Creating a Leadership Incubator

Since the early 2000s I have been part of a village that undertakes the annual project of building and running an ongoing concern in the stark and remote Black Rock desert for the Burning Man festival. For those that have never been to the event, seated villages and camps provide contributions to passers by as their imagination and wherewithal are able to provide. Since Burning Man operates in a gifting culture, contribution means providing a service, experience, or trinket without expectation of compensation. The village, ranging from 70 to 300 members, and all that it does, is our gift to the Black Rock City citizens. Annually we like minded folks get together and plan, build, run our creative project for a bit over a week, then pack it all up, and leave the desert playa in the pristine condition that it was in when we arrived.

At some point early on, I offered to lead our group of volunteers in our project using my project and operations management skills. That year extended to multiple years after which I took a needed hiatus. We rotated leads year to year. Some were ambitious at the cost to the villagers in time and effort. Others were not very organized. The fortunes and standing of the village rose and fell with the adeptness of the lead. Complicating matters was the level of fluidity we experienced as a village. While a handful of folks returned most years, many of the members floated in and out of the village, occasionally camping with us. Some just took time off between forays into the desert. Others tried out village life for a year then moved on to other things. Year to year the new and inexperienced villagers ranged from a quarter to half the village. Additionally, the camps within the village would vary. We always hosted three to four camps, each providing different experiences. However, camps would often shift their focus year to year or move in or out depending on their own interests. Finally, the event organization changed requirements from year to year as well. So the village was literally an annual experiment and newly defined project for whoever was leading.

One of my work-life commitments is to leave a durable improvement that transcends my time in a role. For years, during my first couple of rounds leading the village I did not meaningfully extend that commitment to village leadership. However, on my third stint as the lead I went into it realizing that my time in the role would be limited. I wanted to provide a durable stability to the village. In my mind, that meant creating a structure that stabilized the leadership approach year to year regardless of who was leading.

The Essence of Leadership

Before I jump into the details of what we did, I want to first take a slight detour to talk about what leadership is. I have over the years occupied both managerial roles, managing a substantial number of folks, and individual contributor [IC] roles, working through influence to complete large bodies of work. In my opinion, the best way to develop a leader is to give them accountability for delivering without the authority to tell others what to do. Effective leaders that I have worked with have three common attributes.

Vision — The leader has a clear mental picture of what success will, or at least should, look like. This vision may only reside in the head of the leader. However, a vision is much better if it is shared. In the case of our village, that shared vision needed to be shared in common, at minimum, with the cadre of long term, passionate members that were interested in the long term viability of the village.

Ownership — The leader owns the outcome of the venture. That means that the leader has to be whoever and whatever they need to be to accomplish the work required to deliver the desired outcome. For the village, leadership required equal parts planner, administrator, organizer, diplomat, collaborator, nurturer, and cheerleader.

Influence — The leader must be able to communicate the vision, specific objectives in a way that activates others to lean in and jump onboard the effort in ways that move the group forward towards success. In the case of our village that influence takes a couple of forms. Early on, influence manifests in sending notifications / invitations to the expansive list of previous villagers to gauge interest and deeper engagement with the handful of passionate long timers to solidify what the village will be hosting.and achieve consensus on the rough shared plan. Once the plan is crystalised the influence shifts to project management and cheerleading.

Structuring for Incubation

Leadership is not a fixed quality which is the domain of a few gifted souls. Rather leadership is an intrinsic quality lying within each of us. Being a leader is a choice that each person makes. Like any muscle, leadership needs to be developed a bit at a time with plenty of room to make mistakes. Leadership is also a choice. It cannot be forced. So individuals have to be willing to step up. In my experience, two concerns hold capable people back from leadership positions — fear of not knowing how to lead and fear of not knowing the subject matter, the whats and hows, well enough.

With this in mind, we had to sort out a few burning questions. [No pun intended]

• How do we leverage the culture and build on it to get us where we want to be?
• How do we build institutional knowledge?
• How do we split up the village responsibilities to make it safe?
• Who were the best candidates for leadership in the village?

Culture is Key

Our village had been loosely run for years as a “do-acracy”. In other words, if you were doing something — building, creating, planning — you had a say. If you weren’t actively working on things then you had an opinion but not necessarily a say. It was an organic, low-structure way of managing things. Our organizing principles were generally around providing a safe, nurturing environment for our campers, supporting the imaginative ambitions of our camps, and a willingness to experiment from year to year. The camps were our portals to the public. The back end of the village was, for festival purposes, our home.

