I was reading Dave Pollards addictive blog "How to Change the World" again just now, and he writes; "We don't need 'leadership' or 'leaders'. What we need is experimenters".

I think what he suggests makes sense - a leader is supposed to know the answers, they're expected to be wiser and more experienced than the rest of us - whereas an experimenter doesn't need to know anything, an experimenter can be anyone, an experimenter can focus on questions; and it's only by asking questions that we can grow, and that we can achieve real change.

As Bruce Mau exhorts in "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth":

• collaborators: they don't do anything alone
• facilitators and coaches: they help others to learn and discover how to do things better
• demonstrators: more than just communicators, they show how it works and what it means
• ideators: they imagine what's possible, and tell stories to bring those ideas to life
• innovators: they take those good ideas and realize them, make them real
• researchers: they study what's been done, in nature, by other cultures and communities, and what's needed, and spread that knowledge
• connectors: they bring people together who were meant to work together
• model-builders: they design and build something that can be understood, replicated and adapted by others
• founders: they start new things -- enterprises, communities, different ways to do important things; they build something new rather than criticizing what exists