Author: Richard Foggo

This essay is a response to my experience of leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic.  I found it tough.   So I picked up a book on leadership.  That book talked about Plato.  I wasn’t convinced, so I went back to read Plato for myself.  That started me thinking about leadership more generally.  This essay is a reflection on that thinking.  Where I get to is the deceptively simple claim that true leaders are those of us who are as in touch with reality as it’s possible to be.  Along the way I emphasise just how difficult that is and to be particularly vigilant against those who claim to be but aren’t.  Leadership on this account is more a matter of perception than action.  That might seem counter-intuitive. It might also seem naive. I end by saying something brief about that.

In a wonderful piece in The Guardian writer Neal Ascherson likens our state of being in pandemic lockdown to cure de sommeil – the sleep cure:

Yet a great emergency, like this shared time of pestilence, leaves people sensing their own power, aware that they can act without waiting for yesterday’s leaders. When we finally wake up from the long sleep cure, there is a chance to make those “never agains” more than a fading dream. A chance – but lasting only for a few months of creative confusion as we all stand up again and look around. “Rise like lions after slumber,” said Shelley. There is plenty to do, but we have to do it fast.

Ascherson’s analogy obviously relies on it being possible for us to awaken to a new reality (and thereby be cured). Otherwise of course it’s just sleep. 

As it happens, Ascherson has been talking about us being on the verge of an awakening for a while now, long before the pandemic.  Herewith 2017: “[h]elplessness, not independence, is the false dream, the “sleep, wonderful sleep” now tempting Scotland again. But the alarm is going off.”

The alarm has been going off for a while now and yet we are still asleep. As Ascherson puts it, 2020 now: “for most people life is on hold. A trance descends, soothed by birdsong, a dog barking, an ambulance in the distance.”

To be fair to Ascherson the analogy between pandemic lockdown and a spiritual and cultural slumber seems almost to draw itself. With the lifting of the lockdown representing the possibility of (spiritual and cultural) awakening.

So apt perhaps that it may seem more than just an analogy but it is an analogy. In reality, when our eyes open – when lockdown is lifted – there won’t be any more buildings than there were or fewer mountains; the sky will still be blue and the grass green. The suffering will certainly still have happened. The slate will not be clean. Above all, the dead will not have risen.  

So transformation won’t follow naturally, as day follows night. On what basis then will we rise like lions and not lambs after slumber?

The temptation is to see what’s required to be above all a matter of resolve, resolution, will. Perhaps above all political will: the will for things to change and change for the better. 

We can perhaps see something of this in the narrative of renewal in the Scottish Government’s COVID-19: A Framework for Decision Making: “When things come apart, there is always the opportunity to put them back together differently.”

This document speaks of the political will to put in place the conditions needed for us to think and act differently. Ultimately we will have the chance to be differently, a redemption of sorts.

I don’t exactly deny that will is important; we will indeed need to will things differently after lockdown if we want them to be different.  

But here’s a thought: what if will and willing are in fact the issue?

What if underlying our most troubling issues, our obsession with possession and the consumerist nightmare that follows, along with our desire for absolute dominion over nature and the climate emergency that follows, and so on, there lies a corrupting and ultimately catastrophic conception of will and willing?

Maybe then the awakening Ascherson talks about – the sense of our power – is precisely not grounded in our capacity to will into being a new reality even one that is “better” (economically, socially, politically) but something altogether different, deeper.

What if we were to awaken to see as if for the first time? What if what mattered here was seeing not willing?

I am not the slightest bit religious but I cannot help but think exactly here of Corinthians 15:52: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

And we shall be changed. In the twinkling of an eye.

The COVID pandemic has created a crisis in our conceptual lives. We are experiencing the kind of conceptual emergency that Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara claim accompanies all real emergencies, including pandemics.

Not everyone will cope, not everyone will wake from this nightmare changed. Those who can Leicester and O’Hara call persons of tomorrow, persons who have the competences and literacies to meet the complex and ambiguous world with creativity and transgression, growth and transformation. 

Persons of tomorrow are the people who Ascherson claims will rise like lions from slumber, who will act without waiting for yesterday’s leaders.

This claim takes a familiar shape.  It’s worth just highlighting a couple of concerns that help us position the claim.

First, Leicester and O’Hara consider these competences and literacies to be innate which matters not just because that makes them natural but because it thereby seeks to disrupt any elitist or aristocratic reading of their claims. 

They recognise, I think, that persons of tomorrow cannot be the chosen few; but are potentially any of us. There is work to be done nonetheless to ensure that our material situation does not stand in the way of fulfilling that potential. Otherwise class and power will defeat their egalitarian intentions. That’s something for exploration elsewhere.

We must also not see persons of tomorrow as those simply with the strongest will and resolve. That is the source not of power but ruin. 

That’s the thought I want to pursue in the rest of what follows.

The idea that those who might lead us into a new tomorrow are distinctively strong-willed seems almost inevitable.  They possess the will both to create and to resist the temptations of the fallen world; the will to grow and transform.  And so on.

This is a tenacious picture. It is deeply rooted. Indeed it seems almost a tautology, a conceptual truth: leadership is resolution, resolve. 

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says: “A picture held us captive”. He had in mind a particular conception of language which takes words to be names and sentences to be combinations of such names. But the point holds generally about certain deeply ingrained assumptions (“pictures”) that lie before and to some extent outside rational critique.

I think that the conception of leadership which effectively indexes human excellence to strength of will is just such a picture.

Just as Wittgenstein sought to free us from the spell of a certain view of language so we must free ourselves from the spell of a certain view of human will if we are to awaken into anything resembling a new reality.

