Yesterday I stood in my kitchen and an archetypal piece of pop culture, a t-shirt print, called forth a voice from the past. In another time and another place, another man stood and mused far more lyrically on a classical piece of culture.
As I stirred the mince, a t-shirt on the television grabbed my attention. '6 May 1937' was superimposed over an airship. Reflexively I recalled Herbert Morrison's voice crying out with anguish: 'Oh, the humanity!' As my conscious thinking caught up, a newsreel flickered into life in my minds eye and I felt myself transported to an airfield in New Jersey as an airship burned.
From the Greek κάθαρσις and translated as either cleansing or clarification. Though the meaning has been much argued over, it is nonetheless a powerful action which we undergo when seeking to salve our troubled thinking. Part of the reason why I embarked upon #100DaysToOffload was to achieve some portion of catharsis in a year which has had equal measures of sorrow and joy.
This post is the first of my #100DaysToOffload. The concept, kicked off by Kev Quirk, is simple: to write on your personal blog every day for 100 days.
I am looking forward to the challenge, and a challenge it will be, because my most recent writing efforts and current researches are months if not years in the gestation and in consequence I am out of the habit of a daily journal.
I hope the process is instructive and gets my creative thoughts flowing again, as well as being a little cathartic. My very own Pensieve:
One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form. – Albus Dumbledore
This post is day 001 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. If you want to get involved, you can get more info from https://100daystooffload.com.
Posted in #100DaysToOffload #thoughts
Due to the complex interactions which constitute ‘leadership,’ a rich and diverse literature has developed to try and explain the phenomenon. This literature has sought to understand the cognitive, emotive and perception basis of leadership as well as the broader societal foundations which impact leaders and followers.
Yet despite the growing diversity of leadership theory, and accompanying academic agendas, several challenges remain. In my research and blog I try to address these by critically examining foundational assumptions that define leadership research.
Leopold von Ranke’s famous interdict, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ [as things actually are], is perhaps best translated as ‘how it essentially was.’ By it, Ranke meant that he wanted to penetrate by a kind of intuitive understanding to the inner being of the past. Those who undertake writing about history do well to meditate on Ranke's meaning.
As a philosopher of history my thinking always looks back to project solutions forward. In doing so I am cognisant that each generation has seen a ‘turning point,’ asked very similar questions and, in a manifestation of Santayana’s prophetic phrase, often repeated the mistakes of the past. Part of the cause for this repetition of error is, as R. G. Collingwood noted, we too often ask the wrong questions by only enquiring about what people did, rather than trying to understand what they thought. In such a context we often give the right answer to the question, but, because it is the wrong question, fail to resolve the issue which persists for the next generation.
If the present leadership continues this trend of asking the wrong questions, no matter how well it may answer, the history of our time, far from being a turning point, will be described using A. J. P. Taylor’s famous phrase: ‘history reached its turning point and failed to turn.’
Philosopher and historian by training, Operations Director by pay cheque. I am also a doctoral candidate at the Macquarie Business School researching Edmund Burke on authority and the implications for leadership.
In 'No one is to blame for misbehaviour', I made reference to George Herbert Mead’s 'I' and 'Me.' But what did he mean by them and what are their implications for the practice of management?
In Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun, the character John Connor makes the observation:
The Japanese have a saying: ‘Fix the problem, not the blame.’ Find out what’s screwed up and fix it. Nobody gets blamed. We’re always after who screwed up. Their way is better.
While it is likely this proverb is as much a product of the author's imagination as the fictional Nakamoto Corporation around which the novel pivots, it doesn't detract from it being apposite when looking it how organisations and individuals address agency when something goes wrong. The challenge for leaders, in an Org Behaviour setting, is that the simple mantra of 'fix the problem, not the blame' runs the risk of becoming lost in a world which has become enthralled to the behaviourism of B. F. Skinner which teaches that because of environmental conditioning, no one is to blame for misbehaviour. But if Skinner is right, how do we develop a sense of personal responsibility?