Hello Reader,
Far too often I have found myself staring blankly out the window, dwelling on what it is that I must do, to ensure the time I have is used in a meaningful way.
And this has been uncomfortable for me, in the way that make us realise we have been participating in something we knew was wrong, but never admitted it, or said it out loud. It's the way of these uncomfortable things; they're so accurately felt.
Sometimes staring out the window reveals something for me. Something I've been hiding from myself.
We have built our organisations, our communities, our public and private lives around a fantasy of exceptional individuals—the ones that are meant to arrive, see our problems clearly, act decisively, and deliver us from the burden of having to figure things out for ourselves. These people are celebrated and elevated by all of us every time we laude over them with the expectation that they and they alone will take us by the hand into a better future where certainty and hopefully abundance exists.
We often, mistakenly, call them 'leaders'.
I'd like to think of this as something closer to a well-trained dependency on authority.
Did you ever have an authoritative school teacher who was simply 'in charge' all the time? It's such a subtle way to let ourselves off the hook. To alleviate the burden of delivering ourselves into a new world, and instead we outsource the effort and accountability to someone else. Even if they all look the same; as long as they get the job done they're easier to blame when it all goes pear-shaped.
We get to continue on with our lives; comfortably numb and oblivious.
What makes this interesting is that the dependency is mutual. Power feeds on this. The leader gets to be needed. The rest of us are absolved of any kind of responsibility. A mutually beneficial form of remaining oblivious to the effort of crafting our own paths towards our own destinies.
Yet, the question for those who are more conscious than others remains, at what cost is the benefit of such a mutually beneficial arrangement when both parties benefit from the arrangement?
A friend recently recommend Peter Block's wonderful work titled, Community (2008) which describes this form of leadership as a form of parenting. Our workplace resembles a household where one person holds the responsibility and everyone else manages upward; and panders to their every whim. The result is the paralysis of our physical, mental, creative and emotional growth.
All of this is dressed up as a functioning culture. Something many multi-billionaire, tech-bro startups are famous for cultivating and infamous for tearing down.
Earlier this year I, like many around the world, was taken by Mark Carney's speech at Davos in January, particularly his mention of an essay title The Power of the Powerless; a story about a sign in a window, which I have since found doing circles in my mind.
Written by Author and former President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel the essay is about how the average person cooperates with systems they find completely absurd because cooperation is how they manage the anxiety of the moment.
Doing anything else is just too difficult.
In the essay, a greengrocer puts a sign in the window—a statement to support the system he no longer believes in yet chooses to go along with—because it is so much easier than change. Cooperation means he is happy for someone else to wear the responsibility. Showing his support for the kind of leadership he doesn't believe in absolves himself of any effort and responsibility, until the day he chooses not to put the sign in the window. Until the day he chose to say, 'enough'.
Mark Carney was talking about the international rules-based order—the decades-long arrangement in which countries joined institutions, praised a set of principles, and benefited from predictability, even while knowing the story was partially false, that "the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient", that the fiction was useful precisely because no one named it as fiction.
"So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality...we are now taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it." Carney said.
Then called on leaders of other countries to take their signs down too.
The gesture of the sign in the window, it turns out still symbolises the arrangements we have all made in the kind of leadership we have stopped believing in. Why? Because the alternative requires a confrontation too difficult to face.
The great Civil Rights author and activist, James Baldwin said "nothing can be changed until it is faced." So let us face it shall we?
The antidote is not better leadership, but the abandonment of the accepted leadership models altogether, or at least the heroic versions of them.
I have used the word stewardship deliberately in past essays, to describe a key attribute of the new creative leadership; an act of holding something in trust for future generations, of remaining accountable without hoarding control or power.
Anand Giridharadas, in his wonderful book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), puts it more bluntly when writing about elite forms of philanthropic leadership: "The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. The fox, in other words, has been asked to design the henhouse."
This is why we keep our signs in the window, not because change is beyond us, but because someone finds it useful that we keep our signs there.
Change takes work. Real work. Hard work.
It takes effort to face ourselves and everything we once believed in. Resisting the seduction of the spotlight and the stage. This requires a particular kind of confidence. It requires humility and patience.
And it requires us to spend time staring out the window facing the uncomfortable questions, and deciding that we will no longer put that sign back up.
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See you next week.
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Learn more about my March First project here.