What Are Leaders For?
Management in a corporate setting often makes a lot of assumptions about the rules of the game. This is a collection of notes from an all-day workshop session on leadership.
Leadership is about navigation. It is a project of coherence and legibillity. We operate together within systems of extraction and destruction. We work together to create and maintain structures of care and liberation. We all exist together within networks of obligation and debt.
So, what are leaders for?
Social patterns of risk management & cohesion adopted as salvage capitalism.
There’s a complex web of social interactions – society, community, organization through which flows power and benefit. We participate in these networks on many levels, and benefit from the ebbs and flows of power through them. Many of them have nothing to do with “work”.
In a business context, management is about creating and nurting these social patterns in a manner that benefit flows to the firm. We need to clear about how our leadership uses power to influence this, and understand the social conventions that lend legitimacy to that use of power.
In order to be effective, we must read the white space around and the shadows cast by power.
Seperateness and Not-Seperateness of Context.
What is the connection to a company and a summer camp? The construction of a context in order to manufacture seperateness, within which which we can tell ourselves a story of ourselves. The firm sketches a boundary within which it operates and tells stories, and the more isolated and seperate from the larger world the more control is asserted – the more the story is controlled. This is an excersize in power.
Fixed vs. Infinite Games.
Are we playing a fixed game, staying within the bound of a global north capitalist ideology? Someone has to “provide direction” and “lead the way”. But where? Why? With what assumptions?
Our social relations within the context of the firm have some degree of alignment/divergence from hegemonic and majoritized ontology that governs broader society. We must be intentional about that alignment, or about that divergemce, on order to be honest and truthful about what we think we are trying to do.
Safety & Courage
We want to create a sense of safety. What is it we want to be safe from?
We want to act with courage and bravery, but bravery is only possible in the presence of fear. What are we afread of? What fears might others have?
Leaders must take risks. But what is the risk of? What are the stakes of the wager? Who must bear the brunt of the consequence, who gets to collect the benefit?
Safety and courage are questions of priviledge and comfort.
Creation of community pattern languages.
How do we agree on the language we use? How do we understand what it means? How do we use this language to define how we move through the context of the firm, how the firm relates to the world, and how we limit or expand our possibillities of action?
A system created for people by people.
David Graeber posits that the root of oppression is fungibillity, and Terry Pratchet agrees.
There is a river.
There river feeds a canal.
The purpose of the canal is to provide for the communities that maintain it.
The canal must support the life of the river.
We draw from the canal while contributing to it’s continued flow.
What do we extract from the canal?
What do we return to the river?
What wheels does the canal power?
What emabnkments do we repair?
What trenches do we dig?
Which mills do we destroy?
Who do we decide to help?
How are we helping them?
There is a line beyond which we cannot care.