For me the beginning of wisdom here is to follow not Wittgenstein but one of the generation of philosophers that followed him: Iris Murdoch. 

Iris Murdoch has described the conceptual emergency Leicester and O’Hara identify more lucidly than anyone before or since.

For Murdoch the picture of leadership or human excellence as resolution, resolve is grounded in “far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality”. 

Speaking clearly from within the conceptual emergency, Murdoch says:

What have we lost here? And what have we perhaps never had? We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity.

So what awakening amounts to is not a move toward greater scientific clarity and insight – as if we just need our concepts to be sharper – nor indeed to a superficial new political settlement – as if all we need is for our concepts to be more powerful and persuasive. 

As Murdoch puts it, we must avoid “the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole.” Instead we must awaken to “the real impenetrable human being”: “substantial, impenetrable, individual, indefinable, and valuable”.

The point is to use the experience of the pandemic to reflect soberly on the sense in which our conception of ourselves – as bare naked wills – has been driven by a fantasy, a fantastical sense of fulfilment and progress, of consumption and dominion. 

In this denuded state of lockdown, reflecting on what we have lost, we open the possibility of discovering that what is lost was never really what it seemed to be, and was, in certain critical regards, not only not valuable at all but positively damaging. 

As Ascherson says, “[t]he fantasies and anxieties are already with us. And here one comparison with wartime does work. The longer the virus emergency lasts, the more the memory of the pre-virus world begins to grow unreal, unconvincing.”

For “unconvincing” read “shallow and flimsy”.

What then is the alternative? Murdoch in turn turns to the incomparable Simone Weil: will is obedience not resolution.  

The ideal situation . . . is rather to be represented as a kind of ‘necessity’. This is something of which saints speak and which any artist will readily understand. The idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’.

When Ascherson says that we need to stand up and look around, the “look” here is not an active exercise of will and resolution, a taking and grasping. That is at the very heart of our definition of conceptualising, of applying our concepts – bringing things under categories and definitions, one thing rather than another. This reduction of the many to one has even been described as a form of violence.

But let us think of Ascherson’s standing up and looking instead as Murdoch’s “patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation”.  Let us look as a saint might on the suffering of others. Let us look as the artist might on the world around us. If we do then much of what ails us becomes not merely undesirable, as if it still requires us to choose or consent to not have it, but impossible. 

It is not clear that there is anything resembling an argument here. The best that one might do would be to canvass views on the following claim: murder is impossible. 

If one understands how such a claim might be true, despite murder being all too possible, one has perhaps begun to understand what Murdoch is saying here when she talks of the necessary obedience of saints and artists.

Murdoch has long since given us the prospectus for our awakening:

We need more concepts than our philosophies have furnished us with. We need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian and non-religious sense, the transcendence of reality. A simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and totally free, engenders a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it. We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.

Leicester and O’Hara talk about the threshold or foundational competence of persons of tomorrow being our ability to read ourselves, our culture and our world. We might instead say, a new tomorrow depends on our ability to attend to ourselves, our culture and our world with a patient, loving regard.

A vision then of leadership and human excellence that is based more on a vocabulary of attention rather than of control.

If so, I wonder then whether (contra Ascherson and Shelley) we might not after all prefer to rise like lambs after slumber?

For some of last year an older family member requiring care came to live with us. Given our circumstances we needed to supplement the care we could provide with a “care package”. In practice that meant a visit twice a day from a “care worker” from a small team who were providing support for a number of “clients”. 

I use scare quotes to register an unhappiness with the vocabulary of care. It seems riven with a certain transactionalism and commodification.

I cannot for a second imagine that that is justified by the common experience of such care. That is to say I cannnot imagine that we find the use of such transactional vocabulary apt because such care is in fact in general transactional.

There are reasons for the transactional language – a way no doubt to avoid condescending alternatives – but my failure to imagine its aptness is because of the nature of my experience and encounter with such care. My experience, as I shall say, contradicts it. 

Is that contradicting experience universal? Of course not. I can’t deny that there were times when the interaction between my relative and their worker was perfunctory. Team members came and went. At times they seemed stressed and distracted, impatient and hasty. 

Even so, speculating on the inherent motivation of such workers seems if not irrelevant then certainly secondary. Even if there are horrifying exceptions, there are more important things to be said not least about the status, rewards and demands placed on such workers before we get anywhere near generalised criticism.  

Who could avoid being stressed, distracted, impatient and hasty in the context of ten or perhaps twenty housecalls a day?

But what my use of scare quotes is intended to register is that on occasions what I witnessed transcended the perfunctory and indeed the professional and did so to an extraordinary degree. 

What I witnessed was something of a quite different order to anything that might resemble a transaction, something that requires a completely different vocabulary.

I want to say that what I saw, occasionally, but not uniquely, was a miracle. 

I saw an encounter between two human beings that was as tender and intense as I could ever imagine, made all the more astonishing by the fact that it was between two human beings that barely knew each other and which took place within an allocated fifteen or so minute slot.  

We have come to talk about kindness as a virtue in public service. I think we do so to contrast and show up the way of seeing things that I described above as transactional. Kindness registers a “thicker”, more morally loaded notion of human interaction than the more objectified, commodified forms (e.g., clients or service users and service providers).  

But there are occasions when it is not thick enough. The vocabulary of kindness appears distinctly inadequate in the face of the sort of interaction between humans that can happen when, for instance, a carer cares, or a nurse nurses or a doctor doctors. Or for that matter when a teacher teaches. 

(It is a matter of some interest, for another occasion, to specify the boundaries of this phenomenon; would one say it of an engineer, a police officer, a politician, a civil servant?)

