The Empire of Love initiative supports executives, boards and organizations in embracing the idea that Love ultimately governs any evolutionary process. We are three professionals from various horizons who are committed to catalyzing leaders´ and relationship-systems development, expanding consciousness and capacities.
With the Empire of Love initiative, we’ve been exploring the relationship between love and power for several years now. Through self and mutual inquiry into our experiences in different environments, through scholarly contributions, and engaging in experiential explorations with leaders and practitioners of systems’ change at the critical times we are living in. Our last shared exploration was the second iteration of our workshop within Relating Systems Thinking and Design, when we joined the Rivers of conversation of RSD13 with a focus on “power with”. We now feel called to pause and contemplate, as a way of harvesting the learning and honoring the wonderful human beings joining us in co-creation. What have we learned so far about love and power?
Martin Luther King Jr.’s (1967) words are still a potent clarion call, bringing us directly into the heart of the matter. “One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
These words call us to see that love and power are, at their best, mutually informing, and that together, they are at the heart of what we define leadership, or the art of guiding self, others, systems, and the whole, toward better and better versions of ourselves. This is particularly meaningful from our perspective as practitioners committed to supporting the organic unfolding of Life in all its forms. When we develop both love and power, growing our innate capacity to be compassionate and caring beings, and tending to the inner and outer conditions to express our agency and aspirations while empowering others to do the same, we naturally end up being guided by something greater than ourselves, and genuine power with may emerge.
In the alchemical reaction of love and power at their best, love becomes a transformative power. As bell hooks suggests, the most profound transformations towards greater good, greater beauty, and greater truth, in our life as in our relationships and communities, are rooted in love.
Therefore, we are with our friend Louis Klein at the International Federation for Systems Research, inviting us to shift our current ways of taking action in the polycrisis, mostly steeped in fighting or flying, and “offer a warm embrace instead.” What we see working in our lives as in the larger environment, are shared, co-created experiences that emerge from the awareness and the vulnerability to meet our limitations, our toxic patterns, our blind spots, and let them be welcomed by the warm embrace of other loving beings who share the same intention for evolution. In that embrace, they can evolve, transform, and dissolve sometimes, liberating all the resources that are necessary to thrive. The only way out is through, and together.
With the Empire of Love initiative, we aspire to create the conditions of psychological and emotional safety for leaders and systems to transcend the tensions between power over and power under and fully engage in power.
This is exactly what we experience every time we meet among us three co-stewards. The field we co-create together is filled with authentic love, which makes it possible for us to be genuinely powerful and access more of our capacities and creativity. We deeply believe every one of us and our systems intimately knows what we need (in terms of structures, processes, and practices) to restore our different balances, tap into our genius, and express it in the world through loving and powerful contributions.
So, let’s explore and embrace what’s in the way of our individual and collective thriving and make more space. This is how the polycrisis becomes polyopportunity. Our invitation to summon leadership as love is an invitation to love what’s possible into being.
We believe this is our human superpower. We commit to enacting it, even when the initial embrace is so hard to give, even when we would prefer to keep ignoring, suppressing, or fighting what life calls us to see. Even if we feel we did not receive that embrace of love and acceptance ourselves when we needed it most.
How do we cultivate the superpower of leadership as love? Within safe and generative spaces, we can tend to our intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual alignment with love as a transformative power so that it becomes a living practice. Social entrepreneur Hanae Bezad recently gave a beautiful account of what’s possible when we live in that alignment. She also refers to Bell Hooks, highlighting the importance of being practitioners of love (not only theorists). Well, we constantly gather evidence of the power of love-based experiential practices to keep learning how to restore and regenerate our systems.
It is a delight to co-create such experiences with leaders, scholars, and practitioners committed to expanding individual and collective leadership as love. We are immensely grateful, and awed by the extent of embrace of complexity humans are capable of when offered the space to do so together.
Until our next shared exploration.
Read more from Empire Of Love
Empire Of Love, Executive Leadership Coaching & Facilitation
The Empire of Love initiative engages executives, boards and organizations that embrace the irony and the truth of Love, which ultimately governs any evolutionary process.
Ilaria Distefano (Italy), Gabriella Fenesi (Hungary) and Silvie Le Muzic (Norway) are the visionary stewards of this initiative. They bring together a unique blend of backgrouonds in organizational and leadership development, action research, sustainability, governance, architecture, creative technologies and entrepreneurship. They channel this diverse experience towards expanding human capacities and partner with leaders and relationship systems committed to growing, prospering, and elevating their contribution to the complexity of our times.
