18
Unleashing Possibilities
Leadership and the Third Space

Zachary Green, Omowale Elson, and Anjet van Linge

In the previous essay, Cimino and Denhardt demonstrated how leaders foster connections and relationships in groups through music and rhythm. The final essay in Part Three, by Zachary Green, Omowale Elson, and Anjet van Linge, moves our attention to recognizing and identifying with such larger patterns—the whole, not the parts—by thinking structurally. They explain that we can benefit by differentiating the various parts of ourselves, and the cultural and other groups outside ourselves, so as not to minimize unique needs and perspectives. As Colman and Ubalijoro identify the “third thing” in the resolution of internal and external tensions, these authors provide a similar idea of the Third Space as existing beyond our differences in the relationships within, between, and among us. This essay offers a perspective that can help you gain the capacity to recognize and understand your own complexity as well as of that of the other living systems of which you are a part.

It is common for many of us to say that as humanity, we are one. This statement suggests that we share a capacity to see the underlying unity of life. It also means that there is a tacit acknowledgment of our differences. When we are born, we encounter our first duality. It is affirmed in that first moment of life when someone says, “It’s a girl.” By definition, it is determined that this new life is of one identity, but not another—not a boy. Soon thereafter, a form may ask for another designation of this child—a race. Along with whatever name the parents give to their newborn, other ways of naming are also present. We are classified into a number of categories or identities: gender, race, social class, nationality, (dis)ability, and so forth.

Our narrow distinctions become ways to differentiate ourselves from one another. Our gender, race, age, and nationality are but a few attributes we use to mark our uniqueness and claim a first space of identity. As individuals and as larger societies we use these same attributes to separate ourselves into “us” and “them” categories. What was one becomes two. In other words, what was our common humanity readily becomes lived as duality (Friedman, 2007). The result is that we have male and female, black and white, older and younger, native and foreign where before there was simply the fundamental unity of our common humanity. From the very beginning, we come into a world of yes/no, either/or, and black/white. If we are lucky, we rediscover the both-and-also that was there before our duality training began.

Once there is the duality of two and the emphasis on difference, there is also the beginning of tension and struggle for dominance—we are better than you. There is no longer only the differences in attributes, but a very human push to create hierarchy (Elson, 2002). Others label us and often we ourselves embrace a “we,” when in a couple or when we are seen as being part of a group. However, while classifying others in a group is easy, being labeled as being in a group is more difficult. We then have a common, almost immediate reaction to differentiate ourselves from this we-ness, because we feel we lose who the “I” is. Duality then is expressed not only by an “us-and-them,” but also by a “we-and-I.” There is, however, merit to looking deeper into what it means to belong to a “we.” The “we” invites us to be responsible for who we are together and honor the tension, destruction, and creation that go with that. It invites us to take responsibility for the “we” and carry our part in the collective leadership.

The challenge comes when we want to have our “we” recognized as more powerful than another “we.” The desire for dominance separates us from our common humanity. Paradoxically, duality becomes a retreat from the unity in humanity and needs a Third Space to bring us back to one.

The Third Space

The Third Space is known to us, though we are likely more familiar and practiced in thinking in dualities. Whether we are considering divisions within self-identity, individuals with one another, individuals with groups, or groups with other groups, the Third Space occurs when we move out of an identification with any of the parts (including our own ego orientation) to see a bigger picture, a structural view, or the relationship that links the parts together. Doing so almost always opens up possibilities that could not be recognized in any other way.

The theory was derived from the work of Bhabha (1994), who noticed how identity arising out of the struggle of colonized people with oppressive authority created a third, blended identity. He went on to suggest that the tension in the power relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed created a space where those new forms of identity were negotiated and emerged. In postcolonial contemporary societies, the Third Space can be seen in a generation whose parents worked in multiple international posts or experienced numerous military deployments. The children, commonly referred to as Third Culture Kids, shared a sense of identity formed by the variety of points in the world where they lived. They often felt alienated in their early development with no firmly fixed sense of identity. As adults, they became known for their flexibility and adaptability to cope with a wide range of the human condition (Pollack & Van Reken, 2001).

The leadership implication of the Third Space, as being evidenced by these children, is hope for moving beyond protracted and seemingly intractable human conflicts. The Third Space demonstrates that identity can be other than the regressed and known familiarity of duality (Starosta & Olorunnisola, 1995).