What I witnessed was care given absolutely without condescension in a way that I can only describe using the conceptual repertoire of miracle, love, sacredness, and so on.

I felt humbled and even to an extent shamed. Shamed that all along I had clearly had some degree of pity and condescension in my heart. Of course in the face of great affliction such things as pity are “justified” but what I saw in the loving care provided to my beloved family member by their carer was something altogether better: a good beyond (mere) virtue. 

It is the sort of compassion for the afflicted that Simone Weil described as “a more astounding miracle than walking on water, healing the sick or even raising the dead”.  

I think it is part of the essence of this that it came through experience and not reason. It could not have been true and can never be true that (true) love be a means to an end. Love is an end in itself; one either feels it or one doesn’t. There is no “should” or “must” as 2+2 must surely equal 4.

This makes me think of a perceptive remark by R. F. Holland, quoted by the philosopher who has to the greatest degree inspired the thoughts in this note, Raimond Gaita:

“A stance has to be taken unless it goes by default, towards the difference between judgements that are of the highest significance for ethics and judgements that are not. In the former case I would say that it is more a matter of registering an experience or marking an encounter, than passing a judgement. I am thinking now of what can be seen in the unprofitable fineness of certain deeds or characters – and is pointed to by the unprofitable vileness of others; the difference between the unqualified goodness attested or offended against there and the ordinary run of merits and demerits among people and their works.”

I would agree: discerning matters of the highest significance are more a matter of registering an experience or marking an encounter than passing a judgement.

I might have understood my own behaviour to that point in terms of the ordinary run of merits and demerits, but I have now registered what can be seen in the unprofitable fineness of certain deeds and character. I can only aspire to such fineness, to such unqualified goodness.

These insights came before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I have in other contexts acknowledged the insight of Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara that every real emergency is also a conceptual and ultimately existential emergency. That is palpable when it comes to the catastrophy that is a global pandemic.

I want though to add a thought: perhaps in all such cases we are confronted by a moral or ethical emergency too.

That moral or ethical emergency is expressed in the following sentence which a human being (who I shall not dignify with a name) said out loud (or at least wrote down): “spending £350 billion to prolong the lives of a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people is an irresponsible use of taxpayers’ money”.

It does not add anything to the horror of this remark that one of the elderly people written off here is my beloved family member. Even if that were not true I would still consider such a thought unthinkable.  

One might be tempted to suppose that that claim can only be metaphorical because in stating it one has essentially already thought it. One has performatively contradicted onself.

But I mean thinkable here not in a thin, abstract sense – an idle thought – but in the thickest and realest sense I can possibly muster. In that sense, such a thought is utterly unthinkable and that is a literal truth.

For what it’s worth I take the attempt to think this thought to be a reductio ad absurdem of at least the more superficial forms of consequentialist thinking in which the end justifies the means. Indeed as it happens I think it hits home hard against any form of consequentialist thinking. But that sort of philosophical oneupmanship is a complete distraction from what I feel impelled to say about it.

Of consequentialist thinking and epithets of precisely this sort philosopher Stuart Hampshire wrote: 

“epithets usually associated with morally impossible action, on a sense of disgrace, of outrage, of horror, of baseness, of brutality, and, most important, a sense of a barrier assumed to be firm and almost unsurmountable, has been knocked over, and a feeling that if this horrible, or outrageous, or squalid or brutal, action is possible then anything is possible and nothing is forbidden, and all restraints are threatened.”

This is what I want to say, not just in the name of my “elderly” relative but in my own name: I refuse to allow this thought to be tolerated as thinkable to avoid knocking over a barrier that must for the sake all human decency remain firm and unsurmountable.  

As Hampshire says, if such as thought is thinkable then anything is possible, nothing is forbidden and all restraints are threatened. That is utterly intolerable. 

Regrettably, I understand that to be a normative thought, expressing an ought perhaps more than an is.

As Raimond Gaita says: “Just as you can tell what kind of person someone is partly by what she finds morally unthinkable, so you can tell the essential character of a nation by noting what is undiscussible in it. Nations and their political and moral cultures are partly defined by what is undiscussible in them.”

Unfortunately the well has been poisoned, the waters muddied. It is as if the boundaries and constraints of the thinkable and the discussable have been loosened to such an extent that the necessary contrasting idea of the unthinkable has been devalued. 

That we are meeting the potential horror with our collective eyes wide open and not leaving those who care professionally to meet this alone.

It is not so much that everything is now thinkable as that just so much is now deemed unthinkable. We now no-platform and excommunicate at the drop of a hat. We have utterly devalued the currency.  

It cannot be called out in a way that can easily be heard. 

There is an ideological dimension to this that one might well describe in terms of the qualities of the human heart (that carry with them implied notions of leadership): hard hearted (“right”) versus bleeding hearts (“left”). 

When faced by a real emergency that is at the same time an existential emergency one might find oneself imagining that amongst our political leaders there is no choice but to think precisely these supposedly unthinkable thoughts: if essentially sacrificing “a few hundred thousand mostly elderly people” (“a lesser evil”) in the short run saves our economy with all the horror that brings (“a greater evil”) then that is a price worth paying.

We have heard such things before: if torturing a few Muslims to extract actionable intelligence will thereby save thousands of lives then so be it. If sacrificing some civil liberties protects our way of life then sacrifice we must.  And so on.

These are often presented in philosophy classes – the ticking bomb or trolley problem – and in the media perhaps more than anywhere else. In the media they are often presented as hard cases that only tough leaders have the balls to confront, and indeed must confront.  

