Leading Across Geometries

Commons as Laboratory for New Leadership

 

Note: I had been sitting with this post for a while now and chanced upon this article posted on Linkedin. It was the provocation I needed to hit the publish button.

The river has no patience for frameworks.

Picture a community meeting about water sharing along the Kaveri. We have farmers, companies, and government officials gathered by its banks. The water flows past their deliberations, circular in its seasonal rhythms, linear in its downstream journey, networked through tributaries, spiraling through landscapes and generations.

Each group speaks a different spatial language.

The farmers speak in cycles – of monsoons, crops, and ancestral water practices. The company representatives speak in lines – of quarterly targets, infrastructure, scalable interventions. The officials speak in hierarchies – of permits, policies, jurisdiction. And the tribal elders speak in spirals, of how water holds the memory of ancestors and the needs of children yet unborn.

These scenes reveal how commons work surfaces geometry. Not the mathematical kind, but the cultural logic of how people relate to time, space, and relationship. And leading across these geometries, without flattening difference, is a distinct, multi-lingual form of leadership.

In my earlier writing about connection and abstraction, I suggested that change work takes different shapes. But nowhere is this more visible than in commons governance.

• Circular thinking is relational and seasonal. It is built on reciprocity. Taking water requires giving back, and leadership is collective, rotational, and rhythmic.
• Linear thinking defines property rights, tracks progress, and seeks efficiency. Leadership here is about direction, control, and outcomes.
• Networked thinking spreads power laterally. Think open-source protocols or digital commons. Leadership is facilitative; trust flows across nodes.
• Spiral thinking integrates personal, communal, and spiritual dimensions. It holds memory and aspiration in the same breath. Leadership is ancestral and moral.

Perhaps the real challenge is that most governance systems are designed for just one geometry and in expecting the others to conform, results in misalignment, mistrust, and missed opportunity.

This is why commons work can be a powerful laboratory for new kinds of leadership.

Where leaders learn to read the room, not just what people said, but the geometry behind it. When farmers were speaking in cycles about crop rotations and when bureaucrats were speaking in lines about budget deadlines. And to creatd spaces where the geometries could meet, like overlapping circles creating new forms at their intersections.

This is “through me” leadership. Not imposing, not brokering, but enabling emergence. It’s less about reconciling differences and more about weaving across them.

So how do leaders develop this capacity?

They practice noticing: when someone says “sustainable,” do they mean balance or efficiency? They learn to shift between geometries like a musician toggling between rhythm and melody. They design processes where different logics can coexist and where consensus and command, ritual and reporting, can all have a place.

And above all, they trust emergence. They stop trying to control outcomes and start cultivating conditions. That’s the heart of leadership in geometric terrain.

This kind of leadership depends on trust, not as an outcome, but as infrastructure. And not just interpersonal trust, but cross-geometric trust.

Trust-building means showing up in different geometries, be it rotational village meetings and linear quarterly reviews. You don’t have to unify the two but honour both.

Trust, here, isn’t about agreement but about demonstrating respect across spatial logics and following through on commitments made in one while showing up relationally in another.

To be most effective, leaders I know don’t stand at the center. They act like mycorrhizal fungi in quietly enabling nutrients and information to flow between disconnected parts of the system.

They don’t facilitate common ground by flattening difference. They help people relate through their difference. Like soil connectors, they sense where the network is thin, where flow is blocked, and where cross-geometry contact might yield something alive.

This requires humility. They often go unnamed. But they keep the system breathing.

What does all this mean for how we approach leadership and the commons?

It means moving from seeking best practices to designing ecosystems that can hold geometric diversity. Asking not “What works?” but “What spatial logics are in play and and how can we hold them in generative tension?”

Effectiveness might look different in each quadrant. Circular effectiveness shows up as balance. Linear as efficiency. Networked as adaptability. Spiral as alignment. Good leadership, then, isn’t about choosing the right shape but to see the whole field and knowing where to stand.

Our biggest challenges are polygeometric. They sit at the intersection of different worldviews, timescales, and power structures. They will not yield to heroic intervention or single-system solutions.

They require leaders who can host complexity, not solve it. Leaders who can sense when to step in and when to step aside. Leaders who don’t ask, “How do I fix this?” but “What wants to emerge here if the right relationships are made possible?”

Meanwhile, the river kept flowing as the meeting ended, carrying the words downstream to other geometries, other ways of relating to water.

P.S. I’m coming late to much of this thinking. Elinor Ostrom spent decades showing us that communities can govern shared resources without top-down control or privatisation. And indigenous communities have been practicing geometric leadership for generations, holding multiple ways of knowing in relationship with land and water long before academics had words for it.

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Originally published on Substack on 25 May 2025. Read on Substack →