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Sparks + Embers Episode No. 015: Social Stewardship & Self Governance (Apprenticeship Leadership)
73 Plays1 month ago
This week we discuss the reality of our present moment: what does it mean to self-govern through the lens of the Apprenticeship Model for Leadership in the public sphere. We read an excerpt of this week's Kindling feature, focusing on the demands of us as citizen leaders.
Article Summary: Social change research reveals multiple valid approaches to community transformation. Some situations require confrontational organizing; others benefit from collaborative coalition-building; still others need policy-focused advocacy. The complexity deepens when addressing historical trauma and systemic oppression that affects different communities differently. The bridge-builders face this challenge as they work with tourism development and government documentation while maintaining traditional practices. How do we apply universal principles while respecting specific contexts and needs?
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Sparks and Embers'
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There's something about a campfire. We gather around it, stare into the flames and find ourselves in conversations we never planned to have. I'm Tiffany. And I'm Tyler. And this is Sparks and Embers, 10 minutes of what sticks when we step back from the fire.
00:00:21
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Each week, we distill insights from our kindling newsletter, sharing the questions that won't let go and the connections that surprised us. We hope this creates space for whatever wants to emerge around your own fires.
The Week's Feature Article: Relevance Today
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Last week, we took a break from our apprenticeship leadership model series. And part of the reason for that was due to the work that we were doing on this week's feature article.
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This feature article feels like one of the most appropriate ones for this time in history. And what we're going to do this week is a little bit
Exploring 'Good Pain' and Self-Governance
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different.
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I'm going to end up reading a section of the article that is an invitation to who we need to be as a self-governed society from the perspective of good pain.
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We hope after you hear it that it sparks something in you that wants to go and explore this piece in its entirety. It is a conversation we need to be having right now, not because it's going to solve us or rescue us or give us an escape plan.
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Because we find where we are right now is asking the bigger question of who do we want to be going forward? So with that, enjoy this section.
Roles in Community Structures
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Standing in the tragic gap requires more than leaders with enough heart to withstand the breaking open. The bridge builders don't leave elders alone to maintain spans.
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Every village member participates in the work. Decisions about bridges require consensus. Knowledge transmission happens through whole communities, not isolated masters passing wisdom to selected apprentices.
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Everyone has a role and to professionalize bridge building as a select group is to forsake the roles everyone else must play. The apprenticeship model operates through these reciprocal bi-directional flows.
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Masters teach apprentices, but apprentices also teach masters through questions that reveal blind spots, through feedback on what works and what confuses, through fresh perspectives that challenge established patterns.
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This bi-directional flow prevents stagnation. It keeps knowledge alive rather than ossified.
Citizens and Public Leadership
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Public leadership requires the same reciprocal dynamics.
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But the governed have largely abandoned their role as teachers of those who govern them. We have ceded the monitoring function to those we're meant to monitor.
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We have allowed the standing up of ethics commissions that are staffed by the very members of the profession under review. We've allowed legislative bodies investigating themselves to produce predictable outcomes.
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Public comment periods where inputs gets collected but never influences decisions is the norm. Recall mechanisms that are so difficult to trigger they exist only in theory are what is allowed.
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This collapse didn't happen through malice. It happened through exhaustion and learned helplessness. Monitoring takes time and energy. People feel they lack. We feel we lack that time and energy.
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Previous attempts we may have made at accountability failed or they were punished. The systems seem too entrenched to change. Individual action feels pointless without movement around it.
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Ellen Ostroms, who we discussed earlier in this article, her design principles work only when resource users and monitors both participate. When we, the citizens, delegate enforcement to the very leaders We are meant to hold accountable.
Primary Roles of Citizens in Governance
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The commons deplete without anyone noticing until crisis forces attention. The governed serve three functions in the apprenticeship model of leadership.
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First, we are the monitors of the leadership commons. We track how leaders use trust, social capital, and organizational resilience. We identify when extraction exceeds replenishment. We name depletion before collapse occurs.
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This goes beyond oversight. It is tending the resources we all depend on, the way bridge builders inspect the root systems for weakness before the storm arises. Second, as teachers through consequence, we provide feedback through formal mechanism like voting, like public comment, like organized testimony that demonstrates patterns rather than outliers.
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We create sanctions proportionate to violations, responses that restore trust rather than merely punish. We reward bridge-building behavior through re-election support and resource allocation.
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We, the governed, teach leaders what serves and what depletes through the consequences they create. And third, as co-creators of governance conditions, we participate in rulemaking that affects them.
