Non-Anxious: A practitioner's notes from a year spent building Lead Wichita's network of networks

I want to tell you about my journal.

I carry it everywhere. If you know me well, you know the one. It's a leather jacket, that is refilled 2-5 times a year with a new insert. The rate depends on how many notes I've been taking. This last year, I've been using it. A lot. — I doodle in meetings, and circles and arrows and boxes appear, helping me make sense of the world. Slipped inside has been a single piece of paper, ridiculously drawn on over and over, trying to map the 'networks' of my home town of Wichita, KS. Sometimes when I've shown it to people I feel a little like John Nash from A Beautiful Mind. This document showed as a hub-and-spoke model, which I ended up eventually scrapping — because the longer I sat with it, the more I kept landing on the truth that no one person, and no one organization, can actually be the hub of a network of networks. Wichita doesn't need a center hub. It needs a lot of people willing to be connected. Spontaneous action, coordinated, but flowing from the inside out. So, the question of how to truly coordinate and create synergies, reduce redundancies and fill gaps persists.

Behind the doodles is a question: if I could design the perfect network of networks for our city — efficient, aligned, everybody rowing together — would it actually work?

Journaling and listening is one aspect of the last year, but more deeply my thinking is also informed by reading and studying — and by the fact that network building has become the actual work I do on a daily basis. Over the past year, Lead Wichita has been the client where I've gotten to take that thinking out of my journal and into practice: a live laboratory for a craft I've been developing for a long time, not just a role I stepped into. What follows is less "here's what our organization believes" and more "here's what I've been learning as a practitioner, with Lead Wichita as the place I've been testing it." I'd like to share some bread crumbs from my reading and reflections and offer some thoughts to consider as we try to build better organizations, systems and networks.

Start with the Kansas Leadership Center, right here in Wichita — I've been learning their ideas for almost ten years now, long enough that they're less a framework I read and more a lens I see through. I used their framework while running a construction firm where I trained front line employees and managers alike, and while building several non-profit organizations. I love it so much I joined their team for 3 years as Chief Business Officer. It's built on Ronald Heifetz's adaptive leadership work out of Harvard: technical problems have known solutions and just need expertise; adaptive challenges require people to actually change — their habits, their loyalties, who they think is responsible for what. Ten years in, I still unfortunately catch myself treating Wichita's disconnection like a technical problem. Draw a better chart. A new model. The right messaging. The problem of course is that no one has enough authority or expertise to do that and have it be adopted. It will require a new type of leadership skill.

Then design thinking — starting with people's lived experience instead of your own assumptions. Related is Stand Together Foundation's Principles of Human Progress and Principle Based Management and belief that you need more bottom up solutions in a top down world. Then Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, naming family, work, education, and religious community as the four pathways that make a life — and a city — actually flourish. Then as I've spent time with non-profit, government and community organizers you learn of Collective Impact, out of the Stanford Social Innovation Review — common agenda, shared measurement, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, a "backbone" to hold it all together.

Then recently I stumbled onto a another one that I'm just learning about — a Canadian model called Constellation Collaboration, developed by Tonya Surman in Toronto: small self-organizing teams called "constellations" form around a specific action, do the work, and dissolve when it's done. A genuinely different way to think about how a network gets things done without a permanent structure holding it.

And all the while through a national cohort I was a part of I learned about Decentralized Networks and network science — the actual math and biology of how networks hold together. From ants, mycelium, and nonprofit ecosystems all run on similar rules: no single node has to be strong, but the connections between nodes have to be real and dynamically alive, and resilience comes from the web, not the center. There's research on "weak ties" — what actually spreads opportunity through a network isn't the tight inner circles, it's the looser links between them that provide the real, long lasting and at times miraculous strength.

So: adaptive leadership, design thinking, principles of human progress, human flourishing, collective impact, constellations, decentralized networks. A shelf of frameworks, each with great wisdom.

How to smash these ideas together or pick one and run with it to create and sustain real momentum?

But when I reflect back on this year and the many conversations, from leader after leader trying to do good work here I heard common refrains of: "I'm tired. I'm doing this alone. I don't know if anyone else sees what I see." Not once did anyone say, "You know what we need? A clearer chart." They said some version of: "I am depleted, I am isolated, and I have no one to hand this to when I fall down. The division and isolation is unsustainable."

Which means the problem was never really the box-and-arrow diagram. It's what's happening inside the boxes.

Speaking of what's happening inside of us when we observe the harsh realities around us, another author, Walter Brueggemann in his book Prophetic Imagination argues that a forerunner's job has two halves: first to unapologetically criticize — refusing the numbness of a system's ordinariness. Don't get used to injustice. Name it. And proclaim it as unjust and sit honestly in the grief of what's actually true — and only then to energize, offering people a genuinely hopeful alternative worth their imagination. Brueggemann calls the numbness itself "royal consciousness"--a culture so committed to appearing stable and sufficient that it loses the capacity to grieve, and without grief, he says, there's no opening for anything new. I read that and realized the listening had quietly been doing the first half of that work all year. I wasn't gathering data. I was letting leaders grieve out loud, in a city that can easily be too positive or too nice to slow down and create that space.

Then lastly, Mark Sayers an author and thinker I've loved for some time, whose book, A Non-Anxious Presence, on leading through uncertainty gave me a phrase -- the "gray zone" — the disorienting overlap between the era that's ending and the one that hasn't arrived yet, where old maps stop working before new ones get drawn. He lands on a key leadership trait needed from gray zones which he calls a "non-anxious presence." A belief that in any anxious system, leadership isn't primarily about having the right plan, it's about being the one who doesn't get swept into the panic.

Sayers writes that when we're anxious, we build strongholds — we centralize, we control, we try to make ourselves sufficient against the chaos, because self-sufficiency feels like safety. Self-sufficiency isn't a leadership strength. It's a lie. In my estimation we need God and we need others more than we can possibly calculate. So, the truth is we can't do this, any of this, alone.

So here's where the pondering has landed , at least for now. Every framework on that shelf is a design for how we organize. Not one is designed to give you the thing that makes the organizing survive amidst the storms of life — which is virtue. Not sufficiency. Not strategy. Virtue, often divine, often received. The practiced capacity to be non-anxious when the system around you isn't, and to have healthy enough capacity that you have something left to offer when it's your turn to be needed. Those aren't simply personality traits. They're not civic skills for the network — they're the same virtues a person needs to lead a family well, a team well, an organization well.

Which means the actual root-level work that might matter most — underneath the network design, underneath the shared measurement, underneath every well-intentioned strategic plan — is leaders who've stopped pretending they're sufficient. Leaders who've said, out loud, to God and to each other: I need help. I cannot do this by myself. I was never supposed to. That's not weakness, that is just true. Remember this verse "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble" (James 4:6) For us to lead systems level change inside ourselves and out into and across our world, we are building in a 'gray zone' and it will require us to be non-anxious and confident that it is not our self-sufficiency that will show the way but our reconciled identities and relationships.

None of this is only for network leaders or community organizers, either. Almost every leader I talk to these days — running a business, leading a church, managing a team, raising a family — is operating in some version of a gray zone right now: old maps not quite working, new ones not yet drawn. The virtue underneath the blueprint doesn't change by sector, and neither does the invitation. If you're leading anything at all right now, there's a good chance you're already in the gray zone with the rest of us.

Thanks for coming along on this journey and reading and considering some of the bread crumbs I've picked up along the way.

Stay on the quest, Damon

PS-What enterprise are you leading through a gray zone right now?

I'd love to hear about it — [reach out here: https://www.dkyconsulting.com/contact] — and see how we might learn together.