminine has enabled people to tap into their creative impulses, become more alive and bring in more of their own power. Through connection with her own body and life-force, the feminine accesses the creative energy that the masculine needs to stand in his full power to take initiative and manifest. Women who practice this kind of leadership share things like: “When I connect to my feminine power the atmosphere in the room changes” , “Complex, sticky situations all the sudden seem clear and easy.”, “It creates like a field around me, and those who step into that field are able to solve problems at a higher level of complexity — from a place of deeper emotional maturity.”. “I have never had more fun at work, or gotten so much done with so little effort”.
I am not going to go deeper into what feminine leadership is, and how to access it, as that is an article in itself. Also, ultimately, this is something that you have to experience for yourself to fully understand. The feminine is about being, not doing, and it is a lived experience rather than an intellectual understanding. But, if what I have shared resonates with you, you are most welcome to join the lived exploration. The more leaders we are that have access to this dimension of leadership, the stronger the feminine field gets. So do get in touch if you want company on your travels, I can’t wait to see what will be possible when we begin to, on a large scale, unleash the power of the feminine — thereby unleashing the masculine, and the synergy between the two, in our organizations.
*This is consistent with with how Bard and Söderqvist in “Digital Libido” explain how groups best fit for the emerging network society are the global tribes — where the feminine leads the inner circle of the tribe and the masculine the outer circle. The fractal perspective along with the metaphor of a tribe also solves the conflict of gender as a social or biological construct — showing us that it is both. Adopting the lens of fractal nature helps us see that we all have the feminine and the masculine within us, and that some of us have more feminine or more masculine. And a tribe always consists of both masculine men, feminine women and the people in between who have the crucial role as the link between the inner and outer circle. All these roles are needed to succeed in a participatory organisation.