Dancing with change: John Perry Barlow would like you to leave your comfort zone.

JOHN PERRY BARLOW IS ALL about free speech--particularly in cyberspace. In fact, Barlow is said to have been the first person to apply that term in the context that it is generally used today.

What does Barlow bring to the electronic free speech discussion? Well, his diverse and colorful background, to start. Longtime Grateful Dead lyricist, former rancher, and contemporary business consultant are just a few titles attached to his name. A cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, which advocates for freedom of expression in the electronic media, Barlow has been writing about--and dvocating for--freedom in cyberspace since the mid-1980s. At that time, he'd become intrigued with the virtual community that his band's most devoted followers, also known as Dead Heads, had established.

But business consultant? What does a former Grateful Dead lyricist have to offer a multimillion dollar corporation like, for instance, Kodak? If you only have a surface awareness of the man, business consultant Barlow is a notion a bit difficult to fathom, given chat he prides himself on never having had a real job. Simply put, Barlow, who has continued his career as a lyricist, brings to organizations the advantage of being an unattached outsider--that is, one who can see an organization from a vantage point that those who are a part of it cannot. Moreover, Barlow, who facilitated ASAE's Strategic Leadership Forum earlier this year (see sidebar), prides himself on speaking out on what he sees and what he feels needs to be said--even if the truth might bring discomfort to the listener. So here's what the champion of free speech had to say about nonprofit organizations, cyberspace, and other topics of interest in an interview with ASSOCIAT[ON MANAGEMENT prior to the forum.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: What perspective do you bring to today's business issues?

Barlow: I've always tried to be a rigorous generalist, and I think that all of my peculiarly diverse experiences have influenced my thinking about economics, business, and the way people organize themselves around joint endeavor. I've been involved in many different strains of collective undertaking--of which a cattle ranch and a rock band are but two--that lie outside the traditional office.

This has made it easier for me to avoid standard habits of mind. I am sometimes useful to organizations because the folks in them can become trapped in mutually generated reality distortion fields that I have no stake in. [Communication theorist] Marshall McLuhan said: "We don't know who discovered water but we are pretty sure it wasn't a fish." I like to think I'm amphibious in a sense. I can go in amongst the fish and show them the water. For example, when I was first consulting to Kodak, a lot of people there seemed to think they were in the business of selling silver halide on paper. But, given the percentage of that paper that ended up bearing the image of a child, it seemed to me they were in the business of making emotions portable. Hearing that may have eased somewhat their transition into digital photography.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: Why should association executives be concerned with the priorities of the Electronic Frontier Foundation?

Barlow: Among the issues the Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently concerned with are threats to electronic privacy that result from the Patriot Act [USA Patriot Act of 2001]. Many executives are unaware that the Patriot Act can compel them to turn over their databases of customers or members if the FBI asks for them. The authorities no longer need to name an identified suspect or crime. Anyone in the database is open to investigation. Thus, information that has been given to associations with the expectation of confidence is open to government scrutiny. Furthermore, the fact that these data are electronic allows them to be examined, stored, and combined with data from other secretly subpoenaed databases. Most organizations haven't begun to assess what responsibilities they have to their constituents under these new conditions.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: What can leaders do to be more forward thinking?

Barlow: They can try to recognize the actual terms and conditions of the present. Periodically I'm accused of being a futurist. I am not a futurist. I don't predict the future, and I think that anybody who thinks he can doesn't check back on himself often enough. But I do predict the present-which might seem useless, except that so many people, including the leaders of most organizations, are busily predicting the past. Organizations themselves tend to assume that there's a Newtonian trajectory into the future, though this assumption doesn't seem to be born out by an examination of history. I believe you can advance your cause a lot by simply recognizing how the present is different from what you think it ought to be.