In terms of leadership, the Third Space is the location of the tension, negotiation, creation, and emergence of the new. Initially, three points form it: the leaders, the followers, and the relationship between the two. When we remain fixed on leadership strictly in terms of leaders and followers (Burns, 1978), our thinking is linear and locked in duality. The Third Space invites us to consider leadership as a process and system of interactions with infinite potential points of action and networked dimensionality. In this way, the Third Space is a location from which leadership as transformation begins. Leadership in this perspective can be seen as a function of the group (a view also held in the group relations tradition). In other words, what we call leadership is more of a calling forth of what the group as a collective requires at any given moment (Bion, 1961). While a “moment” may be as little as the few seconds it takes to deal with an immediate crisis, or a millennium in the case of some faith traditions, in any instance it is the group that has a significant role in what leadership arises and how it is sustained. The importance of the Third Space is that it recognizes the importance of time in the development of what leadership becomes. When we move out of static positions into the world of dynamic relationships, everything is in motion, all the parts are affecting one another, and new possibilities emerge.

Leadership and the Third Space: A Model

Leadership and the Third Space are evidenced when a plane of potential is created between one and another. Rather than the tug-of-war of dynamic tension between one person and another, or one group and another, or even one nation and another, a third is coconceived. It is more common to think about a battle between two forces. The human tendency for thinking in “either/or” terms helps reduce anxiety and complexity when people engage one another (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). Thinking in these kinds of dualities is rather a default position. Indeed, “us-and-them” tensions may be a necessary first step before the Third Space can be seen. The leadership challenge is for groups to move beyond the kind of embattled “double consciousness” that was presented by DuBois (1903) to describe the experience of African Americans: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (p. 255).

This process is readily recognized in people in the United States who identify often as “hyphenated” Americans, but it is actually more universal. For example, a person who is Asian American or African American identifies with a place of racial and cultural origin, as well as with the land of their nationality. Each side of the hyphen is a discrete identity with its own nature, mores, values, and socially constructed meaning. The Third Space holds what the two identities create when viewed as one. Simply put, the nature and meaning of being Asian or American is perceived and is likely to be experienced as different from being Asian and American at the same time. Yet we are our nation, culture, race, and gender all at once. What we make discrete in dualities is a retreat from the Third Space and from the promise of unity in our humanity.

Thus, it is only in our Western Christian (and more so in our post-Descartes) times that we are invited to invest in choosing between one of two aspects within ourselves and, therefore, identifying two in the first place. Doing so helps us contain our anxiety of a more complex “we” that also exists (Heifetz & Linsky, 2002). When we invite ourselves to think of two points (previously thought of as opposing or dual) as markers in a field, we can see the field emerge between them.

Modern science is slowly unpacking verifiable aspects of this “we,” uncovering how things can be both a particle and a wave, and that what it is depends on how we choose to measure it—when we measure for particles that is what we find; when we measure for waves, it will be that. We have not yet discovered a way to measure and, thus, prove the simultaneous existence of both states (Heisenberg, 1927/1983).

As a model for leadership, the Third Space invites us to consistently explore not only who the “other” is (the other group, the other department, country, or religion, or the other side of self), but also what might be the Third Space that can be cocreated with this other, as a field in which the different perspectives held by both parties can serve as anchors for what is new that may need to emerge.

Transforming Leadership and the Third Space

If we think of this field as a space that is always present, yet rarely accessed, we open ourselves to new ways of thinking about leadership. One can think of the youth movements that created the Arab Spring to see the Third Space in operation. Through acts of collective will by the group, the existing formal leadership responded and created a different kind of relationship—sometimes revolutionary and sometimes reactionary—with repressive crackdowns. The potential of what is held in the Third Space was activated, and it created the conditions for transformation. E-tools facilitated the emergence of this Third Space by connecting thousands of people and tapping into their energy and desire for change.

