IMHO
Leadership is the ability to see both the short and long term reality as
well as to analyze and solve the complexity of both the task and the group
process involved in its solving. It involves the ability to deal
successfully with long and short in both time and space and their
implications. Anyone can have a pretty face, a fine figure or a beautiful
voice but that does not mean that they can act or sing at the Met. That
is a great deal more complicated.
After you have the "knowledge about the project" comes what Paul Tillich
called the "Courage to Be" (in the book of same name) and what we in the
arts call discipline.
CAREERS AS "CAREENS"
People are "human" and there is a temptation to believe that the
successful leader exists as a career rather than a "careen", i.e. a
straight line. Straight Arrow leaders may, but I'm not even sure of that,
exist in war but once the war is over, the complexity of human reality
retires the Churchhills. If it does not they often become "Pinochets."
We cannot seriously hold our leaders to the "straight and narrow" (S&N) if
we want success, when there is no such thing, as the S&N in reality.
Reality IMO is more like "tacking with the wind" in a sail boat or using
the switchback to cross the mountains.
I would submit that the belief in this "straight and narrow" leader is
often a kind of infantile psychosis tied to a desire for a "Leader Father"
or Joe Campbell's "Hero" who reduces difficulty by not telling the truth
about the complexity of the task to his followers. Real leaders like
Gengis Khan do tell the truth even when it is monstrous and command
committment from those who follow their leadership.
In an earlier post, politicians were brought up and Rick wisely asked us
not to get involved. I will now disrespect that slightly and beg his
forgiveness. The most notable point about the past orgy of sexuality in
the government was that no one of any consequence or leadership was
straight and narrow about it. In fact there could be a case made for the
more sexually involved being the most free to make intelligent statements
with a sense of reality about them. Even Tillich had his wife breaking
the myth of his deification which she did in a delightful, set the record
straight, book entitled "From Time to Time" he...... His student Rollo
May lamented her need to make the posthumous Tillich "so human." I found
that it made his "courage to be", as well as hers, much more adult and
believable.
IMHO true leaders have the power of impathy without being disabled by it.
They are human, truthful within their context, and committed to that area
where they must be the leader.
I would submit that there is a pedagogy that can teach the structures of
leadership but not the courage or the wisdom to speak truthfully about it.
This involves a kind of synergistic thought that only comes with the
wisdom of age/experience and enlightenment and is usually consigned to
retirement by the time it happens. As I get older, naturally I consider
this a fatal flaw to the system and the younger do not.
HITLER AS LEADER
Where I think the "Hitler as no leader" folks have a point is in the
difference between the courage to sacrifice personal fear in the pursuit
of a worthy goal (a relative term based upon context) and an obsession
based upon the need to work through psychological issues in real time and
relegating real people to the role of objects in the "leader's" pursuit of
his own ultimate "health".
The issue in the latter case is that the only sacrifice that happens in
that pursuit is the sacrifice of others. I believe that includes Hitler
and, to my way of thought, also includes the CEOs who destroy peoples
lives and families in their pursuit of the "wealth that can never heal
their pain and insecurities."
LEADERSHIP AND COMPETENCY
I have typed in portions of an article by former list member John Warfield
with his permission to share. I think it bears on the pedagogy of the
first part of leadership, the ability to see the levels of complication
connected to the team's incompetencies including a statistical tool for
grading levels of complexity and the likelihood of success given the
make-up of a team.
Warfield comments on the value of accurate data and the wise use of such
in this paper on "The Great University." He says that the Great
University should be concerned with three things:
1. Putting the learner in possession of the cultural inheritance.
2. Qualifying the learner to participate in the contemporary world.
3. Qualifying the learner to contribute to the civilization of the
future.
I believe that these are essential to any discussion of the future of
work, jobs or anything that moves forward in time and space.
I'm typing in a section of this excellent work for your examination.
>From "THE GREAT UNIVERSITY" 1995
by John N. Warfield,
Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences
George Mason University, Va.
"This leads me to the thought that whenever someone makes a
generalization, (intended to apply to a broad subspectrum of life), its
validity is likely to depend on its space-time span. If I say something
that has been valid for most of ... 36 normal lifetimes, it carries some
weight, even if it has not been valid for a few recent years. And if I
say something that has been valid largely for the western world, it
carries some weight, even if it is not valid for the Orient, or for other
parts of the earth. And yet we seldom bother to attach space-time spans
to our utterances.
These ideas introduce my first theme, an Information Scale
Proposition (P1):
Importance of Scale.
SCALE IS IMPORTANT IN DEALING WITH INFORMATION
(P1)
If something has been valid for 36 lifetimes, it is reasonable to suppose
that we have incorporated beliefs and habits drawn from that period of
time. But at the same time, it can well be that if we look at the past
few decades, i.e., at less than one lifetime, those beliefs and habits
have been superseded by new possibilities, even if we are not tuned up to
recognize them.
