I find myself feeling dangerous!
I think that compulsions are dangerous things, and I feel compelled to act … an act of what might possibly be thought of as sedition or treason, with the intent to foment revolution.
My body is bristling with it … I can feel it in the hackles raised on my neck, and I am aching for a fight.
Before I get lost with myself let me restate the charge …
I have been accused, or so it seems to me, to be resisting the interdiction to challenge some institutionalized ways of knowing. Specifically, an instruction of sorts about acting in alignment and accordance with a given model of interaction.
AN ARGUMENTATIVE STANCE:
I find that one of my ways of being … an ontological form so to speak … is to be in argument, in the most formal of ways of thinking about argument:
From From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48:
A process of reasoning, or a controversy made up of rational proofs; argumentation; discussion; disputation
From From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):
A discussion in which reasons are advanced for and against some proposition or proposal
A course of reasoning aimed at demonstrating a truth or falsehood; the methodical process of logical reasoning
So it seems to me I have a long lineage of argument to point to as a valid way of and of seeking to know and knowing i.e.: of inquiry and discovery.
In part the revolution I might be seeking to foment is in challenging the willingness to accept that
- A) collaborative knowing is somehow more valid than subjective, individual, phenomenological knowing
- B) that having a deep sense of knowing that is resolute is less valid than one that is more permeable when it comes to pursing an inquiry into one’s own knowing
- C) that there are better and worse ways of knowing, e.g.: my challenge to a Euro-Centric way of knowing being refuted by virtue of making that challenge within a Euro-Centric institution
- D) that knowing is somehow separate from being, e.g.: “I am this thing I know.” as the causative, karmic statement
Before I go on, I must add none of what I am stating do I hold to be “true” in any way … other than as I experience it myself.
This idea that I can only know what I experience, and that my “knowing” does not necessarily represent any reality beyond my experience is essential to my stance and my argument.
So the things I state … that I am bristling at the challenge and ready for a fight … are based on my experience of events, and not the events themselves. I readily admit I cannot with any certainty know what those events were other than my experience of them … even if they had been recorded in high fidelity and high definition, e.g.: Dolby THX 5:1 Surround Sound and 8K, Ultra High-Definition (7680×4320) video!
Okay … with my charge restated I shall continue …
INCITING A (LEADERSHIP) REVOLUTION:
More precisely I seek to instigate what I think of as a large scale revolution … yea, not evolution but REVOLUTION … in leadership as we know it to be in most instances.
Leadership on the grand scale. Leadership as it exists in the institutions we inhabit and occupy day in and day out.
The institutions I refer to begin with the family, and leadership with those nuclear relationships. Then the extension of the institutions to include our communities and the schools, business and organizations they contain and that comprise them.
Reaching further I find I am compelled to point towards the large scale institutions and bureaucracies of governments and all they spawn and contain as well … the departments and the ministries.
I am indeed hot under the collar about such things … using the ontology of argument to fuel my inquiry so to speak.
It seems from the stance I find myself positioned in that leaders suffer from an institutionalized way of knowing … an insistence on being understood if not liked by others before they can or will lead, the desire for collaboration outweighing their commitment to lead.
Here I expect that some will find my stance objectionable, if not downright offensive.
How dare I suggest that the will to lead in a family, school, business or other institution could be or should be anything other than collaborative first and foremost.
“Doesn’t everyone have a right to a voice?” “
Doesn’t everyone have their right to their opinion?” “Shouldn’t we seek the input and advice of others before we act?”
I can hear these and other charges ringing forth at my suggestion that leadership may not be best served at all times by the collaboration so often sought by leaders in institutions today (or, mea culpa, so it seems to me … ). But my challenge to these charges is of equal fervor.
“Do we not seek our leaders to lead and not merely facilitate?”
Isn’t there an argument to be made that a biological imperative exists for a hierarchical structure in the formation of human systems?
(NOTE: Although I would argue that the hierarchy is best served and of most service when it is fluid, NOT non-existent.)
THE COST OF NOT LEADING:
I see the effect in the system-at-large for the void in leadership presenting symptomatically in many different ways:
- Unruly children who aren’t just rebellious (normal IMO during certain phases of development) … but somewhere between ornery and obnoxious to the point of outright violence against themselves and others
- Social system breakdowns with less opportunity available in the system-at-large for those not yet fully enfranchised and benefiting from the accumulation of wealth from generations past
- Civil and political unrest, locally and globally, about the direction of leadership as it is practiced at the top, with a sense that those not close enough to the top will be left behind entirely
- Outbreaks of violence against individuals – as in the battering of women and children … communities of people – as in racial and religious hate crimes … nations against nations – as in acts of war …
I feel the unrest in my own blood and bones … probably in part what I am bristling at just below the surface at all time, with the smallest slight or infraction in my direction setting me on edge or pushing me off it.