We have not strayed from those core values. However, for them to remain intrinsic to the village as we pass the leadership torch, we needed to sharpen them and write them down. Beyond that, we needed to overtly check in with them when making decisions for the coming year and beyond to ensure that we were in service to those core values. We did incorporate both written values and check ins, which I will discuss shortly. To summarize, we committed to ink, values that covered and built on these considerations:

• The village provides a safe, nurturing space for our campers to enjoy
• Contribution is our purpose and foundation. Whether we are contributing to each other or to the public that comes to us in our camp venues, we are here in this place to contribute.
• Those that contribute most get a say in what we are about and what we are doing, whether for the upcoming event or for the long term viability of the village.
• We respect each other in how we engage, interact, and communicate. We find respectful ways to resolve conflicts.
• We remain curious and support experiments in the way we organize, what we offer, and who we engage.
• We make it easy for new people to understand what we are about and provide them options for how they can contribute.

I cannot stress enough that clarity on our values had to be in place before we tackled anything else. Knowing what we were about made structuring the leadership incubator crisp and clear.

Building Institutional Knowledge

For years we had reinvented the wheel for putting together the village. The look and feel of that wheel was largely dependent on the whims of whoever happened to be leading that year. Leading required a comprehensive understanding of all the pieces and parts, and the rhythms of planning, building, running, tear down and exodus. The annual project was not so complicated that it couldn’t be reinvented each year. However, much of it did not need to be reinvented. Additionally, critical aspects could get lost or underappreciated year to year depending on the leader’s memory and predilections.

The first step was to just write it all down. I wanted to demystify village operations to take away any fear a potential leader might have about not understanding a particular arena. I also wanted to organize our efforts around pieces that were more easy to understand and manage. My considerations for writing the guide was that it:

• Was accessible and easy to understand.
• Leveraged the wisdom and expertise of our veterans and village elders, some of which had been around for over 20 years.
• Was written in a way that could be read end-to-end or referenced as needed in the moment of need.
• Identifies what truly stays roughly the same year-to-year vs.areas that require regular experimentation
• Could be easily updated as we evolved.

I drafted our first guide, writing down everything I could remember about how we did things. I was nervous about sharing the guide with my fellow campmates. They notoriously eschewed structure and formality. It’s Burning Man damn it. We’re counter cultural. But, I needed to get expert feedback on various aspects. I also needed to test the water to see if they agreed with the approach and content. So I organized the guide into sections and rather than ask each person to read the entire missive, I billed the guide as the document we provided to all of our villagers. I designated various folks to each section and asked them to read just that section and provide feedback. I, of course, offered all of them the option to provide feedback on the entire guide. To my delight, everyone was enthusiastic about having a written resource. They all jumped in and provided edits, suggested new categories, and even philosophized about various aspects and how they fit our culture. The leadership shift had begun.

The categories have shifted and morphed over the years. We have roughly established these categories as:

• Culture and core values — particular emphasis on contribution and respect
• Dues, budget and spending priorities
• Planning, early tickets and work passes
• Village layout
• Infrastructure — power grid, climate controlled area, showers, and shade structures
• Camps — operating requirements, team, cultural fit and general village engagement. In many ways the village acts as a motherboard into which the camps plug as modules.
• Village kitchen and evening meals — self formed teams would volunteer to prepare & serve a meal for all villagers. This effort served two purposes. First, it initiated the concept of contribution during the event preparation period. More powerful was the effect during the event. The evening meal did the heavy lifting for providing a common point of connection and camaraderie for all villagers.
• Village build [field supervision] Layout positioning, build phasing, arriving traffic control.
• Teardown and exodus [field supervision] Container inventory and fill placement, clean up, and waste disposition.
• Burning Man organization and regulatory agencies contact

These categories are not just an effective way to organize the village which have become our leadership pillars,

The Power of the Whole Picture

By the time we had put the finishing touches on the guide, we had a clear picture of where we needed to focus our leadership. As an aside, seeing the written form exhausted me. I couldn’t believe I had been trying to keep all of that in my head and a spreadsheet. To be fair, we have been managing it organically through collective tracking and action. However, our organic approach did not give us a way to step back, look at the whole, and make longer term decisions and plans.

Having a formal, documented compilation of all considerations gave us three new advantages:

• We built alignment and consensus around the entire effort to stand up the village each year.
• It allowed us to step back and, as a collective, think longer term than the current year, saving for prioritized longer term investments.
• It created more bite-sized roles for new leaders to test their mettle.

Inviting People to Lead

For many people, leading is something that they want to learn to do, but is also terrifying. What if I screw up? I don’t want to let anyone down.” I have found that inviting people to lead rarely gets a flat out ‘no’. Rather it elicits a list of concerns. What I hear in that list of concerns is, “I want to lead. But I don’t know how. Or I’m afraid of screwing up.”

With the village guide in hand we had great descriptions for each area and what needed to happen. So new leaders had a subject matter starting place. I also set up mentorships with area experts so the new leader would have someone to bounce ideas off of while working through the effort. This approach helped put to bed subject matter concerns.

