Sane Leadership

The title of Margaret Wheatley’s new book, Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity intrigued me enough to read it. Facing reality means knowing where we are now and how we got here. Claiming leadership means determining the role of leaders now. And restoring sanity means creating islands of sanity. As with her prior books, one cannot easily summarize it. Rather, I will try focus on the leadership core of her book.

Sane leadership and local leadership comprise the major threads of her leadership discourse. If I had to pick out her core focus it would be this: Sane leadership is the unshakeable faith in people’s capacity to be generous, creative, and kind. It is the deep knowing that, even in the most dire circumstances, more becomes possible as people engage together with compassion and discernment, self-determining their best way forward. This leadership is no longer available at the global level. There is much to unpack here.

What then do sane leaders do?

They “create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas…that sustain our best human qualities.” Islands of sanity are sometimes an identifiable space such as a geographic community, a small organization, or a department within a large organization. For many, it is an interior space bounded by our values, commitment, and faith. Wheatley also says that islands of sanity are places of possibility and sanctuary where the destructive dynamics of collapse are kept at bay. For as long as they can be.

Creating islands of sanity means leading people to create positive changes locally that make life easier and more sustainable, that create possibility during global decline. These positive changes result in bringing people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings. They effect conditions that evoke in us the human qualities of generosity, contribution, community and love no matter what.

What are the skills and characteristics necessary to create islands of sanity?

Leaders need insight and compassion, irony and humor, and wise discernment. They must possess the skills to host explanatory conversations and support reflective processes. Time to reflect and learn from experience are essential. Leaders need to think well, with insight and discrimination. They need the skills of dialectical thinking to explore paradox, difference, and the evolution of issues. They also need systems thinking to determine root causes, so energy is not wasted on superficial actions.

Leaders also must be self-aware. They must notice how they are being influenced and changed in both positive and negative directions. Self-awareness and the ability to notice who you are becoming is especially important as you respond to pressure.

Sane leaders need compassion and insight. Wheatley believes compassion is easy. It arises spontaneously from an open heart. Insight or discernment requires more skill. Leaders need to choose their battles carefully. They must discern where they can be most effective. This requires good thinking and understanding the opposition. Finding allies is essential; right timing is everything.

Finally, Wheatley strongly opines that leaders should be present for others. Leaders must clear their perceptual filters to discern what is going on. Mindfulness practices can teach us to watch our minds, notice what triggers us, and learn how to create a space before reacting. These practices give us the ability to stay present even when challenged by other people’s fears and aggression. These abilities, says Wheatley, require disciplined training. You cannot just will yourself to be present.

Today’s environment

Wheatley believes the todays environment requires sane leaders. She develops her concept of sane leadership based on two frameworks. She calls one framework “the pattern of collapse of complex civilizations.” Here she refers to the books of two historians: John Glubb’s The Fate of Empires and the Search for Survival, while the other is Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. The second framework, which she has used for a long time in her writings, is the science of living systems.

The pattern of collapse. The collapse theories provide the basis for her pessimism about today’s society, which she sees as a global happening. Wheatley believes the pattern of collapse is occurring with astonishing speed. She sees a world which hastens to dominate, ignore, and abuse the human spirit. Leadership has been debased because leaders are seen as being successful today when they take things to scale or are the first to market or dominate the competition or develop killer apps. They hold on to power by constantly tightening their stranglehold of fear until people are left lifeless and cowering.

Wheatley writes two powerful paragraphs that well highlight her pessimism. Sane leaders, she says, need to be fully aware of what is going on, how economic and social policies are failing to solve our problems, increasing people’s anger and alienation. A society collapses when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity. Collapse is the sudden simplification of complexity, the loss of institutions and ways of life that depend on complex systems to do their work. The loss of complex systems pushes people back on their own resources. They retreat into clans and ethnicities. People revert to the worst human behaviors, struggling to survive such great dislocation.

She bases her other succinct summary of our impending demise on our post-truth, fake news world. She believes we are witnessing the death of reality. We cannot live in this world without a commonly shared sense of what is important, what is of value, what is real. The internet has enabled global groundlessness unparalleled in human history because of its scale and penetration. How do we make sense of the larger world beyond our group? We don’t. We contract inward, we seek self-protection, and the world becomes ever more hostile and frightening. Humans cannot live without meaning. The greater the uncertainty, the more our desperate grasp for a handhold, a shred of meaning. Is our meaning found in the realization that we are the chosen ones? The realization that everyone else is inferior? The hope that our former way of life will be restored? The promise that someone will end the sickening fear and noise in our heads?

Living systems: self-organization and emergence.

Her second framework, living systems, or more particularly, self-organization, allows her to bring some optimism to her overall perspective. But she still has to work for it. Although Wheatly believes self-organization has damaging as well as positive effects, it is the most powerful organizing dynamic we have. In what may be heresy to some, she posits that self-organization require leadership. Self-organization creates networks and networks have no hierarchy, just nodes. Leaders come from within the network, they emerge from the initiative of individuals and groups. An organization does not need more rigid controls. It does need a more focused identity that opens to new people and new ways of thinking. Leaders take advantage of self-organization by arousing creative acts that further its cause, its identity.

Leaders of a self-organizing system first must keep watch over the system’s identity. Systems change as people make their own decisions. Often people will try to shift a system’s or an organization’s identity toward an extreme to make a difference and get attention. Leaders of a self-organizing system must not let events and crises distract them watching what is happening to its identity. Being unwatchful often results in leaders becoming more controlling once they become aware of the identity change. Second, leaders in self-organizing systems must ensure that people are using the organization’s identity to decide on the actions they take. This is especially important in times of crises when reflection time disappears and reactivity is high.

