Collective Vision - Winter 1995
By Sally Osberg

I have learned most of what I know about leadership in three ways. First, from being the oldest of nine children, I learned from an early age about taking responsibility and about the value of being accorded respect. My parents trusted me, my younger brothers and sisters looked up to me, and I developed self-confidence and judgment as a result. Second, from all good literature about human strengths and foibles, as well as the social context in which dramas play out. Leadership is essentially a human drama, an aspiration to make things better, to do the right thing-even if it turns out differently from what you had in mind. And third, from the wonderful people with whom I have worked over the years, from their wisdom and our collective perseverance and appreciation for each other, I have learned all the lessons experience can teach-the most important of which come from my mistakes.

Over the years, I've evolved a number of rules to live and lead by. For a state of mind that will weather good times and bad, I strive for what John Gardner calls "tough-minded optimism"; for the art of decision making, I shift deliberately into the analytical mode, asking myself which fork in the road looks to be more challenging and then admit that the more arduous course is the one to take. For a general world view, I like to look at most everything as paradoxical, in the yin and yang sense: Strengths are usually the source of one's liabilities, the jettisoned idea usually has the seed of a great one within it, and tension is a source of frustration and the key to creativity.

I believe that leaders are teachers and students. Peter Senge speaks extensively of our mental models and the leader's role in explicating, challenging and usurping those models with new, more compelling ones. Take children's museums, for example, which are replete with lessons for effective leadership. After all, we honor the affective as well as the cognitive side of human development; we're places of ideas, of positive social interaction, places to learn through experience. In our children's museums, we create and cultivate a learning environment. I am convinced that our organizations should be quintessential "learning organizations." Years ago, I drew up a set of principles which I circulated with my staff, calling it "What It Means to Live and Work for Children's Discovery Museum. It advances the idea that the values we espouse- curiosity, inquiry, engagement, joy -are also tenets for living. It comes down to the old saw, "practice what you preach." Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that what we are should be how we are.

One of my heroes is the late Renaissance scholar and university president turned baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti. In "Take Time for Paradise", a wonderful monograph about baseball, Giamatti argues that we can tell much more about a society from the way it chooses to play, "to take its leisure," than from the way it works. I like to think of children's museums and the flowering of our movement, as a kind of alter ego to the education-as-work paradigm. Children's museums remind us that learning can be an exhilarating and joyous experience, although sometimes, to be sure, it's sheer plodding work -just like leadership!

Which brings me to my final point: Textbook definitions relegate vision to the leader, day-to-day work to the manager. Frankly, I don't believe any vision has much currency without good management backing it up, nor is any leader good for long without managerial skills herself or good managers surrounding her. Leaders, especially those of us who are working with and on behalf of children, families, and communities, must be committed to the long pull; short-time, just-fix-it solutions are no solutions. Vision isn't something you sit down and do, like an operating plan-it's a picture of the future so vivid and so compelling that it inspires you, the leader, as well as those with and for whom you work. It's a glimpse of what's possible. And- here's the important bit -it should never feel comfortable but always out of reach, something worth the aspiration. Recently I ran across a line from Matthew Arnold, which pretty well summarizes my personal vision of leadership: "It's not about having and getting, but about being and becoming."