There is a rage that brewing against the lack of decisiveness from our leaders I think … at least that is what is percolating inside of me, always threatening to boil over.
Instead of owning the obligations and responsibilities of leadership, I see our leaders wanting to share their leadership, abdicating accountability to empathy.
I for one know that I cannot, nay will not, follow a leaders who is themselves indecisive … I want those who choose to occupy the chair of leadership to lead, to express a vision of their own that calls followers to them, and then to lead with a strong arm and even stronger heart.
I want to follow a leader with heart, in the mold of servant leaders from all times … those who willingly bear the weight of the crown and raise those around them upon their shoulders … not the leader who off-loads the burden of leadership and raises themselves up on the shoulders of others.
The leader who will be a servant my learn to not to care enough to lead well … i.e.: not to care about what others think of them to be able to do what it takes to lead others beyond what they could lead themselves to undertaking and accomplishing. It is a lot to ask, but I ask nothing less.
BATTERING BONOBOS:
Even in the most loving and collaborative of primates, our cousins the bonobos, we find a strong hierarchical structure. In their case (the bonobos) it happens to be a matriarchal structure with the dominant females beating the males into submission if they get all uppity and dispute the given order of things.
The bonobos to be fair also use the granting of sexual favor to organize and create structure in their communities, once again under the auspices of the females who lead.
But … to be sure these are not “communal” or “collaborative” decisions made by all within the community, the dominant female bonobo leads with an iron fist when necessary, and does not brook insubordination with grace.
I use this example to help make my point as it is … We too, as primates, are sometimes potentially best served when we least tolerate equivocation … not always, but in measure.
I would argue that we, like the bonobos with whom we share so much of our DNA (greater than a 99% match in our genetic structures by some measures), have a deeply imprinted archetype to recognize a hierarchy in the system.
THE ARCHETYPE OF THE KING/QUEEN:
We deeply seek the pleasure of the King or Queen, to have them beam their grace down upon us.
The ancient act of kneeling before nobility in an act of submission born of subjugation may be renewed and rejuvenated by the action of submission born of choice.
By choosing to place ourself in relation to other subordinately we may receive what grace they can and choose to cast upon us. This grace may be an act of love, or teaching, or discipline or wisdom.
If the act is one of grace, and of our choosing, it may not matter in form to still bestow the benefit. Again, I can imagine the protestations in the the milieu I inhabit with my fellows.
“SUBMISSION … kneeling before another!!!! How dare he be so insubordinate as to even suggest that to me!”
The hypocrisy of the speech act all but invisible to the proclaimer.
It seems we have built a society so fearful of command or control as to have thrown out the baby and drunk the bathwater of our own beliefs in equality, plurality and tolerance … even when these things may least serve us, our causes or our kind.
When the presence of the King or Queen is missing it is just as severely felt by us as when they are fully and most regally present to us. I believe that in part the challenge to the perturbations of my argument are a response to the missing Kings and Queens in our collective psyche, and the deep desire for their presence in our lives.
NOTE: It may be worth pointing out that in my observation and experience both the King and the Queen are necessary for us to perceive and experience ourselves as whole and complete.
It might be useful here to restate my purpose as I did the charges against my stance I experienced them …
My interest is in inquiring into the heart and soul of change, what it is … NOT the process of change … but , its ontology.
To organize my inquiry I have chosen as well a focus, the idea or concept of leadership such as it is that I think of it, one might say the phenomenology of leadership as an ontological entity … i.e.: “What does it mean to be a leader and/or to lead?”
The question in English seems to provoke an inquiry into action, i.e.: the doing of leadership, yet I seek to resist this direction and to aim my inquiry at the nature of leadership and leading as a state of being.
I want to explore the premise that who a leader is being is what is most perceived by those they lead. (Of course, this presumes that leadership is about leading people and not processes – a presumption I fully own up to in the pursuit of my inquiry.)
THE LIQUID OF LEADERSHIP:
It seems that in pursing the line of inquisition I have followed what has emerged in part is what I think of as the liquid nature of leadership in human systems, in much the same way information is liquid.
