What Leaders of the Future Can Learn From Burning Man: Leadership in the Transformational Ecosystem
Thank you.
A huge one.
Our story on Why Society Needs Burning Man: Can Transformational Festivals Be a Source of Change? generated inspiring and meaningful responses.
❤
Our mission, since my very first research trip, was to map the seeds of disruption and innovation in the ecosystem where people design change and then bring these seeds out, to plant them in the actual society.
We loved the emails, the messages and more than everything, the actual projects and companies that are starting working with us on changing the World, changing their World, with the transformational festivals wisdom.
If you, right now, are thinking “fucking hippies!”, please check out the science that is behind innovation, disruption and, ultimately, change. Read why society needs Burning Man and transformational festivals.
For all the others, this time, we want to talk about leadership.
“The 10 Principles of Burning Man and the New P’s of Culture and Community” by Brian Solis
We enjoyed “The 10 Principles of Burning Man and the New P’s of Culture and Community” by Brian Solis. Brian is a great analyst and futurist. He suggests that instead of Price, Product, Promotion, and Place, leaders should embrace, People, Promise, Purpose, and Principles.
We add to the table one among many rituals that happen in the transformational festivals. We know how pioneers and veterans of Burning Man used to joke about hippie circles ;) but it’s a growing need to talk about female leadership, apparently (see: Silicon Valley female leaders coming out on male power).
The Women’s Circle at Electric Forest’s Her Forest
The Women’s Circle belongs to Electric Forest’s Her Forest, a collaboration between women, intended to create the most supportive, comforting and empowering environment possible for women at the festival. Within Her Forest, […] the Women’s Circle is an invitation for Forest Women to connect in a celebratory circle in The Jubilee.
[…] A circle is a gathering that facilitates connection and amplifies the power of the collective through an intentionally-curated shared experience. The circle is a universal symbol that represents inclusion, unity, and equality. Through the guidance of the leader(s), circles have the power to temporarily suspend social norms and encourage a depth of connection not readily experienced in everyday interactions. When we gather in a circle, we revive an ancient ritual that has long been used to bring people together, create a common focus, and set intentions — as equals and without judgment.
(source: http://www.electricforestfestival.com/program/her-forest/)
So, we have so far, a new form of leadership that looks into building community and culture around its values — rewriting the 4Ps, and a circle shaped social structure where leaders guide the group in a highly participated, hyper connected experience based on inclusion, unity, and equality as opposed to hierarchy and static social norms.
A futurist’s analysis of new leaders’ values and an ancient ritual riproposed by transformational festivals to reinforce the power of communities and their leaders.
To lead has to do with community building and community management more than ever. Relationships, connections, are leaders’ everyday mean, in order to succeed.
Now, let’s go where leadership becomes crucial and almost political, for the impact it has on the market.
In the book “Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work”,
Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal recounted how Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned to Burning Man as part of their process to find new Google CEO, Eric Schmidt.
They were facing their toughest decision yet at Google […], one of the more pivotal CEO hires of the high-tech era.
[…] They had to find someone who could set ego aside and get what Google was trying to do. Someone who could, in the New York Times’ John Markoff’s assessment, “discipline Google’s flamboyant, self-indulgent culture, without wringing out the genius.”
Get it right, and they’d own the search engine space for a decade or more. Screw it up, and they could lose control of their company. Game over. Back to grad school. […]
So, what would you do? Tough, uh?
Here’s what they did. They decided to take in consideration a particular, and particularly freaky, data point out of the huge amount of qualified resumes: Burning Man.
So, when the founders heard that Eric Schmidt, the 46-year-old veteran of Sun Microsystems and a Berkeley Ph.D. computer scientist, was the sole CEO finalist who had already been to the event, they rejiggered their rankings and gave the guy a callback. “Eric was . . . the only one who went to Burning Man,” Brin told Doc Searls, then a Berkman Center fellow at Harvard. “We thought [that] was an important criterion.” […]
Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal describe the Burning Man leadership trigger as […] altered state of consciousness that suggested a better way of working together, and a feeling that anyone who presumed to lead them simply had to know firsthand. Maybe, if Schmidt could endure the blistering heat, the dust storms, the sleepless nights, and the relentless strangeness of Burning Man, just maybe, he’d be the guy who could help them grow the dream without killing it. […]
Did it work?
“The whole point of taking Schmidt to Burning Man,” explains Salim Ismail, global ambassador for Singularity University and a Silicon Valley fixture, “was to see how he (ed. the next CEO of Google) could handle a wild environment. Could he deal with the volatile, novel context? The extreme creativity? Did he merge with his team or stand in their way? And that’s what they learned on that trip, that’s one of Schmidt’s great talents. He’s really flexible, even in difficult conditions. He adapted his management style to fit their culture without bleeding out their genius and turned Google into a monster success.”
Yes, it worked.
Just check the numbers. When Google hired Schmidt in 2001, their revenues were rumored to be about $100 million. A decade later, when Schmidt finally handed the CEO reins back to Page, the company’s revenues were nearly $40 billion.
That’s a return of almost 40,000 percent.
(source: “Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal)
So there’s this, and for the few that thought of transformational festivals communities as “fucking hippies”: you guys might have to switch mindset towards the business ecosystem of the future. ;)
For all the others, make sure you follow Burning Man and Transformational Festivals publication here on Medium and join us.
This content is part of the first research in the transformational festivals field: Blaze of Inspiration. The Impact of Festivals ‘from another planet’ on our society, backed by social big data.
Alessia Clusini, Martina Faralli.
