Community leadership is confusing: What is the middle way between centralized and decentralized?
And how can we learn to dance between individual agency and co-creation?
Over the past few months, I’ve been having inspiring conversations with César Salazar about community leadership. César currently chairs Sandbox, a community I co-founded in 2007. And in our conversations one theme keeps coming up: how confusing community leadership can be.
Community leadership is confusing because it exists on a spectrum of power. On one side is traditional, centralized leadership, where a single leader decides and others follow. On the other side is fully decentralized leadership, where power is distributed across the whole group as much as possible. Everything is co-created. Everyone has power to shape things. The leader’s role then focuses on facilitating shared decision-making and supporting others.
In Sandbox, we’ve experienced the full spectrum: the community started very centralized (led by a few co-founders), became increasingly decentralized (enabling chapter leaders), and then—as the group went through a moment of deep crisis and lost all centralized structure and leadership—was forced to become fully distributed. Since then, a more lightweight structure has re-emerged at the center and its leaders are playing with different expressions of community leadership.
What we have noticed is that many community leaders—ourselves included—naturally shy away from traditional leadership. The flaws are obvious. We see daily examples of why this approach doesn’t serve the collective. It’s fundamentally about power over people. Community is different because it’s not a hierarchy. A political or corporate leader tells people what to do. A community leader facilitates people who are there by choice. It’s power with.
So, many of us community weavers end up on one side of the spectrum: We put ourselves fully in service of the collective. Leadership essentially becomes about facilitating co-creation circles and deep listening. It decentralizes power from the individual leader to everyone in the community.
Decentralized leadership clearly has many benefits: It centers humility and service to the collective. It’s relational and enables others. It creates shared ownership and identity. And yet, we feel that decentralized leadership has serious limitations.
Limitations of decentralized leadership: being vague & right
Ross Baird - a friend and former colleague - frequently quotes a principle that has become central to my life. Ross says: “It’s better to be specific and wrong, then vague and right”. And in our conversations, César and I realized that this also applies to community leadership.
Much of decentralized community leadership is about being vague and right. It’s about finding some foggy middle ground that everyone will be ok with.
Here are some limitations of decentralized decision-making:
It lacks clarity: Co-creative processes don’t tend to converge on a small number of clear decisions and they often bring up a ton of ambiguity. Imagine a Miro board full of post-its, providing so many different directions a project could take.
It sometimes creates suboptimal outcomes: Co-created solutions tend to focus on the shared middle ground, prioritizing compromises and group harmony over strong, individual ideas.
It’s exhausting and slow: In the spirit of hearing and honoring every voice, co-creation processes often go on for much longer than they need to. They suck up all the energy out of the room. In an effort to be inclusive, we keep circling and circling about the same issues. And at the end, we come out exhausted, often with a result nobody is too excited about and just glad the process is over.
Leaders mute their own perspectives: In an attempt to be a truly inclusive and humble leader, I have often censored my own opinions. Because of my positional power in the group, I intentionally tried not to dominate the conversations and gave space to everyone else’s opinion, while keeping my own muted.
It invisibilizes and demotivates leadership: Much of community weaving happens behind the scenes. A culture of co-creation creates a narrative that everyone is contributing in equal terms. This is, of course, not true. Contributions within communities vary widely—a few people contribute most. That narrative also ignores the enormous work required to design, facilitate, and operationalize co-creation processes. I have found this demotivating in the past. It’s important to be a humble leader, but is it sustainable for a humble leader to never feel seen and recognized for their work?
Most people don’t want to co-create: In my experience, only a small group of people wants to actively shape the community. Most other people are happy for someone else to decide and move things forward.
Benefits of centralized leadership: being specific & wrong
Even though we are surrounded by examples of unhealthy centralized leadership these days, César and I felt that categorically labelling centralized leadership as bad in the community context is too binary. In fact, we believe a community can benefit tangibly from mindful centralized leadership:
Long-term vision: A community leader might carry personal clarity on how the group can evolve.
Creativity: The strongest ideas are not always co-created. A community leader might be the “source”, bringing creative clarity to projects.
Agency & Speed: A central leader can make decisions quickly and get things done in a much more timely manner than a bigger group.
Motivation: As a community leader, it’s rewarding to bring my own voice, act on my visions and ideas and be appreciated by the rest of the group.