The “liquid” of leadership, i.e.: the state of being of the leader, permeates the system equally despite the distance from the leader that those in the system reside in relation to them.
This last point is essential in the exploration I have undertaken … it is NOT a given by any means, but one that continues to demand my attention over and over again.
The leader’s presence (or lack thereof) is felt at a distance from the leader in the same degree that is felt adjacent to the leader in connection to the transference of state within the system where the leader operates.
A LEADERSHIP EXAMPLE:
If I take my family as an example of the liquid nature of presence there is a particular decision I can point to that has shaped my life for more than a decade … setting the course I have taken and continue to follow.
When my daughter was born, my son was already thirteen. I had an intention from his birth to be of service to him by virtue of being the man I wanted and needed to be such that he would experience me in ways that allowed for him to become himself. I accepted that he would nonetheless model some of my ways of being and behavior, if not permanently, then surely until he found his own ways. The weight of what I can describe as “generational responsibility” was heavy upon me.
I recognized in my own ways of being and behavior the imprints of my parents and extended family, and beyond those that of my teachers, friends and colleagues, not to mention lovers and partners. I assumed,rightly or wrongly, that my way of being, and the behaviors I expressed as a manifestation of it, would imprint themselves on my children, as my own history had demonstrated to me about myself.
At the moment of laying eyes on my newborn daughter for the first time I made a vow that regardless of the place, time, circumstance or situation … alone or with others … I would act as though my children were standing with me, observing and modeling me.
To be sure I have not keep this vow in any way resembling perfection. I continue to discover my humanity in my failings and foibles as I attempt to continue becoming the man I intend to be.
But, this way of organizing myself, in relation to my children, regardless of where they or I am at the time, permeates my consciousness and my actions. In other words in order to lead I must do so from one step behind, allowing the consideration of my constituents (in this case my most beloved children) to permeate my intentions, and the actions they give rise to as well.
I am both leading and being lead by the consideration I have for my son and daughter in the role I hold as a leader in the family system that revolves to a great extent around my way of being and how that manifests in an extant way … through my words and acts.
However, I believe in my heart and soul that my children experience me as much as they attend to anything I say or do … to use a common expression, they “feel” me … as I “feel” them, even when we stand thousands of miles apart from one another.
Of course you can ask, and rightly so, who is leading whom?
SIGNALS IN THE SYSTEM (A RECURRENT THEME):
FWIW, I would answer by stating that the strongest signal in the system organizes the system, even when that signal is in response to another signal also within the system, e.g.: the way a fire alarm ignites the action of a team of firefighters, and possibly and entire community, in response to the signal of the smoke and flames.
Do the firefighters follow the signal of the alarm, or is the alarm a way of transmitting the signal of the smoke and flames beyond their local reach?
Likewise, it is only when the signal that I am and send is present, even when I am not, like the spore of pheromones in the wake of my having walked a particular path, does my “leadership” begin to permeate the system as a whole.
This applies equally as well to the vacuum that would be present, in the system, were I not at all … just ask any child who is missing a parent if the effect of the loss is as profound as the presence of the parent who remains. I know how the signal of both those who are present, and those who are not, reverberates in the system.
Despite the distance of time, the missing presence of my wife, who I lost to cancer almost two years ago, haunts the home that my daughter and I share. The emptiness where she once was stalks the rooms like a ghost in the wake of her absence.
We could also ask anyone at Apple what the effect of Steven Jobs is now that he is no longer physically present within the organization, arguably no where to be found literally. I presume the employees of Apple would share their sense of the ghost of Steve Jobs legacy haunting the corridors and conference rooms for years to come … despite whether or not they ever met the man.
This is the “liquid” I am referring to as … “the effect of the leader felt at a distance” … (applicable in both space and time).
CONCLUSIONS??? … NONE!
(even when I looks like I believe myself …)
BUT … MAYBE GETTING CLOSER!
(… or at least close enough to be of some service)
MY ROLE AS CHANGE ARTIST:
My current role as a researcher and practitioner is committed to exploring the nature of my professional actions, and their impact and effect/effectiveness, with a aim towards uncovering what might be revealed about what has remained hidden from view for me as of yet … and of the possibility of developing new ways of being in my role as a change artist that would better serve and benefit those I commit to being of assistance to in this role.
