Mary Parker Follett: Her Ideas Still Matter

The purpose of leadership is not to direct people, but to create the conditions under which people can discover and exercise their collective power… to paraphrase her work.

Mary Parket Follet seems to become more relevant with every passing decade.

She wrote in the early twentieth century, yet many of the ideas people celebrate today (systems thinking, collaboration, collective intelligence, network leadership, community engagement, and participatory decision-making) can be found in her work long before they became fashionable.

In her work, she clearly understood something many people still struggle to grasp: people are not problems to be managed. Communities are not machines to be controlled. Human beings exist within living systems of relationships.

That insight inspires much of my own work.

Whether I’m thinking about community health, neighborhood resilience, social capital, time co-ops, or localization, it always boils down to the same question: What conditions allow people and communities to thrive?

Most institutions attempt to answer that question by focusing on services. They ask, “What can we provide?” Follett asked a different question. She asked, “How can people create together?” And that question is what separates top-down thinkers from bottom-up thinkers.

Many social systems operate on the assumption that experts solve problems for communities. Follett believed communities themselves possess wisdom, creativity, and capacity that often remain untapped. The role of leadership is not to dominate, command, or control. It’s to help people discover their shared interests and work together toward common goals.

She called this process integration.

When conflict arises, most people see two options. Someone wins or someone loses. Follett proposed a third possibility. She believed people could work together to discover solutions that neither side originally imagined. Instead of compromise, where everyone gives something up, she sought integration, where everyone creates something new.

And that idea feels particularly important today.

We live in a time of fragmentation. Political fragmentation. Social fragmentation. Economic fragmentation. Institutional fragmentation. We increasingly divide ourselves into categories, tribes, and competing interests.

Follett believed communities become stronger when people learn to work through differences rather than around them.

At West Avenue Compassion, I see this every day. The food pantry matters. The diapers matter. The health advocacy matters. The resource center matters. But what often matters even more are the relationships formed around those services. Neighbors meeting neighbors. Volunteers discovering purpose. Organizations learning how to collaborate. People realizing they have something valuable to contribute.

Those moments create social infrastructure.

Follett understood that healthy communities are built through participation. People become invested in what they help create. They become stewards of systems they helped shape.

That idea also influences my interest in projects like Time Co-Ops, KommunityKoin, and community councils. None of these are about technology or organizational structures. They’re about creating environments where people can recognize one another’s value and work together toward shared goals.

In many ways, Mary Parker Follett was describing ecosystems before people commonly used that language in management and community development. She saw society as a living network of relationships rather than a collection of isolated individuals.

That may be her greatest gift to us: the future will not be built by isolated heroes. It’ll be built by communities that learn how to think together, work together, and create together.

Mary Parker Follett saw that more than a hundred years ago.

And we’re still catching up.

Join us and making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did. Cheers, friends.