This apparent dilemma is represented beautifully in Dick Cheney’s fourth wall breaking speech at the conclusion of Adam McKay’s superb Vice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E-v5yDBR64 

“I will not apologise for doing what needed to be done”. I will not apologise for thinking what needed to be thought. Thinking the unthinkable so that “your loved ones can sleep peacefully”.

But one may well ask (evoking Shakespeare’s Macbeth): at what cost sleep?

The sense in which such things are unthinkable is not psychological. Thinking the unthinkable is not just a matter of mental toughness, of having “the right stuff”. As if one just needs to grit one’s teeth, gird one’s loins. In the end this has got very little of anything to do with psychological toughness. This is about moral toughness.

Toughness precisely not to think the unthinkable or find an uneasy balance between a lesser and greater evil. As Gaita says, “a lesser evil is still evil”.

The toughness here is the toughness needed to realise that there is no such choice. There are no such trade offs. There is no balance to be struck. 

For that to be clear I need to risk taking seriously what I have said cannot be taken seriously, viz. to think what it would be, for instance, to let hundreds of thousands of people die to save the economy. 

One cannot be said actually to have thought this thought unless one is willing to think what it would actually amount to. Literally leaving them to die? Without support? Without medical treatment? Would we seek to ease their passing? Would we restrain their families from seeking to help? 

And so on. 

Each question more brutal than the last until every last bit of (moral) sense is knocked out of the sentence. All that would be left to be thought would be that what is needed is a final solution. Godwin’s Law writ large.

But that most practical of reductio ad absurdems is not the basis of what makes such a thought unthinkable. That has the form of an argument and the passing of a judgement that suggests we are in a rational conversation and we are seeking compromise, a balance, a lesser of two evils.

But here we might well consider not a rational argument but a possible encounter. Let us suppose that the carer who cared for my beloved relative found themselves confronted by that choice. Or my nurse friends? My GP who has looked after my family for over ten years? 

The very thought experiment is horrifying to me.  Even more horrifying for the fact that it is exactly this situation that we may well be approaching in this pandemic.

Let us imagine then how such people could be made to confront the thought that we let hundreds of thousands of mainly elderly people die to save our economy? By something enshrined in law? Guidance? Instruction from employers? 

Inconceivable.

But . . . what is the alternative to thinking the unthinkable? Would we potentially let millions die to save the hundreds of thousands? Here we are caught utterly in something approaching madness. The words “let” and “save” here are stripped of all sense.  

If it must be said, and there is risk in feeling obliged to say it out loud: we would do everything in our power to save everyone, absolutely every last person. We would risk absolute tragedy rather than suffer the moral catastrophy that would come from “letting hundreds of thousands of mainly elderly people die to save the economy”. 

The point is that to act at the cost of our soul individually and collectively is a price that simply cannot be paid. It would murder sleep. Haunt us utterly.

And so here we are. It cannot be faced but due to an unfolding pandemic, in every care home, in every intensive care ward, such events will unfold.

But not, it is essential to say, in the vast number of cases, the unthinkable choice we have been discussing. The choices that will be made are real and carry with them utterly unimaginable moral weight. They are the clinical choices that nurses and doctors make every day.

In the face of hundreds of thousands of such choices, however tempting, we cannot simply take the “easy” way out and accept we must always be justified in doing the lesser of two evils, in my example, thereby condemning hundreds of thousands to die. There is in fact no free pass. There is no way out, or around, or away from the moral reality. There is no justification of any sort here.

All we can do is hold out a hand and seek to ensure that we are all accountable for the circumstances and context in which such choices are to be made.

In that very context, confronted by the emergency that is COVID-19, the Scottish Government has published an ethical advice and support framework.

In a section headed “Ethical Considerations” the document states some fundamental principles:

• Everyone matters.
• Everyone matters equally- but this does not mean that everyone is treated the same.
• The interests of each person are the concern of all of us, and of society.
• The harm that might be suffered by every person matters, and so minimising the harm that a pandemic might cause is a central concern.

For what it is worth, and since apparently we need to be reminded, I agree.

This note is intended simply to emphasise that (at the cost of forfeiting our souls) amongst the harms to be minimised in confronting the pandemic is the moral harm.

Humans are sense makers and sense takers; pattern formers and pattern recognisers. That’s a familiar enough claim.

It seems all the more true in times of crisis. Established patterns, norms and conventions are disrupted. But we adjust, quickly, partially, sometimes completely. Not all of us, but most, and naturally.

That shows then that sensing and settling in to patterns comes as second nature to us. It’s part of the form of human life.

Whilst in the past the crises confronting us have been war, pestilence and famine; today, it’s plague. Our response is to lock ourselves down. Unimaginable just days ago. Now it’s how we do things. New patterns have emerged. 

We already know the rules: 2 metres apart, hands washed; stay at home, save lives.

I want to connect this insight to a question I am confronted with: what does leadership amount to in a time of crisis? 

I feel an expectation, a demand. Eyes have turned to me. However disappointing I take what follows to be an important part of my response to that demand.

Leaders excel. They stand out, are out-standing. In what ways?

Leaders don’t (necessarily) do different things but (necessarily) do things differently. They do what we all do, but perhaps just more consciously or explicitly. Sometimes maybe more deeply or powerfully. More insistently, more wisely. And so on.

That applies to sense making and sense taking. Sometimes leading is sensing (and reacting to) patterns that others don’t (sense and react to). Other times it’s imposing those patterns, on to situations, circumstances, people.

One might think of that as the ability to normalise the abnormal. To render sensible the insensible. To order the chaos. And so on.

In their famous “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”, Dave Snowden and Mary E. Boone, separate out five ways in which leaders make sense of things. Four are relatively straightforward, as domains (“ontologies”) of order and sense making: the simple, the complicated, the complex, the chaotic.   