To date my observations include those that point to being of greatest service when I help those who lead better serve the systems they operate within, whether those systems are intimate relationships, families, business, multi-national organizations, or entire governments and their obligations and responsibilities to their constituents.
Simplifying and summarizing what has emerged on the horizon of my attention is that when I can (and do) help leaders, i.e.: lovers, parents, entrepreneurs, executives, administrators … become more aware and self-differentiated, while simultaneously remaining deeply connected to the systems in which they lead and serve, I am myself providing the greatest service.
This is NOT a function of helping leaders to motivate or direct others, or to organize the context or the actions that unfold within the context.
In other words this is NOT a function of doing, but a function of learning to “be” in the role of leading.
In addition to some of the questions I have already asked, questions I have added that remain outstanding include:
- “What does it mean to lead?”
- “How can a leader better come to know themselves in the role of leading?”
- “What does it mean to be in the role of leader as change artist” (with the assumption that all change artists at some point lead their clients)
- “How does leadership apply to the work of being a change artist?”
- “How can change artists best work with leaders?”
Leaders set the mood, or the emotive state, within the systems they lead. This role was explored and documented in the work of Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee in their book, Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. Their conclusion, after a significant longitudinal study, was that the leader sets the mood for the organization-at-large … and I would add like it or not, with intention or not.
THE DISNEY MODEL – i.e.: KILL THE PARENTS:
I would argue that the baggage or our lack of self-differentiation, i.e.: our inability to cope with independence prior to seeking inter-dependence, now permeates leadership at all levels.
The primary differentiation that is lacking however is the differentiation from the family of origin, i.e.: our parents and their shadows in our lives, that prevents us from getting on with our lives.
With this consideration in mind I hold that one of my primary acts in my role as change artist is reparenting my clients to achieve the necessary separation, i.e.: “killing the parent/s” to achieve self-differentiation and independence, leaving the state of dependance behind and assuming a new state of being entirely.
Only from a state of independence, can a leader achieve inter-dependence.
MORE ANSWERS THAN QUESTIONS:
I think that too many programs and prophets have proclaimed that the way of knowing and doing that the leader possesses is what defines the quality of their leading, but I am suggesting that it is the state of being that the leader possess that defines the entirety of their leadership quality.
BUT … I still don’t know how to most effectively lead the leader to uncovering who they are in that role … the role of leadership … and that remains what is on the horizon for me at this point in my search, i.e.: how to most effectively assist my clients to transform themselves in the leaders they are capable of being, and the ones they desire to become …
As individuals operating in relation to others in love and work … as lovers and friends, parents and children, employers and employees … the edges remain largely undefined, but I believe the magic is there beyond the boundaries where entire systems, and the people that comprise them, find one another.
I have many, many more questions than answers, and FWIW I expect it will continue to be this way.
So I conclude for now with my ranting about the challenge that raised my hackles and sent me off bristling (a very powerful and useful state to be in for me, given my commitment to formal argument as part of my methodology and learning strategy) …
I found in my bristling at the challenge I perceived my stance was both reinforced and reinvented. I could, and do, hold the paradox of getting that it is only a stance, and yet I also indulge in the folly of believing it.
The idea of provoking the system via taking a resolute stance, and simultaneously observing the affect of taking that stance in a human system, is at the core of my inquiry.
Becoming the instrument of perturbation, provocation and probing all at time – i.e.: forming a singularity that collapses these roles into one – continues to fascinate me.
This is the heart of my inquiry as it stands today … albeit ready to be challenged and changed again …
To become the change I intend AND the change I seek to inquire about … the what and the how … knowing that I do not yet know, while acting as if I do … and accepting that I may never really know anything at all beyond my own experience reflecting itself, is where I stand today … breathlessly waiting for what is next, once again peering beyond the horizon.
T-genic says
I like this inquiry into the way of the LEADER. BEING A LEADER in one’s life, in systems of organizations, families, friends, communities and the world. My experience of this piece of writing is that it is deepening my own exploration of my lived leadership in creating and generating what I want in the world. Recently I was listening to a piece of thinking by the Institute for Generative Leadership where they link leadership, management and coaching. This piece provokes me to ask what your conceptions are around applying your inquiry and exploration onto these three components also. I see that from being exposed to your work I lead more and live more in my own leadership, I manage more like a leader and a coach and I coach more from a leadership experience.
I take this piece of writing into my experience of aesthetic arrest and transform or name it now as my LEADERSHIP ARREST…..
