Naïve Leadership...Let’s Bring it.

Most change begins with a small group of people naïvely dedicated to doing the impossible.

Meet Dr. Katherine Ortega Courtney and Dominic Cappello. Kat — a psychologist, coach and ultimate data geek. Dom — a strategist, communications expert and NYT best-selling author. Together, as social innovators, they tackle our most pressing societal problems through collaborative leadership and data-driven systems change.

Kat and Dom know that leadership isn’t about holding power. It’s about holding space to lift up others. Raising up the voices of leadership of people and places who go unheard and unseen.

Such was the inspiration for their first book, Anna Age Eight. By telling the story of a young, unknown girl who the system failed, the book sparked a movement for systems change.

Kat and Dom also know something else important…

There is no such thing as a system. The system is just us. Created by people like us, run by people like, and enforced by people like us. This is good news for those of us who’d like to lead systems change.

The power to change systems is the difference between those who are organized and those who are not.

Kat and Dom’s early organizing work originated in the unlikeliest of places: a basement office buried deep within state bureaucracy. There they were inundated with data that told one consistent message: systems intended to protect people, especially children, tragically fail us time and again.

Where was the political will to enact real systems change?

Having worked for decades with communities and governments, Kat and Dom knew that the leadership needed to change systems resided within communities themselves, not particularly with powerful bureaucrats. This is where I reconnected with them, supporting their convening, capacity building and movement building.

I love a good system changes initiative, particularly one led from below. But this work feels redemptive at a more personal level.

Having grown up in Detroit, I felt everyday the realities of a system in decline. I felt the helplessness of having no access to grocery stores, street lights, street snow plows in the cold Michigan winter, and endless waits for the police when help was most needed. Working alongside Kat and Dom, you experience daily the unassailable, pragmatic optimism of folks on the ground who have decided to wait no longer to exercise the leadership they’ve sought for somewhere other than themselves.

Anything worth doing is kind of naïve. We need more naïvete in our leadership. Naïvete to be bold, to be audacious, and to do what the mind — and the bureaucracy — say is impossible.