In a similar fashion, an increasingly global Internet provides an increasing percentage of the world population with greater instantaneous access to the triumphs and tragedies of human life than even a generation ago (Friedman, 2007). The network of communication means that the nature of authority is also shifting. Social uprisings against repressive and autocratic states are broadcast via videos made on mobile phones. Bloggers and social networkers offer their commentaries on the issues of the day with the capacity for immediate potential transformation when messages reach millions in moments. These experiences mean that we each have available to us encounters with a space apart from our own, often unconscious, fixed notions of identity. While such “e-proximity” hardly assures connection, the potential for it is now infinite. Without leaving one’s home, other worlds are readily present to explore and experience. Through these various modes of media, massive migration, and other means, the other is more often nearby, existing in another kind of Third Space. Yet those same e-tools enable us also to retreat into a this-is-not-me space, because we are offered easy access to everything that happens in the world and, when feeling low, may seek to explore other people’s misery to feel better. We have been trained to think it takes courage to live in this “we.” That is how invested we are in maintaining the struggle of duality (Rutherford, 1990), or the see-me-be-brave venturing out into the Third Space as an act of courage (rather than, perhaps, our natural state).

Leadership that emerges from this field does not necessarily divide the world into leaders and followers. It may describe the field as held by people in various roles at various times (Hayden & Molenkamp, 2004). It invites actors in that field to think about the roles they take and how they relate to others in the field. New media enable us to make that field visible more swiftly. The Obama presidential candidacy may be one example of how in such a Third Space, in such a field, new leadership can emerge, held by many, yet claimed by no one in particular. A man who is biracial, who is a product of different faith traditions, who lived in other cultures, who was termed by some the “first viable female” candidate (Linsky, 2008), and who spoke of a common American identity—actually embodies the Third Space. However, as soon as he was in office, his ability to evoke a larger Third Space was undermined by partisan culture wars.

The Third Space Applied

It is rather easy to find evidence of where Third Space thinking is not applied and practiced. In the political discourse of the United States, in the ongoing struggles for dominance in more than a few sub-Saharan African nations, and in the seemingly interminable and intractable Israeli-Palestinian negotiations there is an apparent collective propensity to operate in dualities that easily regress into polarities. The familiar nature of these discords reflects an apparent larger need by human groups to be reductionist about complex questions of identity, governance, and change. As a consequence, slogans, catchwords, sound bites, and coded language replace dialogue that could produce deeper meaning and compassion between different others (Isaacs, 1999). Rather than becoming the apex of dimensionality, the practice is more akin to a tug-of-war with clear winners and losers. While this kind of linearity offers a facile black-and-white reflection of the world, it does not create the developed consciousness needed for leadership that is truly transforming.

There are a few examples in recent human history when the Third Space could be seen. One of the most compelling examples was in postapartheid South Africa. While issues of poverty and inequality still abounded, the fact that the country did not collapse into civil war or retro-oppression was a function of the leadership that was demonstrated at the moment of the historic shift in power from a white minority government to one of the whole, as represented in the presidency of Nelson Mandela. In the development of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the horrors of the apartheid era were given a forum for expression. Those who were perpetrators and victims of atrocities during those dark days were given time to tell their stories, be heard, and experience a degree of healing not possible within the realm of simpler right-wrong duality. Though many cried for a familiar brand of justice in which individuals were expected to pay for their crimes, the TRC offered a third way (Tutu, 2000).

Another less known event is Women in Black, where in Israel, for example, Palestinian and Israeli women traverse rigid polarized boundaries to meet at a common space at intervals to share their common grief for their lost sons, husbands, and relatives in a seemingly endless war (Baillie, 2002).

Implications

In the years to come, leadership that is authentically transforming may well require competence in traversing the Third Space. While systems ranging from couples, to communities, to corporations, to countries may continue to operate in dualistic reductionism, greater success in addressing the host of challenges of tomorrow may be through what can be created in the Third Space. It is in the individual courage to see, hold, and act upon what feels like the “other” within that a process begins that leads to leadership. Until we can experience the Third Space within ourselves, it is difficult to experience it with others. Once known, the reflection of the process beyond the bounds of self can be seen first in our relationships with those closest to us and then, much later, in those whom we experience as different, alien, and, perhaps, even disdainful. It is in the recognition that these others are also ourselves that the Third Space becomes not only an expression of a different kind of leadership, but also a source of compassion for our fellow humans—as one.

When leadership begins to take on a texture of more dimensionality—when those who hold the roles of directors and decision makers of various forms and forums see the potential that exists beyond polarity—then there is the Third Space and the emergence of a world anew.