Risks of centralized leadership: being specific & wrong
Unsurprisingly, centralized leadership also has significant limitations. The risks for the group are obvious: the leader might make decisions that don’t benefit the collective.
But there’s also a less appreciated risk for community leaders themselves. Speaking my own truth in a deeply relational environment while being in a position of formal or informal power is scary. It risks alienating fellow community members and damaging my friendships and status in the group. For many community leaders, these relationships are the main reason we do this work. This might be a risk many of us aren’t willing to take.
César suggested that a group can develop safety mechanisms to make centralized leadership safer—such as giving the community simple processes to veto a decision or vote the leadership out.
What’s the middle way of community leadership?
You can probably see where we are headed with this. Clearly, neither extreme on the spectrum is ideal by itself. Ideally, we’d have a bit of both—a space in between. But that space is very undefined. We don’t even have language for it, no well-known role models, no template. It feels like uncharted territory.
In this middle ground, there are no simplistic binaries to follow (just decide! just co-create!). Instead, it feels more like a dance between two elements—a constant sensing and playful integration of seemingly contradictory perspectives. How can we both deeply value others’ opinions and also value our own? How can we be both humble and strong at the same time? How can we be both slow, patient listeners and keep moving forward? When is being specific and wrong in service of the collective, and when is it not?
This nuanced type of leadership has personal agency, clarity, and direction. It’s energizing for the leader and the people around them. And yet the clarity doesn’t come at the cost of the collective—it makes the collective better off.
Exploring 3 community leadership practices that dance in-between
So far the theory, but how does this show up in practice? In my next few posts I’ll be exploring different types of leadership that I believe playfully integrate centralized and decentralized leadership:
Leadership by proposal: The community leader as the group’s main resolver of ambiguity.
Leadership by invitation: The community leader’s role to pro-actively and personally invite people to contribute.
Leadership by role-modeling: The power of a community leader to shape culture and embody a group’s values.
How have you been playing with the spectrum of centralized and decentralized community leadership? I’d love to hear!
A huge thank you to César Salazar for the energizing conversations and his community wisdom that inspired much of this post!
In community - Fab
About Entangled
// Entangled: Welcome to Entangled, exploring the people, insights and practices that help communities & networks thrive. If you care about bringing people together, this might be for you.
// Hello, I’m Fabian, co-founder of the Together Institute where we work with purpose-driven communities, networks and their leaders to help them thrive.
Thank you for sharing these reflections - it’s so helpful to see that others have experienced and also thought about that messy middle. It can feel like a juggling act to balance between bringing the direction needed for momentum, and stifling energy by pulling too far into my own preferences as a leader. I think it’s very true that people do have varied needs and expectations when it comes to co-designing in communities - and not everyone does want to be as involved in a community as you would wish. I will be thinking about this one for a while.
Brilliant honest assessment of the challenges. In my view of the process, a critical aspect is the guidance and assistance of ever-widening 'Councils of Elders', who form a supportive system of advisors. Also, I would highly recommend ProSocial World's 8 Core Design Principles (E.Ostrum and David Sloan Wilson) and the ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) matrix as tools to help resolve and re-center the Circle. The Elders have historically been the advisors, the keepers of Shared Wisdom. Imagine your Circle is part of birthing an ever-widening hive of Elder Circles (neighborhood, village, city, bio-region, continent, world). The entire hive is supported by the Elders. This sets up to use Natural design structures, in particular subsidiarity (vesting power at the lowest level). Shifting to a truly multi-cellular super-organism, is no simple feat and will take experimentation, the magic occurs by investing in and vesting power in the shared wisdom of the Circle as supported, refined and agreed upon as a community. So, it is really important to hold a collective vision and purpose, which I suggest is "the good of all for our circle, our community and an entire hive". The real magic I am beginning to perceive is related to resilience and grows out of inviting and demonstrating how our own circle's actions co-create community when we actually engage. Our dance becomes an invitation to dance, not an invitation to fix something. There's way to much to fix and few are inspired. What if we actually participate as a Circle in becoming better stakeholders in communities of belonging? This is a very different vision, mission and purpose, and it will lead us on a very different path: inspiring co-creation of the community we want to be. I would also highly recommend ProSocial World's 8 Core Design Principles (E.Ostrum and David Sloan Wilson) and the ACT (Acceptance Commitment Therapy) matrix as ever-present tools to help frame, resolve and re-center, our pursuit of shared wisdom for our Circle and our community.