It seems that this piece of writing is worth of a book, a webcast, some more writing……
Thanks for your expression on living leadership……
T-genic says
http://www.ontological-coach.com/applications/ontological-leadership
Here’s another piece on ontological leadership. It’s still a bit fragmented and not as whole-form or singular as your embodied distinction….
Joseph says
T …
I think leadership shows up all over.
These three areas you mention are naturals so to speak.
I too think its worth a book.
Shyaam says
Wow Dr.Joseph!
I learnt a lot (I have read only once, many more times to follow – I am hurrying up to write this comment)
There are some things that I realized through your posts in the past few months – I was an emotional vampire – and I was stuck in magical thinking…
Now, I also realize that, though I am 23, I have never been really independent – I am kinda dependent but trying to jump to inter-dependence – creating a false sense of maturity I guess… Also, I seem to resist becoming a Man and still trying to be a Boy.
As I am continuously pointed out that only ontological change truly works – my question is – How can I be an adult?
Also, there is another question, slightly out of context I guess, I am planning to get the video replay for the upcoming FW workshop. I read that it is driven by the participants who show up. Since, I am gonna access only after the event is over, I would like to know as to how it will impact me.
Thank You!
Shyaam
Joseph says
Shyaam,
Interesting questions…
Being an adult is about accessing a state of maturity as I see it. Steeping up into a kind of present awareness, and remaining present to what is happening as it unfolds is first.
This alone is unusual, most people access and love in relation to their past, or what they wish for, not what they experience as happening on the present. My work points to a shift into embodying experience, and away from intellectualizing it … my repeated references to somatic considerations.
Then the next steps may begin to flow for you … sense-making, meaning-making, decision-making, taking action, cybernetic awareness, refinement …
It’s about stepping into a space that is larger than the one you have found yourself contained by so far.
In part this is what you will experience me working on with the group on London during the Foolish Wisdom program. You will have a chance to get a feel for what it’s like to stand and breathe in open space, uncontained … and yet connected, grounded, not floating away on meta-magical themes.
Shyaam says
Hi Dr. Joseph,
Thank you for the response. I guess I got what you pointed with respect to accessing a state of maturity!
I re-read the post and another question popped up. Since, biology rules, do you think that an individual should be extraordinarily athletic or be like a Yogi to have the kind of Leadership presence that you talk about?
I am asking this question in the context of relationships with the opposite sex in mind, I see that women tend to somehow gravitate towards certain men and others, even if they are great people – they don’t get cared/loved.
Thanks,
Shyaam
Steven Cerri says
Hey Joseppe,
So well said, and so much said. I could not agree more. Especially with “being the Sheriff” although you didn’t say it just that way, and “killing the parent(s)”. This post is worth sipping over and over and over.
Be well,
Steven
Joseph says
Steven,
Thanks.
I like the idea of Seth Bullock … and of course Swearingen would step up too.
But … my characters would retain the savvy with a bit more finesse, even after killing their parents, which they surely would.
Kind of like a Harold Finch rolled together with Swearingen…
Steve says
Joe: You admit up front feeling argumentative; bristling; hot under the collar; that is experiencing emotions. What is/was cuing/triggering your emotions? Your own thoughts. I won’t refer to the content of your thoughts, just to your thoughts per se as stimulating emotions. That’s the ‘human condition’. I’m interested in the therapeutic relief we can experience by the quality of our thoughts. Emoting indicates we are ‘subliminally believing’ thoughts. When we believe subliminally, we forfeit choice. To keep this comment short, let me say; ” Believing a thought “seems” to have the effect of ‘morphing’ a thought into a perception, and is not recognized as we do that. I ‘overcame’ two cyber bullies by not believing my images evoked by their words. What’s your take on being conditioned to believe by habit thereby causing so much needless emotional suffering by the masses? By others and self inflicted because of lack of recognition,(of subliminal believing).
Joseph says
Steve,
Been there done that … literally … all that, ask the folks who came up with that, you’ll find a few of them learned it from me first.
Okay, now that the CV’s out of the way …
What if I choose to believe my thoughts that create the emotions I’m having knowing that I am choosing those thoughts … in fact generating those thoughts intentionally to produce the emotions I’m having so I can use the emotive energy they generate to help me motor through the action I want to take so that I can produce certain kinds of outcomes in the world, on my own and with others, that are just easier???
AND … that when I’m done I leave what I’ve done where it is, and just pick up what’s next when it’s presented???