There is a fifth domain (stripped of the definite article): disorder. This domain interests me.

The domain of disorder for Snowden and Boone is in fact where we all start. It is the antithesis of active, autonomous sense making; the kind of sense making we might naturally call leadership. Leaders stand out from, stand against disorder. 

Disorder is however not chaos; there is order in our baseline but it’s inauthentic. In some sense, the sense we make is not fully ours. It’s sense that has always already been made (by someone else).  It is the form of life that we are inculcated into. One could call it culture, tradition, Bildung.  

It’s sense making, as Snowden puts it, that’s based on “habituated patterns of . . . past decision making”:

We do not see things as they are but see things as we are.

As habituated creatures, few of us are aware of this – our culture, tradition – as a superstructure of sense. It’s like the (semantic) air we breathe.

Leaders on the other hand, know where they are, epistemically and ontologically. They know which of the ontologies confronts them: the simple, the complicated, the complex, the chaotic.  And know how to navigate, transition between them.

But Snowden’s insight, that doesn’t come as clearly into focus as it might, is the risk that even as a leader one settle in turn too comfortably into these ontologies and the sensing associated with them. 

One might all too easily again start to see the world not as it is but as we are (this time as supposed leaders not punters). To the hammer everything is a nail (the simple; cause and effect). To the system theorist everything is complex, fractal, emergent. And so on.

To not fall back into disorder, leaders have to keep themselves constantly moving. In that sense, disorder is the natural domain of the leader. Not inauthentic static disorder, but, as Snowden says, the “dynamic transition between domains, authentic disorder”. 

Leadership is something liminal, between states (of being).

That generates another hypothesis: leadership is authentic disorder. That’s a more surprising claim than the one I opened with. Surely leadership (as sense making) is about the creation of order, not disorder?

Yes, but let’s suppose that our thoughts are not our own, that we are caught in the “habituated patterns of past decision making”. Then might leadership not (simply) be the breaking out of such patterns? Might that breaking out not justify the label disorder? Maybe so.

I want to test that thought in the context not of the leadership of thought or straightforwardly action, but something we might call the leadership of speech.

Of course speech is action (and for that matter, often, thought). That insight is the legacy of the great ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin. 

He famously distinguished between the locutionary content and illocutionary force of our words: saying “I buried the hatchet” describes what I did. Whilst saying “I do!” in the right context is not describing anything, it’s doing something (e.g., getting married). 

Like a badge of honour, such illocutionary acts tend to come with an exclamation mark: “I name this ship!”. “I object!”. These are doings, not (just) sayings.

For Austin the locutionary and illocutionary acts are distinguishable but not separable aspects of the same “total speech act”. They are ruled, ultimately, by convention, by law, by order. In their saying (and doing) they literally make sense.

But there are times when we run out of road, so to speak. There are times when there is no right thing to say, no well trodden linguistic path. Such moments need not be inherently momentous. They happen all the time. 

But in moments of crisis when our conventions more fundamentally run aground – as they have done in lock down, in the face of a catastrophic plague – we find ourselves torn from our habituated patterns of past decision making. In such siutations the decision at stake is the decision about what to say, right here, now (which is the essential leadership moment).

There is no right or accepted thing to say. This is what Snowden calls chaos: “no manageable patterns exist – only turbulence.” The question then: what is the authentic leadership response to chaos, to crisis?

Snowden says “communication of the most direct top-down or broadcast kind is imperative; there is simply no time to ask for input”. That bears repeating: there is simply no time to ask for input.

This is the claim I want to interrogate: when our habituated patterns dissipate, when we see things as they are and not as we are, there is simply no time to ask for input. There is only time for leaders to broadcast, to impose, to direct. To command and control.  

This is such an ingrained, almost natural thought that it’s difficult to expose it as a challengeable assumption rather than an axiom. 

But I do want to oppose it. Not completely, absolutely. Not to the extent of denying that there are circumstances in which to command, to control, to broadcast may very well be the very things needed from leaders. 

It is however (always) the circumstances that will dictate what’s needed rather than the expectations borne from an habituated concept of leadership.

I simply want to hold out for the possibility of a different sort of leader(ship) in the face of the turbulence. The sort of leadership in which there is only and always time to ask for input: leadership as a reciprocal rejoinder.

To see the shape of such a possibility I want to (re)turn to Austin. In the total speech act – the act of saying something specific in a specific situation – there is a third often ignored aspect: the perlocutionary act. It is not what is said in saying something, nor what is done in saying something, but what is done by saying something. 

A distinctively perlocutionary verb in the space of leadership is to inspire. Unlike the illocutionary “I object!” which crowds out input, and brings definitive order through speech as action, the perlocutionary is resolutely second person: it makes room for you, not I.

Perlocution is bringing about effect, affect. It takes (at least) two to perlocute. Leadership as locution (stating) or illocution (doing) can be social but in fact in essence needs only the leader; it can be effectively a one person show.   

So a leader who says “I inspire!” (as locution or illocution) comes close to performative contradiction. Other than in the oddest of circumstances, such a thing is unsayable by anyone who stands a chance of meaning it sincerely. 

You may say it of me, but never can I (should I?) say it of myself. That ruling out of the first person pronoun is definitional of the perlocutionary.

I am associating leadership here with perlocution and in so doing I am drawing on a notion of Austin’s by way of his great student Stanley Cavell: leadership as passionate expression. 

This is intended to contrast (not completely, but enough) with leadership as performative expression, as stating and doing, as commanding and controlling. This is what one might think of as the dominant sense of leadership.