Where do we go from here?

I find it particularly difficult to summarize a closing to Wheatley’s book. I will start first with a description from a complexity perspective of why she may be as pessimistic as she is. Wheatley makes the point that emergence wields power over the parts that created it. She calls this downward causation. Although a system would not exist without its parts, once it does exist it subjugates the parts. People, consequently, must often participate in patterns of behavior that are foreign to them. They adopt the values and customs of their culture even when that culture contradicts their personal values. Most people unconsciously adapt, accommodate, change their behaviors, to their culture. People want to belong even though they may not like what they belong to.

People cannot work backwards once a culture or pattern of responses has emerged. There is nothing to do but start over, and this starting over is to return to our basic identity, the source of self-organization. Here we can reclaim what we believe in, what gives us meaning.

If Wheatley were to end here, the game would be over, so to speak. But she makes a saving point: everything alive possesses the freedom to chose what to notice and determine its responses. We can use our intelligence to notice that we cannot abide how this culture is changing us, our children, and our colleagues. Therefore, she argues, if we focus on relationships and see learning as a core value, and if we seek partners, then we have a strong chance to self-organize as individuals living and working together in healthy community, in islands of sanity.

In this specific context, sane leaders become necessary. The work of leaders here is to focus within our sphere of influence while accepting the harsh reality that we cannot change the global condition or culture that has emerged. There is no good way to unwind where we are. We cannot spend time trying to stay hopeful. Wheatley sees hope as a filter we willingly place on reality. We obscure reality with our needs and dreams, with our egos. She quotes the former Czech leader Vaclav Havel: “hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” When we move beyond the filters of what we hope for, we can see what needs to be done right – right action – and act appropriately. We can act with compassion and insight.

In closing, sane leaders are warriors of the spirit. Such leaders help people see what is possible, that it is possible to live with integrity. They help people see that humans can still live and work well together, that we can still behave as human beings. Human beings become the center of actions. Sane leaders focus on serving others. They serve individuals, small groups, entire communities or organizations. They attend to people in front of them. The offer insight and compassion. They are the exemplars of the best human qualities – which is a life well lived, even if we do not save the world. This is why we need leaders, says Wheatley, and why leadership is a noble profession.

Comment.

I have always had a like/dislike attitude toward Wheatley. On the plus side I admire her creativity and eclecticism and her efforts to apply complexity to leadership. I also see her as someone with a sense or purpose and a warm heart. On the other hand, her eclecticism sometimes suffers from superficiality as she attempts to popularize and extend the range of materials she brings to her writing. Most of all, her writing style seems a mixture of a Delphic oracle, e.e.cummings, and James Joyce. Her writing style probably results from her eclectic and creative thinking.

I take away from reading her book several thoughts. First, I kept thinking about the islands of sanity that many kept during Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, or other places with similar conditions. It may be that individuals, communities, and small organizations and their leaders kept alive embers that permitted a better society to emerge from the ashes of Nazism and Stalinism.

Although I have not reached her level of pessimism, I do not dismiss her notion that our future may rely on the ability of local leaders, leading at a small scale, warriors of the spirit, keeping certain values and mores alive in times that provoke their dismemberment. Unlike her, I still possess some belief that global leaders, leaders of national and international interests and resources, public and private, will develop and eventually prevail as sane leaders. But I also must admit that I see this more as a possibility than a probability.

Second, I see in Wheatley’s discussion of the functioning of self-organization a description very similar to Ralph Stacey’s complex responsive processes. I don’t think Wheatley has read Stacey and vice-versa, but her description of how sane leaders need to behave and the skills and values they need to have to be successful are very similar to those advocated by Stacey. (see his Tools and Techniques of Leadership and Management: Meeting the Challenges of Complexity.) Having the capability to lead in the increasingly important context of self-organization and emergence becomes an increasingly significant skill and framework that leaders need to possess.

Third, in reading the book I tried to think about the relevance or connection of other theories of leadership in addition to complexity with its emphasis on self-organization and emergence. Some of her leadership content connects with relational leadership and servant leadership. But the concept of steward leadership seems most applicable to Wheatley’s line of thought in this book. Interestingly, stewardship has not been a significant aspect of leading in the leadership curriculum in which I have been involved.

Fourth, and I think this relates to stewardship and pehaps servant leadership theories, is my appreciation on the person and personalism as described in “my viewpoint” page. While Wheatley often refers to individuals and to people, she does not use the word person. Yet her focus as I see it is really on the person, the dignity of each human being. She talks about the need to preserve, protect, defend, champion, encourage, and honor the human spirit. As she puts it, sane leaders are part of a noble tradition of people who, in every age, devote themselves to protecting and serving others. Throughout time, warriors of the human spirit arise when people need protection – they lead with compassion and insight because they remember the capacities every human being possesses.

Finally, I make a brief comment on a topic that Wheatly raises only momentarily but one that deserves more attention. She raises these questions about leading from the future: How many leaders spend time in the future? How many decisions are made using information from both present realities and future scenarios? How many organizations are willing to open their boundaries and absorb information as they can, knowing that it is only these exchanges that prevent deterioration and death? My answer is, hardly at all.

These questions played little if any role in the leadership curriculum in which I taught. Yet, we know current and future changes in our societies, polities, economies, and technologies are occurring with dramatic speed and consequences.Leaders need to grasp at least the outlines of the shadows of the future. Leaders require such a capability in order to start the process necessary to adapt to the future and/or to begin the process of initiating changes that can positively influence the future. Leaders cannot simply wait for the future to arrive.