Just curious?
Now to your second comment, not the one you interpreted and implied that I’ve answered above ( ‘;~> … FWIW I could’a written, “What if I just like being snarky?” if I wanted to save some time … but I didn’t).
I believe that it’s true, i.e.: the masses are conditioned to believe.
The vast majority of my work is about “unbelieving” … and giving up the desire to … both believe and it’s close cousin on the maternal side, “understanding” … usually the maternal side is the evil side of the family FWIW.
So … when I refer to re-parenting this is in part what I’m referring to … establishing the critical juncture where the individual made the commitment to either accept or oppose the parent’s world view.
Then at this junction, in their past, installing a new future, which they can choose to find themselves in the present … and beginning from now act from here as the basis of how they will continue to invent themselves … no longer stuck in the beliefs and understanding they had, but free of them to move onto having what they do.
So I guess my take is mostly “YES!”
Red says
Was it you who once said – something akin to –
1. The leader’s mood sets the tone for everyone else in the group.
2. Always assume YOU are the leader.
I love that. Wish I could remember to do it always!
Joseph says
Red … I did say both, but the first is extrapolated from Daniel Goleman’s work on “Primal Leadership” … and the second was the logical conclusion I arrived at when reading about it.
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
Leadership as a state of being is totally meaningful to me, partly from seeing so much leadership that seems to lack a state of being that supports it. It feels profoundly right.
As for your collaborative versus hierarchical dichotomy (if that’s what it is), it hardly makes sense to me. I don’t really know what you’re talking about. It’s “Milton model”, I can hallucinate whatever I want. But my feeling is that the leadership you’re talking about will make the distinction less relevant.
Or I could let myself be provoked when you say we’ve “drunk the bathwater of our own beliefs in equality, plurality and tolerance”, since my feeling is that so much tolerance is being lost nowadays, and it doesn’t look good to me. This might be a good example: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/04/22/freedom_to_marry_freedom_to_dissent_why_we_must_have_both_122376.html
Of course, we have different data, different observations to go by, which may be causing us to have different impressions of what’s going on in “the world”.
Joseph says
Dagfinn,
I’m not sure if we agree or disagree …
Let me try and summarize:
“LEADER’S MUST LEAD!”
That’s the sum of the post. The rest is about A ) how they don’t, B ) what they do instead, C ) the effect of failing to lead, and D ) how to actually lead.
For me BTW it’s NOT a dichotomy … i.e.: it’s NOT an either/or.
The issue is that I don’t like the falsity of promising one thing to save yourself from doing either it or another thing, i.e.: promising equality, plurality, tolerance as an attack on leading from a position of strength and then doing neither, i.e.: living up to your promises or leading.
What I do prefer is a leader who owns the chair of leadership completely and compassionately, takes input and advice from relevant parties (i.e.: NOT ALL PARTIES REGARDLESS OF RELEVANCY), and then keeps the right to decide what is theirs to decide … or to give it away to another to decide … as their own.
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
Well yes, that’s hard to disagree with. No telling whether we would agree in a specific case, though. How to decide who is relevant may be the most difficult part.
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
I keep getting more insight as I discuss this and think about it, which is my intention in doing it. I think I understand my own gut reaction now. It’s due to this: The kind of generalities you present are often used by the hypocrites you refer to. I absolutely don’t believe you’re one of them, but my skepticism is instinctive. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but even before it comes to action, you can some things clearer by making some distinctions you don’t seem to be making. The handling of “relevancy” is one of them. If the criterion for relevancy is agreement (as it seems to be quite often), then you’re lost in your own feedback loop of increasingly dogmatic belief. Yes men, groupthink.
Joseph says
Dagfinn,
I agree (funny that, eh?).
However, my primary criterion is NOT agreement, but provocation.
I want to stir the pot.
Here’s a delusion I seem to notice …
People want to have inclusion, tolerance, equality and plurality as a basis of modern leadership. I think “in principal it’s more than fine, it’s brilliant” … but in practice ….
Ahhh, there’s the rub!!!
I’m a cook by nature. I love food and the process of preparing it … for myself and others.
Now I know when I’m making a dish that you must blend the flavors if you want to enrich and deepen them, especially if you are looking for complexity (which in my cooking I often do … in this way I’m a kind of extremist … i.e.: extremely simple, e.g.: a piece of very fresh caught fist simply broiled or grilled with butter or olive oil … DONE! … or extremely complex, e.g.: a pot of eel cooked with seventeen spices and herbs in a tomato sauce laced with balsamic vinegars (multiple), red wine and a bit of cognac … and enhanced with hot red pepper (not to speak of the salt and black pepper in the spice/herb mix I’ve already mentioned).
So in the simplest case always there’s only room for the one thing … letting it shine for what it is, as it is … a perfectly cooked piece of fresh fish.
In the second cast I want you to experience the eel and maybe the sauce too. The entire structure of what’s behind the eel is only there to enhance the eel, not to stand out … NEVER TO BE EQUAL, imagine if you could literally taste or experience each of thing twenty or more ingredients I use in the dish equally … it would be horrid!!!
Yet I sometimes here about organizational structure discussed in this way, especially around the idea of flattening the organization.
Or in what people think is supposed to happen in a democratic republic like the United State of America, i.e.: each person having an equal voice in the politics of the country.
It’s just not that way. The CEO and the senior executive team are paid to do a job that’s different from the line management, supervisors or technical staff. They are NOT supposed to give equal weight to the “team” they lead, not even at the level of CEO and their direct reports. They may “use” their team to inform them and help them gather the data they use to make their decisions. They may assign decisions with parameters of outcomes around the them to others to make. They may also use their team to implement on the decisions they make …
BUT IMO … they may NOT abdicate the decision-making process to those they lead and suggest this is more equal and therefore more fair and/or just, and therefore somehow better.
Again, imagine me as the cook saying to anyone in the kitchen, sure just throw in whatever you like … AGGGGHHHH!!!!
In the politics of the U.S. we elect representatives who we believe will best represent our collective interests (not their own … or mine in particular), and then we must leave them to get to it. If they are making truly egregious decisions we have remedy to act on that as well. Otherwise I do not have an equal voice … in reality once I turn over my vote to my elected representative I have NO VOICE (until I get to vote again).
The “voice” of the people in a representative government is best served IMO when the representative presents themselves and their position as authentic for what it is, i.e.: who they are … NOT as a vehicle for the people who they wish to elect them to have their voices heard. Yet this is exactly the bait and switch mechanism of modern politics in many places … and again, IMO, this is the worst form of government, i.e.: government by no one in particular, but the polls in general.
Leading is not about getting re-elected, it’s about making the hard decisions that sometimes no one else can or is willing to make.
I hope that clarifies my point about stirring the pot versus looking for folks to agree.
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
After thinking just a little bit more about it, I think there are two axes that need to be distinguished. One is between hierarchy and collaboration/”anarchy”. The other is between tolerance/plurality/openness on the one hand and groupthink on the other. To me, groupthink is the one that I’m seeing too much of.
Joseph says
once again …
For me these are not polar opposites. In a “best case” scenario they become one thing … i.e.: strong leadership that is informed by others collaboratively without giving up the right to lead and not groupthink.
We can dance around the languaging if you’d like, no claims of perfection there … especially in this piece, which was pretty much “stream of consciousness” and not edited … but the intention feels right to me.
Red says
That’s interesting, Joseph. I described it as you ‘thinking out loud’ – and I feel it’s a more powerful piece for it. This is something I have just noticed myself lately – in all areas: where I would once be extremely pernickity about getting something absolutely RIGHT, spending hours crafting… I’m now enjoying the thrill of taking my foot off the brakes and letting whatever happens HAPPEN. Whatever comes out, that is IT. And the imperfections seem to make it more perfect. It is the WHOLE thing. It is the thrill of the ride, and when it’s done it’s done.
And especially when leading my weekly group. I know I am leading when everything slows down, and things that might have caused stress actually are triggers to be even more relaxed… because whatever happens is what is happening. It is the WHOLE thing, and then the next and the next.
Gaah. I can’t fully express what I am trying to say, but here is my own stream of consciousness imperfect perfection. THANK YOU Joseph for being who you are, doing what you do 🙂 xx
Joseph says
Welcome …
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
As far as I can tell, it’s hard to avoid “languaging” because you’re being vague. When you talk about “submission”, my first reaction is to “that’s interesting, submission might be a good thing in some cases”. My next reaction is, one case would be Adolph Eichmann who was only following order when he sent all those jews to the death camps. So how would one decide when submission is OK and when could lead in this direction, as at has many times?
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
So: I’m not asking you to be right. But I’m acutely aware that much of what you wrote is not specific enough for me to get a handle on it.
Joseph says
Dagfinn,
Try reading it differently …
i.e.: NOT TO GAIN A THING FROM IT … NOT TO AGREE OR DISAGREE WITH IT … BUT …
Just notice what YOU THINK as you read it and what it brings up for you.
It seems to have been a powerful piece for you through that lens.
FWIW I also think the process of dialogue, i.e.: neither you nor I trying to hold onto our thoughts as they were but open to the infiltration of other thoughts on our own making them richer and fuller, is of great value (at least to me).
There’s a method here that I’m applying … once again we can call it provocation, stirring the pot.
I put this out without editing, as I wrote it, in what I can say was largely stream of consciousness applied to paper.
What I hoped for (and got) was a push back on some points, an elucidation on others, some agreement where the ideas seemed to fit, and a further pushing of my own ideas into territory I hadn’t considered.
This is NOT a finished piece by any means … it’s a rant!!!!
Dagfinn Reiersøl says
“Just notice what YOU THINK as you read it and what it brings up for you.” I think that’s exactly what I’m doing. I read the first part and it makes me think “bland generalities”. That makes me pause and realize I have a choice to react with agreement or suspicion. And I find suspicion the more interesting choice. 😉
Joseph says
I get the challenge with submission, it’s a tricky word in our culture.
I don’t know how you decide when to submit, but I will say that what I write is written as an interconnected series or set of ideas, not really separate pieces that I intend to stand alone.
In this piece I clearly speak to both signals in the system that connect us, as well as self-differentiation, neither to be held as carrying more weight or standing above the other.
I don’t think of humans as individuals standing apart from the system (we can use the idea of society as one form of the system, or maybe family as another way of thinking about it), but as individuals standing within and in relation to systems.
From what I can tell in my own experience and my work with many hundreds or thousands of clients we are never “individual” and always “social” in some ways … yet we experience ourselves as individual quite often and that in part is what I’m commenting on … the disparity between our experience of the event and the event itself.
Submission is not giving in, or giving up oneself in my way of thinking about it … it is instead the giving of oneself to something and owning the act of submission as one of your choosing (another point I’ve emphasized).
So if you take the “whole” of what I’ve written as a piece you cannot get to, or at least easily get to, Adolph Eichmann “just following orders” … in his submitting to the system he must also retain the ownership of the choices he makes … including the consequences of distancing himself when the demands of submission no longer match the intention he holds or his sense of personal integrity becomes compromised.
FWIW the last is not easy, but neither is being fully human IMO.
Michael Harris says
Hi Joseph,
If I understand your main points correctly, that present day leadership is ineffective due to their general lack of decisiveness and due to their over-reliance on winning consensus from unrealistic/unnecessary parties, then I agree. If I have any beef at all with your message, it is that it is confusing from a basic communication point of view. As someone only recently acquainted with your work (two weeks into the TCP program), I am optimistic about your process and results, but wish that you would write/speak more clearly. For example, you begin this post with a nice hook about feeling agitated at the current state of affairs, but spend most of the post commenting on things which don’t really communicating what you are pumped up about, why, or your vision for how things can be better.
More specifically, consider one of your opening statements “I have been accused, or so it seems to me, to be resisting the interdiction to challenge some institutionalized ways of knowing. Specifically, an instruction of sorts about acting in alignment and accordance with a given model of interaction.” I’m sure that, when you read that, it seems perfectly clear what you mean, but for me, this took several re-reads to digest! Here is what Merriam-Webster defines interdiction as, “an order that something not be done or used.” So I guess what you’re saying is that someone accused you of resisting an order to cease from challenging an institutionalized approach to thinking about things?
Before you write off my complaint as the writings of a dimwitted poster incapable of following complex sentence structure, I’ll provide that I completed my undergraduate education at UC Berkeley and postgraduate degrees at UPenn, so I am usually able to easily follow what I read.
I’m not really sure why you interrupt your train of thought to tell us that you don’t consider what you say to be true with a capital T but just true for you, and then go on to justify why we should agree with this stance. If something is just YOUR opinion, fine, but if you want us to join you in that opinion (which is what arguments accomplish, right?) then the “this is just my experience” stuff seems unnecessary.
The above stuff isn’t the sum of my difficulties but I don’t want to belabor the point. I like your ideas and what you are trying to accomplish, I just hope that, if you are going to invite us to understand your dangerous feelings, you will be more careful in telling us why…