To manage the Bay Area's 9 counties and 29 transportation agencies, the Host Committee's role was to convene stakeholders who rarely interact. After making the right connections, they strategically stepped back, allowing experts to execute. This avoids bureaucracy and empowers local ownership.
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When working in complex organizations like the UN or federal government, don't try to master their internal language. Instead, find and partner with internal experts who can translate your goals into the organization's native operating system to achieve impact.
The facilitator's role is to create "productive serendipity." This means carefully architecting the context—agenda, environment, opening questions—but then stepping back to allow the group's interactions to unfold organically, rather than micromanaging the process.
Leaders often undermine community by over-structuring outcomes. True flourishing happens when leaders have the patience to let a group struggle and self-organize, like Ed Catmull at Pixar. This necessary 'messiness' is not a problem but the doorway to a new, more vital system being born.
The Bay Area Host Committee, a 501(c)(6) non-profit, successfully united competing pro sports teams. This neutral structure, focused on regional economic impact rather than shared revenue, fostered unprecedented collaboration. It's a model for creating industry-wide alignment around a common goal.
Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.
In siloed government environments, pushing for change fails. The effective strategy is to involve agency leaders directly in the process. By presenting data, establishing a common goal (serving the citizen), and giving them a voice in what gets built, they transition from roadblocks to champions.
Government agencies are filled with "very narrow experts" who possess deep knowledge in specific domains. The role of a leader, according to Howard Lutnick, is not to be an expert in everything, but to act as a "weaver," combining the strengths of these specialists to create a cohesive and successful outcome.
Effective citizen assemblies require experts, but not in their traditional, top-down authoritative role. Experts must learn to be "on tap, not on top"—simplifying their language and responding to citizens' needs rather than dictating solutions. This creates a difficult but necessary learning curve, shifting the expert's role from a leader to a service provider.
The desire for connection and necessary skills often already exist within a group. A leader's role is not to construct community, but to create the conditions—like providing a shared space or a clear invitation—that activate these latent connections and allow them to flourish.
To avoid bureaucratic slowdown, LEGO's CEO broke his leadership team into smaller, empowered subgroups like a "commercial triangle" (CCO, COO, CMO). These groups handle operational decisions, only escalating disagreements. This has cut full executive meetings to just one hour a month plus quarterly strategy sessions.