Cavell says: “We might say: perlocutionary acts make room for, and reward, imagination and virtuosity, unequally distributed capacities among species. Illocutionary acts do not in general make such room – I do not, except in special circumstances, wonder how I might make a promise or a gift, or apologize, or render a verdict. But to persuade you may well take considerable thought, to insinuate as much as to console may require tact, to seduce or to confuse you may take talent. Further, that perlocutionary-like effects – for example, stopping you in your tracks, embarrassing or humiliating you – are readily, sometimes more effectively, achieveable without saying anything, indicates that the urgency of passion is expressed before and after words. Passionate expression makes demands upon the singular body in a way illocutionary force (if all goes well) forgoes.” (Cavell, “Performative and Passionate Utterance”)

In the radically perlocutionary (speech) act – let us suppose in the moment of crisis or emergency – there is no conventional response, I am exposed, I speak with the “urgency of passion” but that is not all, critically (and contra Snowden) I precisely do not crowd out others, rather: I always invite a response, hopefully, in kind.

Cavell again: “In acknowledging as mode of speech in or through which, by acknowledging my desire in confronting you, I declare my standing with you and single you out, demaning a response in kind from you, and a response now, so making myself vulnerable to your rebuke, thus staking our future . . .” (Cavell)

Even in the face of chaos, there is (almost) always then “time to ask for input”. I single myself out – which is precisely the standing out of leadership – and I single you out, as the one addressed.  There is both radical individuation and socialisation in the leadership moment. 

And the form of that address requires not force but tact, not certainty but imagination and virtuosity, not rank and authority but persuasion. And so on.

As a form of passionate expression, this links leadership intrinsically to the emotional and moral domains which struggle to find full expression through (merely) locutionary and illocutionary acts. Command and control – performative expression – seems at least awkward as a form of moral or emotional “leadership”.

There is no final word in the reciprocal rejoinder of perlocution, of passionate expression: denial, refusal are themselves often part of the “game”. Just as there is (should be?) no final word in leadership (even if there are always times when words run out and action or inaction ensue). 

Here, now, as a leader, in a moment of what we might call authentic disorder, I am not reading from a script or score, resting on habituated patterns of past decision making, rather I am improvising. 

A third and final quotation from Cavell: “a performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.”

This is the distinction I have been searching for. It captures exactly what I take Snowden to be meaning when he talks of leadership as authentic disorder: leadership, as passionate utterance, is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire, not an offer to participate in the order of law.

I started by saying that humans are sense maker, sense takers; pattern formers and pattern recognisers.

Although obviously true and necessary (otherwise chaos ensues) I have tried to bring out the price we pay in being embedded in patterns of sense. Traditional conceptions of leadership including notions of leadership as sense making, seem only to allow for leadership as participating in the order of law, of convention, of patterns already established or at best of forcing patterns onto chaos.  

I have tried to outline a way to understand leadership differently not as an ever deeper participation in the order of law but precisely as a refusal to pay that price, and to see leadership instead as an invitation (to others) to improvise in the disorders of desire, of speaking from a position of passion, of not knowing how one will be received, but of simply having the courage to invite a response.

Of course, things need to be built, instructions and orders given, but perhaps in the context of a crisis there is more space for a different more passionate form of leadership than one might have imagined?

A rhetorical question nevertheless intended as an invitation to respond . . .

[I participated in the UK Civil Service Senior Leaders’ Scheme (SLS). Each time I attended an SLS workshop I tried to express something of what I learned in the form of a blog. These are not written for publication. They are often partial and tangential. This is the blog I wrote after attending the Power workshop in 2018.]

We all have our reactions arriving at Ashridge.  

“It’s Downton Abbey!” Or maybe Brideshead? Hogwarts is perhaps the most common. There might be some value in exploring that association: it is where magic happens and where the wizards of the future are trained.  Julian as Professor Dumbledore. Lots of fun ensues. Who’s Harry? Hermione? Perhaps most fun: who’s Snape? Draco? 

However, for me, when pulling up the long driveway I don’t imagine myself on the Hogwarts Express, rather I am arriving at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Gifted? Maybe. Youngster?? Hardly (however it’s notable just how young and gifted many of those arriving at Ashridge actually are these days. That can only be a good thing). Anyway, Ashridge as the X-Mansion, base of the uncanny X-Men. Julian as an analogy-bustingly mobile Professor X. Who’s Wolverine? Beast? Storm?  Too niche? Google it.

Of course, these sorts of associations – what’s evoked by what you see, hear, smell, taste and feel – are always deeply personal.  The sorts of connection are not always logical or even explicable. “I don’t know why I think that?!” Even if there is an explicable connection maybe there’s nothing more to say: Ashridge just looks like a big fancy house where learning happens – Hogwarts or the X-Mansion are big fancy houses where learning happens. QED. Is that it?  Maybe but let’s see if we can push the analogy a bit further.

The arcs of the Harry Potter stories and your typical X-Men story are basically the same: individual enters place of learning with huge potential but is confused about that potential, unaware of its scale, and is reluctant to wield the power they have, but when that power is finally revealed . . . wow! Nothing less than the triumph of good over evil. The world is changed forever.

Reluctance, humility and vulnerability are critical to this – I doubt the series would have been anywhere near as successful if it had been Draco Malfoy and the Philosopher’s Stone. Of course there needs to be an arch-villain, a bête noire, but actually in many senses the greatest risk to the hero transformed is the hero themselves. Too reluctant, the opportunity is missed. Too brash, one over-reaches.  We remember that Icarus flew too close to the sun but his father Daedalus warned him that flying too close to the sea was just as risky. Too much humility, we under-reach.

