Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

198 COLLAGES OF BETTERMENTshugyou carries the meaning of perfecting the humanspirit or enhancing one’s personality (Yuasa 1993).Ki energy is an energy unique to aikido and Japanesecalligraphy. Practitioners of aikido, a Japanese martialarts, regard their ultimate secret to be the unification ofmind, ki (energy) and body skill (power).The first person research is aimed at understanding theintangible factors of leadership performance. As a secondperson observer, I interviewed and had discussions withsome civic leaders and academics in three countries tocollect information and insights on how they have dealtwith leadership development issues. Finally, as a thirdperson observer, I studied documents on transformativeleadership in management science, new science andEastern traditional wisdom.Systemic change: Be the change you want to see inthe worldWe must change the way we changeIn his book, Hope is Not a Method, General Sullivan,Chief of Staff of the US Army, emphasized that to meetthe enormous challenges encountered in transformingthe post-Cold War army, we must not only change butwe must also change the way we change (Sullivan 1997).For me, it is an important message (notion) for theleaders in civil society organizations all over the world torethink their future work and lives because civil societyorganizations, particularly in Southeast Asia, are facingtremendous pressures from dramatic developments atboth the local and global levels. I have seen symptomsof stress and burn out or “inward resignation” in manyleaders and social workers who have worked longerthan 10 years. In Thailand, leading social, political andenvironmental activists are coming into their 50s andone is hardly able to find young promising leaders incivil society organizations. When I was in Manila inFebruary 2007 and had several conversations with manyPhilippine civic leaders, I found similar concerns. SixtoDonato Macasaet, executive director of the Caucus ofDevelopment NGO Networks (CODE), told me aboutCODE’s “nurturing program” to give encouragementto “the successor generations”—future leaders fromthe community of non-government organizations/peoples’ organizations. He is conscious that thecapacity building process still faces a long journey ofsupporting transformative leadership development.Meanwhile, in Indonesia the civic leaders have notseen the consequences of this dilemma. In comparisonto the civil society organizations in Thailand and thePhilippines, they are young. They are getting involvedin a huge pile of dynamic problems that they are tryingto solve. They lamented about heavy workloads, lossof their work-life balance and struggles with their dayto-daywork but did not know how to cope with themiddle- and long-term challenges facing Indonesiansociety. My conversations with Sutoro Eko, directorof the Institute for Research and Empowerment (IRE),and Poppy Winanti from Gadjah Mada University, whois an advisor of IRE, revealed the fundamental problemsof civil society organizations within Southeast Asiancountries. They have no time for the individual andcollective reflection that is the core process of learningcapability. They just learn to “react” to the problemsthey face but do not learn to “tune in” to the emergingfuture. From my personal experiences working in thisfield for more than 30 years, I am afraid that the coregroups of Indonesian civil society will repeat the samemistakes that we have made in Thailand over the lasttwo decades. In my opinion, the future of civil societyis in our hands when we commit to organizationalturnaround and energize ourselves, the leaders and theactivists. The basic rationale for civil society organizationsis that in a situation of complex and rapid change, onlythose that are flexible, innovative and productive willexcel. For this to happen, it is argued, organizationsneed to “discover how to tap people’s commitment andcapacity to learn at all levels” (Senge 2006).Transformational change begins with personaltransformationMost civil society organizations all over the world areestablished for noble purposes—to make their ownsocieties and the world a better place to live. It is atremendous achievement that needs transformationalchange, which is a process that intertwines the personal,the team, the organization and the society at large.It is a process of change that shifts the leaders insidethemselves as well as outside. Hence, transformativeleadership takes on important new meanings in leadingthe changes. In essence, the transformative leaders arethose building the new community or organizationand its capabilities. They are the ones “walking ahead,”regardless of their management position or hierarchicalauthority. Such leadership is inevitably collective(Kofman 2007). Transformative leadership can havemany faces or many names, such as servant leadership,authentic leadership or resonant leadership (Greenleaf2002). The idea of transformational leadership was firstdeveloped by James MacGregor Burns in 1978 and laterextended by others. He showed the contrast betweenthis type of leadership and traditional leadership thatwielded power in organizational hierarchies and workedin a top-down manner. For Burns, transformativeleadership occurs when one or more persons engageAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows