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AcAdemic SympoSium:
a neutral location and invite the whole
world. But what if you can’t even get
past the Purim carnival conversation
with other community leaders?
Leadership is about delivering loss at a
rate a community can absorb. Loss of
any kind, of anything, is complicated.
And it’s hard.
My teachers, Marty Linsky and Ron
Heifetz of Cambridge Leadership
Associates and Harvard, talk about
how we are all different kinds of
vegetables. Let’s say
that I’m a zucchini. My
colleague is a mushroom.
I like my zucchini-
ness, right? He likes his
mushroom-ness. We
want to retain our unique
qualities. So when you
invite me to collaborate,
we’re creating what we
will call a stew. The
problem is that you have
to cook it just right so
that the zucchini-ness is
still in there and you can
still taste it, but not so
mushy that the zucchini
has no identity. So how
do you retain your own identity, your
own sense of who you are as a zucchini
or a mushroom, and yet have a flavorful
stew. We’re all afraid of getting lost
in the stew. If we collaborate, what
happens to me and my stuff? Keep
this in mind as we go on to the
second set of barriers in collaboration.
The next barriers relate more to ability
and skill, not to what is in your head.
Let’s say you get past the hoarding
and the arrogance, and you have a
clear goal: you really believe that you
can attract more Jews by being in a
collaborative situation. You get to the
table and the behavior barrier number
one is defensiveness.
We all sit down at the table and
we’re going to have that joint Purim
carnival, which is not collaboration.
It’s partnership or co-sponsorship.
But these tables can very quickly
dissolve into avoidance techniques,
defensiveness, where nobody can
make a decision. We just keep coming
up with the next idea, but nobody
really wants to run it. That is “over”
collaboration.
We just keep going on the treadmill.
We clearly can’t come to anything,
let’s meet again next year and see if
we change our minds.” It is not, “Let’s
meet for a while and conclude that
we’ve all done our fair share and go
home. And maybe we’ll have a joint
Tisha B’Av.” That would be “under”
collaboration.
First you try to “over” collaborate, and
end up with nothing. So then you
under” collaborate. Not agreeing on
anything is not a reason to leave the
table. But often it is, because we are so
well defended and really come to be
good citizens. But at the end of the day,
we’re a little bit stuck in our hoarding
and our arrogance. Now, I do think
that all those joint programs help us
dip our toes in the waters of trust and
transparency. Trust and transparency
are so often missing from these tables.
Competition is at these tables.
So what has to be left at the door?
What armors have to be taken off?
We need to discard not only the
mindset of arrogance, but the next
two behavioral aspects: politics and
the power of imagination.
Can we really imagine what our
Jewish community would look like
if it were different? Let’s call this the
collaboratory.” This
is the long stage of
conversation. This is
the stage of patience
and openness. You have
to have the right people
there. And then you
have to be playful.
You have to acknowledge
(
and mean it) that we
share a common fate.
You know, if you go back
into most synagogues
and look at their building
histories, you will find
a wall with the pictures
of the different buildings.
We’ve moved. We’ve proven that we’re
built on sand. I often wish I could
interview the people who made
those decisions.
Now, maybe it was easy because the
Jewish neighborhood moved. But
today, we have a whole new set of
realities. We don’t know where the
Jews are. We don’t even know how
they’re going to behave.
But we can’t ignore those Pew Study
numbers. So I’m going to give
you some imaginings as possible
conversation starters that might
happen at this table.