Perhaps something of the genius of Freud was the sense that in many ways the villains out there in the real world – Magneto and he-who-must-not-be-named – are as much projections of our inner world as really out there: the cowards, the braggards, the psychopaths . . . that make up our inner voices. Maybe that’s just me?  Seems not. The simplified Freudianism of Transactional analysis, with the Parent/Adult/Child, is a more homely typology of inner voices, representing every bit as much of a battle than between the hero and her bête noire.

Of course, sometimes the demons are actually out there. Maybe it’s a real person who’s holding us back, standing in our way: the arrogant hubristic leader who uses their skills not for good but to win the (political) game.  Sometimes it not a person at all, maybe that demon is world hunger, poverty, racism. Knowing what battle you are fighting and against whom is pretty important. 

For me though the most important fight is the one I am (always) fighting with myself.  It’s what often causes the greatest pain and fear, but it is also the wellspring of my power. That’s the inescapable tension at the heart of all these great myths  – whether Harry Potter or Shakespeare – and why they speak so powerfully to us.

Unless we have that sense that to release our true potential we need to fight our cowardly, arrogant, selfish, frightened selves we are missing something not just important but essential. Maybe it doesn’t always feel like a fight maybe sometimes more a negotiation but my sense is that negotiation is often too rational. The bits that drag us down, the doubts and fears, are visceral and deeply emotional and not talked away. For me, my Magneto, is anxiety, self-doubt, imposter syndrome.  I am more or less constantly fighting it, seeking to silence the voice(s) that deny me my power. It’s different for all of us.

This is where Professor X and his school for Gifted Children comes in: a safe space/container for the (inner) struggle to play out and to be taught tools and techniques by wise tutors. To try and fail without that costing everything. To be with others in the same position, to form a bond with those also struggling (with themselves) and to sometimes rely on them to take the full weight (“Let me carry the burden Mr Frodo”, says Samwise Gamgee).  

It would be wrong not to credit our wise teachers, Julian above all, with a crucial role in unlocking our potential. But I think about a comment made in the friendship circle at the end of the Power workshop: “the power is here in our network”. Indeed. The structure, the tools and techniques, might well come from the faculty, from Professor X and the others, but the energy, the power, comes from us, a collective of friends pushing the boundaries of their potential and fighting their demons in a safe space with each other’s back.

So far so good but also so generic. My association with the X-Men goes a wee bit deeper than that.  In particular it’s in the fact that I see our power more in terms of mutation than magic (or the Force, the one ring, Gamma Rays . . .).  Our power of transformation is our potential for mutation. 

This is in part to recognise it’s something about genetics. I think there is a role here for actual genetics but actually all of this talk of genetics and mutation is more metaphorical than that. Thankfully I don’t actually see our power for transformation resting in an actual “permanent alteration of the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA or other genetic elements”.  Whether we have it or not is not an accident of birth (although structural inequalities certainly make it harder if you don’t look like me).

But we can perhaps learn something about our power for transformation by imagining it as a form of mutation. 

Even within the metaphor, the sources of mutation are resolutely epigenetic, that is to say changes in my outlook, approaches, beliefs caused by my interaction with my environment. That environment – physical, social, organisational, cultural – can both cause (catalyse) and then feed or starve the mutation.  One of the epigenetic conditions of personal power and transformation is being in and part of a safe, supportive network of friends with the support of great teachers. The true power of the Senior Leaders Scheme. 

The trick though is to ensure that the epigenetic factors in the wider world, away from the safety and comfort of Ashridge, cause and amplify the mutation, rather than suffocate it. Too much unproductive politics and game playing may well stifle true transformation rather than encourage it, even if one feels one is thriving.

But what mutation are we talking about?  Shooting laser beams from our eyes? The power to control the weather? Read minds? Of course, metaphorically, all these things and more.  But the mutation that matters is whatever change, preferably permanent but rarely final, that brings about the power of personal transformation. 

And through that personal transformation establishing the conditions to achieve great things, acts of powerful good that would in any sense be worthy of the description “superpower”. Really?  Imagine the power to create a more humane social security system, to the benefit of millions. Imagine, equally, a health service that engages proactively with people rather than treating patients, that transforms the lives of millions.  And so it goes on.  

These are the things at stake. We have a moral duty to do the work we need to to overcome our demons and to thereby release our power to transform for the sake of the common good. 

As uncle Ben Parker reminded us, “with great power comes great responsibility”.  So when I look around the room at Ashridge I see this potential power and I feel that responsibility.  The responsibility to beat my personal Magneto and to help you do the same.  

Maybe we are more like X-Men than we might ever have imagined? Now if I can only get Julian to shave his head.

A short note in response to a wonderful piece by Chris Creegan on the parallels between the AIDS crisis of the the 1980s and COVID-19:

https://medium.com/@Chris_Creegan/how-do-we-survive-a-plague-together-b61feaccb86c

NOWHERE TO HIDE

In drawing a parallel between the Aids crisis of the 1980s and the pandemic crisis of today, writer Chris Creegan asks, how do we survive a plague?

Chris’s beautifully simple answer: together, points to a form of survival deeper than merely staying alive. This is the survival of the soul. And who would argue with the thought that that’s only really possible together?

Chris says: “Responding to this crisis is a constantly evolving game of catch up which touches every part of our lives, and so the response it demands from state and third sector alike leaves no hiding places”.

Even in a crisis that is literally forcing us to hide, there are no hiding places. We are increasingly confronted, overwhelmingly, everywhere we look, by the sheer horror of it. And that places a demand not just on the state and third sector but on everyone. All people, everywhere. No-one is exempt, however distant one remains socially.

