Transformation

 Heroic intent stills

The sticky past nails the fixed now

Fading dreams whisper

I am present when leaders gather in a sterile meeting room to talk about futures, trends, people, organisation, and transformation.

They are bold and forthright. They are practical and directive. They are heroes charged with changing the world. They see their history engraved in future achievements.

But, ever so slowly, complexity sneaks into the room. The scale of effort, the uncertainty of outcome, and the weight of history all pour into the conversation.

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Millions of small polystyrene balls from the past adhere to the polished surface of the imagined future. The need for certainty comes to dominate, and the endless present rolls out before us.

Quietly the meeting closes. Dreams of transformation fade. An uplifting but soothing communiqué is drafted.

Our future is bright, our history is important, and our present is practical.

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“In the modern world”, wrote Bertrand Russell, “and still more, so far as can be guessed, in a world of the near future, important achievement is and will be almost impossible to an individual if he cannot dominate some vast organisation.”[1]

This sentiment, written in 1948, is a deeply embedded modern leadership belief.

The pinnacle of leadership success is to command an empire through genius and force of will. We adore the heroic leader winning against the odds, the one who persists when others say they will fail.

Jobs, Bezos, Musk, Ma, Zuckerberg, and Branson have crafted hero brands that are emblematic of business success.

This is fiction.

Where is dumb luck? What of human fallibility and limitations? Where is the mass of everyday actions taken by everyday people that hold up the gifted few? Where are connection, dependence, and interdependence?

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Work and organisation remain a central feature of our everyday lives. Many of us depend, directly and indirectly, on the support of large organisations for our quality of life.

But, today, maybe more than in the past, the stability and certainty of work and organisation associated with the 1950s have been replaced by the unrelenting demand for change, reform, and transformation.

The breadth, depth, and speed of the change leave us all uncertain and disconnected. The necessary adjustments and adaptations are personal and private but also public and shared.

It is exhausting.

A rolling and roiling cascade of crisis that breaks the patterns of our lives and our work. We scrabble searching for handholds and footholds. We shed the unnecessary. We cast away anything that distracts attention from the near, immediate, and present.

We are desperately muddling through to save ourselves from confusion and madness.

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The fragility of our organisations, and the flaws of heroic leadership, are exposed.

In 1971, in Beyond the Stable State, Donald Schon observed that when we try to change our organisations, they “fight to stay the same”. The true test of heroic leaders is not starting a new enterprise but rather changing one that is established. A test, that history shows, is consistently failed.

Organisations have gravity. Culture, leadership, and process conspire to maintain balance and sameness. Change is resisted, marginalised, and quashed. But it is ‘achieved’ in ways that create the illusion of movement. Every child gets a prize.

We are all conspirators in uniformity while embracing transformation. The “dynamic stability” that is our organisational life.

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Leadership, no matter where it is performed, is an act of change. This is the obligation and weight of leading.

To not lose ourselves to chaos, we must assume the stability and certainty of our organisations. The illusion is important and necessary. But the peculiar obligation of leadership is that leaders must know, and must delicately let others know, that stability is both necessary and an illusion.

Leaders work against the millstones of our organisations that grind out diversity, manufacture sameness, crush imagination, and squeeze the joy and humanity from our work and community.

Leadership is an act of rebellion. But it is collective rebellion because cut off from the practical realities of work and organisation, the leader is distant, formal, abstract, and irrelevant.

Leaders speak that which is inexpressible to most. They dream the collective dream. They imagine and feel.

They connect the past, present, and future. Time, timing, and timeliness are understood as flow. Effective leaders are immersed in the perpetual tension of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Every decision is the start of an adventure, every act is a risk, and every conversation is a person.

To lead in uncertain times is to lead courageously and dangerously. This is the necessity and obligation of all leaders, not a small heroic few.

[1] Bertrand Russell, Authority and the individual, 1948.