Another thing--and I think this is really important--is that organizations, of whatever sort, optimize for certainty to such an extent that they leave themselves highly vulnerable to unexpected change. They set up all manner of systems to prevent unexpected change-behavioral codes, bureaucratic structures, defensive postures--but in fact sudden change is the most predictable feature of reality. It's becoming more abundant. Only in death does it cease. I guess what I hope to encourage most in organizational leaders is a willingness to dance with change rather than attempting to prevent it--that, and to go beyond mere "inspirational poster" bravado in embracing change.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: What is the biggest challenge on the horizon for associations?

Barlow: I think that the whole system of political organization is about to shift, because just about everybody is fed up with a system of government that is essentially bought and paid for. A lot of organizations are in the business of buying political results. If the public in general gets sick of it, organizations will need to find other ways of influencing the political process. Campaign finance reform is going to happen eventually. When it does, your arguments will have to go deeper than your pockets.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: How do you think associations will have to adapt to reform?

Barlow: They'll need to clarify their messages so that they are precisely and persuasively comprehensible to decision makers. Part of the problem is that the folks who do policy are overwhelmed with information and clamoring voices. And so far the advent of the Internet has only made this worse. Congress is already in data shock. Organizations are increasingly going to have to seek solutions that don't rely on government. And I don't know what they are yet. The same tools that have produced this excess of information can also provide a context where a constituency can organically surround and solve problems.

Organizations are also going to have to broaden their view beyond what is often a very narrow problem set. Many organizations don't think through the unintended larger [societal] consequences of getting what they want. This can be bad for society and eventually bad for them. Recognizing the larger social responsibility is increasingly practical, as everything is becoming more densely connected to everything else.

ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT: How do you help people become more comfortable exploring ideas outside their comfort zone?

Barlow: I hope to be able to convey some of my own temperament. I feel in myself a sense of general permission to talk about things that make other folks uncomfortable. Since I'm not an organization person, I don't have to worry about whether everybody's going to like what I think, and I never have. I don't have those habits. And I think it's useful, if you do have those habits, to put yourself in the presence of people who don't, every so often. Because, in the act of being themselves, they can sometimes extend to you the same sense of permission they carry around all the time.

Furthermore, I believe there's something useful about the combination of intelligence, honesty, and ignorance. I'm reasonably smart, I'm painfully honest, and I often enter organizational situations where I'm completely ignorant of the local assumptions. I come as a stranger to a strange land. But that can sometimes enable me to see the water that the fish have been missing. Being honest makes it easier to point out, even though doing so isn't necessarily going to be popular with the fish.

RELATED ARTICLE: CREATING a Thoughtful Space

John Perry Barlow must have been the right person for the job.

With its open-space format in which participants generated their own discussion topics, ASAE's Strategic Leadership Forum, which took place March 29-April 1, 2003, in Kissimmee, Florida, was at least in part about taking away from the event more questions than answers. Barlow, who facilitated the event, challenged participants to examine various issues in a different light, calling the event "an opportunity to question our prejudices, open our minds, and look at our own challenges through one another's eyes."

With the open-space format, the focus was not on Barlow or any other speaker, but on the participants themselves, the true creators of the event. In fact, attendees even created the space they inhabited. Throughout the event, couches and daybeds were strewn amidst individual chairs, some of which made up loosely formed circles. These various pieces of furniture migrated around the main room throughout the event.

"I think any time you have a genuinely open dialogue among smart, thoughtful, experienced people, everybody learns," says Barlow. "I think that it's very important now to be able to see things as though you've never seen them before, because in many cases you haven't. You could be looking at phenomena that seem familiar, but are actually quite new."

Following are some of the questions and relevant topics executives discussed and also took home with them.

* What is innovation, and how do you foster it?

* How can an organization confront fear in effecting change and taking risks?

u How can executives and staff respond to the intense time pressures they face?

* How do executives effect change when an organization's structure has developed an immune system to resist it?

* How do you develop and focus on a meaningful set of core values that go beyond mere survivability?

* How can an organization become a safe haven for members experiencing chaos?

* Are a given organization's activities genuinely good for society?

Carl Levesque is a senior editor of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT. E-mail: [e-mail].