Circular Leadership
We think of circular leadership as the ways in which we work alone and together in systems to serve justice. Justice asks us to find balance between individual and collective rights & responsibilities.
Circular leadership is not the absence of structure. It is the ongoing design of systems that redistribute power, responsibility, recognition, and resources over time, rather than fixing them in hierarchy. It assumes that leadership is dynamic, roles can shift, and accountability flows in multiple directions. We look at this balance across 4 interconnected dimensions: action, credit, ownership, and pay.
Action
We often wield our personal power, ideas, and commitments to carry things forward independently, and we dream in our heads with freedoms that are unique to us. Genius also emerges when people join together and bring unique contributions into coordinated forms of action in which the sum is greater than the parts. In coordination, our own needs, ideas, powers, skills, and actions come alongside others. We are also accountable to others.
Somewhere along the line, coordinated action comes with drastically consolidated power in which accountability is not equally shared across all members of a system. Important and unique ideas get suppressed, oppressed, and subsumed into the vision of a small group of people at the top of a hierarchy. In other words, you act, but your actions might reflect someone else's beliefs — a form of structural power inequity — and you might still bear the brunt of responsibility. This often happens to peoples who experience systemic injustice.
Democratic practice partly answers the challenge by distributing decision making power, but circular leadership designs for shared accountability, and the ability for roles to shift over time, so that power and responsibility remain connected and impermanent.
Credit
We come up with ideas when we're by ourselves. These ideas belong to us and are expressions of our unique identities, experiences, and insights. Genius also emerges when we blend our unique identities towards common creation. In that process, we often find that the lone genius is more myth than reality.
But somewhere along the line, as power consolidates in hierarchies, credit is not shared. The contributions of individuals with less structural power are erased, and their ideas are represented and appropriated by others. This often happens to peoples who experience systemic injustice.
Circular leadership makes credit traceable, shareable, and revisable over time. It creates norms and systems where contributions are documented, acknowledged, and attributed in ways that reflect the collective nature of creation—without erasing individual authorship.
Ownership
Individuals have the right to freely and independently express, carry forward, and earn from their ideas. Intellectual property laws have incentivized innovation, and sparked new art forms, scientific achievements, and inventions that might not have been possible without it. It has also played a role in building wealth for BIPOC creators. In an era of extreme wealth inequality, we think intellectual property rights can serve justice.
But somewhere along the line, as power consolidates, ownership is not fairly shared. The ideas and creativity of people who experience systemic injustice are chronically stolen and appropriated, and the benefits of their own ideas do not come to them. Meanwhile, access to technical support in navigating complex laws favors people with wealth. Life saving technologies are also out of reach of those who need them to survive, and the extreme application of ownership philosophy has ultimately corrupted our relationship with the planet.
Circular leadership approaches ownership as something to be designed with intention. It asks when ownership should protect individual benefit, when knowledge should remain in the commons, and how systems can allow both to coexist without reinforcing inequity.
Pay
Individuals have a right to freelance, move from job to job, and earn in ways that fit their unique interests and capacities. In service to coordinated action and collective benefit, we often find that it makes sense to coordinate our incomes to pool and distribute salaries, health insurance, and other collective goods.
But somewhere along the line, as power consolidates into hierarchies, income and benefits are not equally shared. We have extreme pay gaps, advanced by individuals with power who perpetuate a narrative that their inherent value — including their opinions, intelligence, expertise, and way of leading — is greater.
Circular leadership designs compensation systems where collective goods are possible, pay rates are flat or near-flat, and shared governance shapes how pay rates are set.
Growing and changing
What is “fair” is not a static or simple concept. For example:
What is a fair pay scale? How do you quantify the value of individuals in collaborations?
When, if ever, is consolidated power necessary, and why?
How do we foster individuality, not individualism, as system norms?
Given that copyright law has helped communities of color build wealth in an unequal world, how do we design to enable people to benefit from their intellectual property — without privatizing ideas that should be in the creative commons to serve justice?
The answer to any of these questions will depend on the group of individuals it applies to: their context & challenges, what they're working on, and more. We use the term circular leadership to honor the fact that we will all learn best what justice actually means by de-consolidating policies and enabling every formulation of individuals to decide for themselves, and coming back together to document what worked and iterate.
