Managing Leadership^®

Detectives do that: organize the facts. They arrange them one way, then another, trying to determine in which they hang together best in the face of all the available information. What they are doing, it could be argued, is positing one premise, then another, picking as true the one that seems most likely to stand up to examination, and then viewing the case from it and drawing their conclusions from what results.

Another way to see this is as though they are creating alternate realities, with different properties, producing varying consequences.

Think, for example of organizing the facts around the premise that the earth is the center of the universe, or around another that has it as a free-floating body in space along with all others. The same facts were long viewed as hanging together best around the former premise.

This produced beliefs about the nature of things and the trajectories of events and new facts that produced particular predictions. It was an awful long time before those predictions so failed to answer the needs put on them that the facts had to be re-organized.

What’s interesting about this, here, is the influence on our thinking of the absence or presence and scope of the “box” – any cultural or other constraints – we have imposed on it. The thing is that, as much as we talk about thinking outside of the box, it is difficult to do that if we are unaware of its presence or nature.

This is a topic that Tolstoy spends a lot of time addressing in the latter parts of War and Peace. His discussion is pertinent on these pages because he denies the Great Man theory, arguing instead that a tide of unconsciously converging human decisions and events carry all – great and small – along with it. We cling to ascribing these great movements to great men because we are accustomed to doing that by millennia of habit – we’re still trapped in that conceptual box.

So, which way of organizing the facts hangs together best in the face of all we know? Events flowing from great individual leaders, or the buzzing tide of human activity thoughtlessly self-organizing into larger movements, depositing what we later suppose to be singularly influential figures here and there like glaciers scraping along the landscape of life, leaving unlikely detritus behind in their wake?

What do you think are the organizational implications of questions like these? On which premise do you build your view of management (or leadership, if you must)? On which do you act? From which do you interpret current, and predict future, events?

Do you think Tolstoy has gathered all the facts, or applied sufficient imagination to their organization? Might there not be additional ways of arranging them, of drawing premises from them?

Might not doing so suggest fascinating new – and perhaps more effective – ways of perceiving what is happening around us, and predicting what might unfold next?

Does the center of the organizational universe reside in individual leadership, or are we planets interacting with each other according to our relative influence over our combined fate? Who, really, is the perpetrator of what, here?

If you think the latter is a good way to describe how superior individual leaders grow so influential that they inevitably draw more and more followers to them, do bear in mind that we have learned to call the comparative phenomenon in nature a black hole. There is no establishment of balance, no weighted collaboration, once that dynamic is set in motion.

Best to approach the subject like a detective, making neither assumptions nor predictions until we have considered and effectively organized all the facts. Perhaps there is yet something else going on, if we can only free ourselves of distorting premises, and develop the right one, the one that best incorporates all we know.

Any ideas?

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Today’s tip: Speaking of imaginative organization of the facts unconstrained by convention, and which open up useful new perspectives, please see this excellent post by Rowan Manahan, at Fortify Your Oasis, offering quotes about how to view life – from Dave Berry.

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