Network leadership looks like a rhizome. If you have a patch of bamboo in your yard, you know how hard it is to get rid of. If you chop down a stalk, in a few days a new shoot sprouts up to fill the space.

This is because underneath the bamboo forest is a mat of interconnected pathways, called rhizomes, that connect all the stalks and move resources around to places where they are needed.

Network leadership is about working together to make sure that people in the network are connected in a way that encourages flows of resources, information and support to every part of the network.

Network leadership is about noticing people or groups who are not being able to access resources and who have been marginalized by the culture of hierarchies, and encouraging them to initiate collaborative action.

Network leadership engages people to co-design new structures that get resources flowing to projects. And network leadership creates space for learning and peer support through communities of practice, so that everyone is continually building skills and insights and breakthroughs constantly emerge from the learning processes.