Community approach to megaproblems

How did you discover the concept of amegacommunity? We were actually aftersomething else when we started. Wewanted to write a book on globalization.We had seen a lot of globalization effortsby industry that failed, and we were tryingto understand why that happened.We talked to over 100 leaders around theworld. It became clear that globalization isnot a problem, but a class of problems that[we] need a new concept to address.Other things in that class are weaponsof mass destruction and proliferation,HIV/AIDS. These big problems: They allspan across the three sectors ? public sector,private sector and civil society. The simplefact is that problems that span across thethree sectors need solutions that span acrossthe three sectors. And yet, we have no constructthat spans across all three sectors.These megaproblems can't be solved bygovernment alone, they can't be solved byindustry alone, and they can't be solved bycivil society alone. They have to be solved byworking together, and that's what led us tothe megacommunity approach. How is a megacommunity different froma public/private partnership? It's acollaborative environmentwherethere is really noone leader or institutionthat is incharge. But there iscollective leadership.We found and proved that [collectiveleadership] is stronger than a singular formof leadership. Finally, it is a communityorganization that shares resources to solve acommon problem. By our definition, allthree sectors have to be involved. With no single leader, how do goals get set? There are leadership roles, butthey tend to be rotating. There may be an initiatorwho gets it started, but the initiatordoesn't stay in charge throughout the lifecycle of the megacommunity. At least, that iswhat we found.But it is not a command-and-control typeof leadership.This is distributive leadership. We areworking on more research on it, but it's quitepowerful. It leverages the power of networksand broad views that you don't get when youhave singular leadership. What are some of the barriers to amegacommunity forming? People generally don't look atproblems in a larger context, so if people can'tdo that, it is hard to get started.If you can't get the players to the table, thatis a problem. Or if you can't find the overlappinginterests, what is it we can all rallyaround?At some point, you have to move from maximizingyour own interests as an organization orsector and move to optimizing all three sectors,which then gives itlonger return.For companies, itmay mean not takingthe short-termprofit view but takingthe long-termbusiness view. What do you hope people take away fromthe book? It's the notion that there's hopeto solve some of these big problems. Therereally needs to be a new form of leadership.Megacommunities have been done, and theyhave been shown to be very effective. Butthey probably aren't the natural state of ourthinking around leadership.