The Menzies Leadership Foundation has entered into a new partnership with RadicalxChange Foundation to explore an increasingly important leadership question: what relational capacities help people bridge divides and hold multiple conflicting perspectives in polarised environments?
The partnership forms part of the Foundation’s Emerging Leaders work and will examine how new forms of civic leadership are already emerging among young people and distributed movements and what can be learned from the ways they share responsibility, navigate difference and act together.
RadicalxChange is a US-based not-for-profit organisation that develops participatory governance tools and methods designed to surface values, build common knowledge and support cooperation across difference. The collaboration will bring this experience together with the Menzies Leadership Foundation’s work to reimagine leadership for a changing world.
At the heart of the partnership is a simple proposition: leadership does not always sit with one individual. It can be distributed across communities, networks and movements, with people collectively assuming the obligations and responsibilities of leadership.
The work will therefore look closely at what RadicalxChange describes as “leaderful” movements, particularly those involving young people, to better understand how shared leadership operates in practice and how it might be recognised, strengthened and supported.
Three questions guiding the work
The collaboration will be shaped by three interconnected questions:
Can we learn to recognise a new generation’s leadership in the wild?
The first stage will identify examples of distributed youth movements in Australia and internationally, build relationships with them, and explore how they navigate difference, share the obligations of leadership and resolve disagreement.
How might we surface the common knowledge required for leading with others?
The partnership will use listening and bridging approaches, supported by civic technology, to help communities identify shared values, understand where perspectives converge or differ, and develop ways of acting together.
How might we serve tomorrow’s leaders, demonstrating relevance and inspiring participation in civic leadership?
The final stage will explore how these insights, tools and approaches could reach beyond those already engaged in formal leadership programs and invite much broader participation.
Using technology to strengthen collective leadership
A distinctive part of the collaboration will be the exploration of civic technology as an enabler of deeper listening and collective sense-making.
RadicalxChange will undertake demonstrations using Idobata, an AI-assisted dialogue and co-drafting tool developed by Japan’s Team Mirai. The process is designed not simply to collect views, but to reflect findings back to participants so communities can interrogate what has been heard, add nuance and develop a stronger shared understanding of what they know and can act on together.
The partnership will also explore the early concept of Kami, a community-governed AI infrastructure that could act as a dynamic repository of collective intelligence and help support the connection and development of distributed civic movements.
Importantly, the emphasis is on building capability rather than dependency: working with communities and partner organisations to co-create processes they can adapt to their own contexts over time.
Reimagining what leadership looks like
For the Menzies Leadership Foundation, the partnership extends an important line of inquiry within its Future Fit Leadership work: leading with others.
Rather than beginning with traditional leadership structures or formal positions, the collaboration will look for leadership where it is already happening — in communities, movements and networks where responsibility is shared and participation itself is central to how change occurs.
The ambition is not only to understand these emerging forms of leadership, but to help make them more visible. As the partnership proposal puts it: if relational leadership can be named and recognised, it can be developed.
Over the coming months, the Menzies Leadership Foundation and RadicalxChange will work with young people, civic movements, communities and partner organisations across both networks, generating insights into how people can bridge difference, build common understanding and exercise leadership together for the greater good.
