"we think the life-long, often joyless and meaningless struggle in the workplace is the only way to make a living. And that the disconnected, alienated way we live in anonymous communities is the only way to live.

We should know better. Just because it's the only way we know to live and make a living, doesn't mean it is the only way. There is a better way. The only thing holding most of us back is lacking the knowledge of that way.

We don't need 'leadership' or 'leaders' to rediscover that knowledge. What we need are experimenters. The way to create working models that work better than the dysfunctional ones we have now, in a complex system where no one is in control and no one has the answers, is to try things. A lot of small-scale experiments, bold, different, even wacky. And then compare notes with each other about what works (and why) and what doesn't (and why not).

That will allow the successful experiments to spread, virally, and be adapted and improved. Eventually, bottom-up, it will allow us to create decentralized community-based self-managed political, economic, educational, and social systems that actually work well, for each community.

Unlike most 'leaders', experimenters are:

• collaborators: they don't do anything alone
• facilitators and coaches: they help others to learn and discover how to do things better
• demonstrators: more than just communicators, they show how it works and what it means
• ideators: they imagine what's possible, tell stories to bring those ideas to life
• innovators: they take those good ideas and realize them, make them real
• researchers: they study what's been done, in nature, by other cultures and communities, and what's needed, and spread that knowledge
• connectors: they bring people together who were meant to work together
• model-builders: they design and build something that can be understood, replicated and adapted by others
• founders: they start new things -- enterprises, communities, different ways to do important things; they build something new rather than criticizing

That's what we need. We won't find it in one or a few people. We have to find it, through love and conversation and community, within all of us. To do that we have to give up on 'leaders' and take charge of our own lives, collaboratively, as peers. Who's 'leading' in government, in business, in religious and educational and social organizations doesn't matter.

The power is in all of us."

= from dave pollard's blog, "how to save the world"