I am proud to be part of the response justly demanded from the state. We civil servants are responding with purpose and insight.

But I am also a human being, confronted. A father, a son. Confronted with nowhere to hide. (A spiritually naked civil servant, so to speak.) How then can I respond? How must I respond both as a human being and a civil servant?

Are these not the same thing? Yes and no. In part. It’s certainly true that the defining values I have espoused professionally for 20 years now – honesty, integrity, impartiality and objectivity – seem not just right but exactly right in the context in which we find ourselves.

Right now, in the face of the crisis, these values are not merely contractual. If ever there was a time for deeply honest, objective, impartial heads focused relentlessly on the evidence it is now.

But even so these values don’t seem to get me the whole way to where I need to be. These values are certainly not wrong but are nonetheless inadequate.

This note is if anything just an attempt to explain, confess what this inadequacy amounts to.

Every day as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic becomes clear, the response demanded requires ever more of us. We can see it in each other’s eyes. This is beginning to eat not just into our time but our souls.

What’s at stake is horrifying and horrifyingly close at hand. It is beginning to weigh heavily. I fear that we are spending deep capital that is not easily replaced. Can we carry lightly enough what weighs so heavily? Carry it light enough to stand a chance to confront this plague as it runs its course.

I am conflicted. One way to express this is to say that I find myself caught in a paradox. One could call it the paradox of policymaking.

By policymaking here I might as well talk about its bigger brother: thinking. Not mere thinking certainly but not quite doing either. Policy is action at best at a distance.

There are times when reality seems to extend beyond thought’s reach. (No policy can guarantee its own success.) That constitutes a crisis in and for thinking. This is in essence what Graham Leicester and Maureen O’Hara have described as a conceptual emergency, which is unfolding alongside the all too real (medical) emergency we are facing.

Our concepts, and so our words, no longer seem to make contact with the reality of reality. In a sense, our experience is simultaneously too real and not real enough. The words we feel tempted to utter in response to what is utterly real seem thin, watered down.

But it’s “just the flu”. Just as for Ann Widdecombe, the plague of AIDS was “not as devastating as feared”. Can we live in a world in which such things can be said, and meant truly? How could one look at the world that way and not recognise the utter emptiness of such words? How could one live with oneself if one ever had the insight to recognise one’s own utter superficiality?

Following philosopher Cora Diamond (channelling John Updike) we might call this the difficulty of reality:

“what is expressed . . . is the sense of a difficulty that pushes us beyond what we can think. To attempt to think it is to feel one’s thinking come unhinged. Our concepts, our ordinary life with our concepts, pass by this difficulty as if it were not there; the difficulty, if we try to see it, shoulders us out of life, is deadly chilling.”

Let us offer an explanation rather than condemnation: when there is nowhere to hide, all too easily, our thought and words seem drawn inexorably toward a shallowness, an emptiness that deflects us in crucial ways from the sorts of rich significance that real life actually has, with all its moral difficulties, horrors and disgraces. It is instinctual. We deflect to defend.

Who can blame those who choose not to confront, but to hide? We let ourselves be shouldered out of life.

What a oddly wonderful phrase: shouldered out of life. Diamond takes that from Ted Hughes’ “Six Young Men”:

That man’s not more alive whom you confront,
And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak out loud,
Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,
Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;
No thought so vivid as their smoking blood;
To regard this photo might well dement,
Such contradictory permanent horrors here,
Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out
One’s own body from its instant and heat.

Here is the paradox – the difficulty of reality – made plain in words. Not policy words but poetic. The paradox of “Six Young Men” is the paradox of the simultaneous utter reality and irreality of the smile of six young men captured in a photograph, all of whom having died forty years previously in the first world war.

It is not possible for a dead man to smile warmly. Yet here we are.

To regard this photo might well dement, such contradictory permanent horrors here smile from the single exposure and shoulder out one’s own body from its instant and heat.

We simply cannot accommodate the reality we are exposed to, our concepts cannot reach, and we are left utterly exposed, demented, shouldered out of one’s body, one’s life, “from its instant and heat”.

I can think of no better way to express what I feel right here, right now than exposed, the exposure of the coming apart of thought and reality confronted by what is sublimely unimaginable.

And of course there is nothing more human than that.

Back then to Chris Creegan.

I think Chris is right that it would be all too easy to despair in the face of our exposure. “Staring into the void gets us nowhere”. And “social action is in our gift”. His answer remember to our exposure to the plague: together.

But read his words very carefully: “social action is in our gift”. They do not represent salvation, yet. A gift’s fulfilment only comes in its being accepted. As Aristotle might well have said, a gift must be both given and received to be a (proper) gift.

So the togetherness – the social action – that Chris says protects us from our exposure to the difficulty of reality is an achievement not a given. We cannot assume it. It requires us to reach out actively and ask to be together.

This little note is me reaching out.

I taught David Hume to 1st year undergraduates at University of Edinburgh. Here are the notes I compiled, which represent a nearly complete commentary on Hume’s Enquiry.

Hume life

Hume – Introduction and Background

Hume – Section1

Hume – Section2

Hume – Section3

Hume – Section4

Hume – section5

Hume – section7

Hume – Section8

Hume – Section9

Hume – section10

Hume – section11

Hume – Section12

I was very pleased to receive a copy of Alastair McIntosh’s new book Poacher’s Pilgrimage: An Island Journey from my friend and teacher John Sturrock QC. John inscribed the book, saying he hoped that it would function as a guide on my own pilgrimage. This extended review is my response to John’s inscription.

ways-of-seeing-poachers-pilgrimage-richard-foggo-october-2016