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We contribute to conflict resolution before divisions calcify. We help design accountability mechanisms that serve flourishing. This means more than voting every few years.
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It means showing up to shape the conditions within which leadership operates. We, the governed, also model the behavior expected from leaders. We practice the secondary posture in participation by suppressing personal recognition in favor of what serves the work.
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We stand in tragic gaps between competing needs. We demonstrate patience for work across time while maintaining urgency for justice. Leaders learn as much from watching how we, the citizens, participate as from any training program.
Breakdown in Feedback Loops
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And this is where the model breaks down in practice. Most of us have never learned how to give developmental feedback to leaders. We know how to complain. We know how to demand and how to attack.
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We don't know how to help leaders see blind spots without destroying confidence. We don't know how to help leaders challenge decisions without questioning motives. We don't know how to hold people accountable while simultaneously supporting their growth.
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Town halls become performance spaces where citizens perform outrage and leaders perform responsiveness. but no learning happens. Participatory budgeting initiatives teach citizens about trade-offs, but often lack real enforcement power.
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Community oversight boards get created without independence or resources to function. The confidence competence framework we discussed earlier in this series applies here.
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Many leaders operate as dangerous novices in new roles. Their high confidence from previous success but they're low competence in the territory they've entered as leaders.
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The governed, us, we can help them navigate this transition through structure and reality testing that doesn't destroy the confidence needed to act. Or we can attack them for incompetence in ways that pushes them into defensive postures that prevents learning.
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Some leaders function as imposter experts with deep competence but doubt about their own judgment, so they defer to others with less knowledge but more positional authority.
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We, the governed, can help these leaders claim appropriate authority through validation and challenge that builds confidence. Or we can reinforce their doubt through criticism that focuses on style rather than substance.
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What happens when the governed seed this apprenticing role? The feedback loop breaks. It disintegrates. Leaders lose the correction needed for growth.
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Without external accountability, confirmation bias
Power Dynamics and Accountability
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dominates. Echo chambers form where only supportive voices get heard. The gap between self-perception and impact widens until crisis forces recognition.
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We, the governed, also lose capacity. Skills for giving feedback atrophy from disfuse. Knowledge of how governance even works fades. The ability to participate degrades when not exercised.
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Democracy transforms from governance by consent into governance by default, where citizens become passive consumers of leadership rather than participants in cultivation.
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Power concentrates when those who hold it also monitor it, And distance between leaders and us, the lead, expands. Public service becomes private extraction with public rhetoric attached to it.
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Eventually, someone accumulates enough unmonitored power to formalize what already exists in practice. And when we finally notice it, we must reconcile the fact that we enabled it, we sanctioned it, and we allowed it to happen.
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Until that acceptance, we continue to participate in the performative act of apportioning blame. Recovery requires rebuilding monitoring capacity, creating oversight with real independence and enforcement power, distributing monitoring across many participants rather than concentrating in bodies easily captured.
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Make accountability mechanisms accessible to ordinary citizens, to us, not just those with specialized expertise or resources to engage systems designed to be difficult.
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The bridge builders rotate to leadership so no one person accumulates unmonitored authority. They require public decisions that the whole village witnesses.
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They protect truth tellers who identify problems before they threaten the structure. They teach every generation how governance works through participation, not observation.
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Standing in the tragic gap becomes possible when both leaders and us, the lead, help each other maintain the stance. The leader holds vision and resistance without collapsing into either cynicism or irrelevance.
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The governed provide reality testing and encouragement, correction and support, consequence and grace. The gap doesn't close. It becomes the space where transformation happens, where what it meets what could be in ways that generate movement toward flourishing.
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This requires citizens who understand their role, not as consumers demanding better service, but as co-creators responsible for the health of the whole
Building Community and Continued Engagement
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system. It requires leaders who understand they're being taught by those they lead, that their authority comes from consent that must be earned.
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through demonstrable service rather than claimed through position. for sitting around the fire with us. If these conversations sparked something, subscribe to Sparks Numbers and all our shows on Apple and Spotify.
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And if you're moved to, please leave us a review or share this episode with your friends. Both help us build this community. For the longer material that feeds these episodes, subscribe to the Kindling newsletter at goodpainco.com backslash kindling.
00:11:49
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That's goodpainco.com backslash kindling. We release it weekly with the kind of content that keeps these unexpected conversations going. We provide the kindling, you bring the fire.
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Until next time, keep the questions burning.