As for the, “What if I screw up?” concern, I offered to be available for the hard decisions and working out any ‘screw ups’. We wanted to provide a safe space to fail. We had a number of folks that had led the village in the past, experts in every area, others with strong opinions, and a lot of younger folks interested in flexing their leadership muscles. So, with trepidation and excitement we filled all the leadership roles.

After watching all of these wonderful folks step up and lead each area with passion, I wondered why I had maintained central leadership for so long. The first round of leadership incubation was a rousing success. But would it stick?

Transition from Leadership ‘Me’ to Leadership ‘We’

The instant that the village folks said yes to leadership we began a transition from ‘me’, as an individual leader, to we as a leadership collective. Each new leader had ideas about how to make their area of responsibility better. And, did things that impacted other areas. We established a monthly planning call for the leads so that we had ample time to discuss issues together and bring to bear the collective expertise of the group. Then magic happened. Each of the pillar leaders wanted control of their section of the guide to update it with the changes they were making for that year. The guide became not only an orientation for new villagers. It was a way for leaders to communicate their intentions to the other leaders. All key decisions were ratified as a leadership group. The process of leaders updating their sections continues annually to this day.

The Power of ‘We’ … A Village of Leaders

A few years ago, a few long term issues came to a head. The Burning Man organization, under pressure from the Bureau of Land Management and local law enforcement was providing more and more strict guidelines for how we had to set ourselves up and operate on the desert playa. Additionally, one of our camps was becoming more and more out of compliance. Beyond that, the camp leadership was not preparing their new members to be village contributors, and year-to-year their public offerings became increasingly paltry. These were close friends, long time villagers, and damn near family.

No one person could make a call on camp disposition. It was a matter for collective decision making. One of the leaders in the leaders group suggested forming a ‘board’. The board would be made of 5 to 7 members focused on culture, budget and the long term success of the village. We jumped on the concept and populated it with longtime veterans, most of which had led the village at one point or another.

After deliberating, performing assessments, and pulling together information from relevant sources, the board decided to offer the camp two options. Option 1: We would support the camp in setting up independently with a two year transition period. Option 2: Dissolve the camp and integrate into other village activities and camps. They opted for the former. However, the Burning Man organization declined their application to operate separately. So they reversed course and integrated into the village.

The well considered, empathetic approach to a difficult situation resulted in a win-win in that we cleaned up a painful situation that had been brewing for years while maintaining our close knit ties to people we loved and treasured. The other, critical shift made in creating the board was to remove the need for a single leader. This collective group of volunteers were and are undertaking a substantial group project every year to deliver something that we all loved and enjoyed. That collective group had established a collective voice and collective leadership.

We now have a permanent leadership incubator generating leaders that make our little project better every year. It’s self sustaining, stable, yet open to new experiments as they evolve.

What are the Takeaways?

That quaint story about a Burning Man village is interesting, but what does that have to do with me and my organization. Great question! There are a set of key learnings that apply to any leader or would-be leader for incubating leaders in your organization.

Release Potential Leadership. Potential leaders abound in every organization. The trick is to find a way to release the potential and put it into action. Aim for an organization of leaders.

Remove Leadership Obstacles. Potential leaders have two concerns. 1) Do I understand my area of responsibility? 2) Can I lead?

• Subject matter expertise is almost always necessary. When considering a leadership position ask yourself how much of that expertise must be pre-existing, how much can they pick up through existing guidance and references, and how much can they learn on the job. For our village example pre-existing knowledge was not necessary because we had plenty of experts. We prepped new leads with the guide and matched them with a veteran/expert.
• New leaders need a safety net. Give new leaders room to try things, learn, and fix their mistakes. Mentorship both within and external to your team is a huge help. Build forgiveness into the support system. We also set up shadowing for key roles to train new leaders. First, having the new lead track the incumbent to see how they do things. Then having the veteran shadow the new leader and provide feedback.

Provide Leader Support Infrastructure — When I conceived of the leadership incubator, I did not tell anyone what I was doing. In fact, until one of them reads this article, I’ve never discussed the leadership incubator concept with any of my village mates. I just offered a thing… a village guide. I was not sure how it would play given our culture was to play fast and loose. Everything that happened after that was a natural evolution. From my many years doing transformation work have taught me that you just never know what will catalyze a shift. But, when you fall upon that thing, jump on the horse and ride it.

Finally, be ready to trade in leadership approaches. For our village and operating model, a single lead worked reasonably well for years. However, it allowed structural issues to foment for years as well. As soon as our village potential leaders broke loose, it was time for me to get out of the way and let the village leadership come into their own. Had I been inflexible about it we would have missed opportunity after opportunity and may not have survived in the long run.

You can apply these lessons in any organization.