And there is another aspect of this Information Scale Proposition.
If the information goods with which we deal are constantly constrained by
the necessity to package them into a small space-time scale, e.g., pages 8
1/2 x 11 inches in dimension, or into a time interval of 50 minutes, or
onto an electronic monitor with a screen 14 inches in diagonal, or in a
one-page memo for management (which is all they normally want to examine,
no matter what the topic may be, assigning equal weight to
corporate-survival material and rest-room keys), or in a 2 minute news
flash, we must raise the question as to what is inherently being divorced
from our purview by the iterative presence of hundreds or thousands of
small-scale events.
This brings us to a second Information Scale Proposition (P2)
Miscalibration:
BECAUSE EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IGNORE SCALE,
INDIVIDUALS BECOME SERIOUSLY MISCALIBRATED
IN TERMS OF INDIVIDUAL COMPETENCE. (P2)
Repetitive exposure to severely limited information scale; accompanied by
repetitive reinforcement of human performance at that scale; engenders
gross miscalibration of human self-competence and produces gross,
ingrained insensitivity to the impact of information scale; accompanied by
a bias in favor of small-scale packages.
In simple English, this is what I am saying: in education, students are
exposed hundreds of times to small-scale information packets; and they
are tested hundreds or thousands of times on their ability to repond to or
reproduce such small-scale packets, or inferences based on a few of those
small-scale packets; and if they do well in most of these instances, they
begin to build and to internalize as habitual behavior the idea that
everything they encounter in life is encompassed in packets of that size.
They become totally insensitive to the idea that some things that they
encounter are well beyond the range of their experience and capacity.
They are totally unequipped to know that those large- scale phenomena
which they encounter lie far beyond their individual,
life-trajectory-limited, span-of-immediate-recall- limited experience and
capacity."
==================
Warfield gives several examples, I will limit it to one due
to the time pressure REH.
==================
"Some of you are sensitive to financial disasters. The recent savings and
loan crisis in the U.S., which was precipitated by foolish large-scale
legislation enacted by Congress in 1986, is a prominent example showing
the impact on taxpayers of enacting legislation that dealt with a
situation beyond the natural span of individual mastery, causing major and
long- lasting impact on our national solvency, and probably precluding our
ability to provide adequately for other strong social needs.
The "opportunity cost" of such blunders may even dramatically exceed the
expenses incurred. Yet we seem to continue to ignore the thought that
such blunders are not isolated, but rather reflect the existance of a
CLASS of problematic situations, all of which are characterized by the
complexity they bring to ill-prepared human beings, falsely subjected to
beliefs that, because they are "educated", they are prepared to work with
such complexity...
================
more examples: Chernobyl, Bhopal, VietNam, Apartheid etc.
================
"A study of 'strange events that regularly occur, in a variety of cloaks,
brings us to appreaciate that 'the bizarre is the norm'. What we might
have thought were reasonable things that we took for granted, seem oddly
to be absent; and the rate of occurence of events that are unexplainable
in terms of commonly -valued ideas seem to be growing.
The media regularly explains gridlock in Washington, D.C., as
founded in 'politics' or 'special interests'. Yet, how many of
these events could equally well be explained in terms of the
point of view that IT IS THE SCALE OF THE ISSUES INVOLVED,
AND THE ABSENCE OF RECOGNIZED WAYS OF COPING
WITH LARGE-SCALE ISSUES, THAT COLLECTIVELY FORCE
THE ADVENT OF POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS TO FILL THE
CAPABILITY GAPS? If a certain choice is believed clearly
to produce major political pluses, and no clearly better choice is
recognizable, who can resist accepting the presumed political
advantage?"
===============
Warfield is considered a world expert on "complexity" with many honors
however I find that his work that speaks to me through his definition of
"complexity' is at its heart pedagogical. That the external world is
difficult to comprehend is a given but the "why" of that difficulty must
be thrown back to the person doing the comprehending. Warfield says:
Complexity is a state found within the mind of the person confronting the
problem. There is no complexity when one knows how to solve the problem.
What this brings to me is the pedagogical truth that knowledge is action
beyond understanding raised to the level of intuition.
Such knowledge is the beginning of the leadership of teaching and the
wisdom to use professionals well on a team project. In musical teams,
there is constant testing of the conductor because they are all highly
skilled in Warfield's larger and smaller information envelopes. There is
more than a little Alpha male involved. A great conductor can finesse an
orchestra with the power of the alpha while sending a dozen roses to each
player. It is truly wonderful to watch a great conductor and you know
that he has control and knowledge of every single moment of every single
instrument and individual.
Considerably more than is demanded of most who fancy themselves leaders in
government or business.
Ray Evans Harrell
--"Ray E. Harrell" <mcore@idt.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>