Enlightened Leadership
Time to stop putting lipstick on the pig
“My bet is that our age will be viewed in retrospect with amusement, as an age remarkable not only for its cynicism, but for its gullibility. The two conditions are not as far apart as they may seem”. — Dr Iain McGilchrist 1
Is time running out for those old-school executives who hide behind PR spin and defensive shields to dupe customers, deceive investors and deflect regulators?
In a recent article for the Risk Assessment Network Exchange, business ethics expert Alison Taylor suggests it is: 2
“The historical use-case for business ethics was to act as a defensive shield around a company to control the narrative and defend shareholder value. With defensive efforts split between compliance and PR departments – to deflect legal/regulatory and reputational risk, respectively – business ethics would put a protective boundary around a company.”
“We’re now turning to companies to solve the tragedies of the commons and expecting them to do more, and with the rise in social media, we are seeing those carefully constructed boundaries crumbling, and we can no longer rely on those old business ethics standards.”
This historical approach to business ethics based on impression management as opposed to genuine ethical conduct has strong parallels in how many senior executives have traditionally defended their careers by hiding behind big name consulting firms.
Today’s consulting behemoths started out providing research-based analysis designed to help executives make better informed decisions.
If and when their decisions turned out to be flawed, executives could cite the firm they’d hired and claim they’d done their due diligence.
However, this due diligence defence has crept into domains where consulting firms overstep the boundaries of their competence.
That’s proved particularly destructive when big consulting has claimed it can help clients create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 3
It’s not hard to understand why big consulting fails in this domain so dismally.
People in organisations experience culture as the way we do things round here. 4
A culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness is one in which the way we do things round here is continually evolving in innovative, agile, and adaptive ways — enabling the organisation to thrive in increasingly uncertain and unpredictable times.
Therefore, the only people who can develop an organisation’s innovation, agility, and adaptiveness muscles are the people who work there, whilst engaged in their day to day value creation activities.
That’s why the big consulting model, where large numbers of junior consultants are shipped into the client organisation to do the heavy lifting, not only fails to help but actively hinders the organisation from developing its future-fit muscles. 5
Just as with business ethics, what executives appear to be buying from big consulting isn’t what they’re actually buying.
They appear to be buying a transformed culture.
What they’re actually buying is a due diligence defence for when things go pear-shaped — which they invariably do, as the brand leading firm itself admits... 6
Isn’t it time organisations developed a more enlightened approach to leadership and create the future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness necessary for people, organisations, and society to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world?
Certainly the world is crying out for organisations to create more genuine value — as opposed to obscene amounts of money for the few, at the expense of the many, to the detriment of the lives, health, and wellbeing of the majority.
It’s time to call time on the age of gullibility and cynicism highlighted by Iain McGilchrist above.
McGilchrist’s work offers powerful pointers to how we might do that — based on neuroscience— and starting with some deep insights as to how we got ourselves into the current mess in the first place.
Exploring deeply where others feared to tread (he was warned it would be career suicide) McGilchrist has become the world’s pre-eminent neuroscientist, researcher, and philosopher on the different ways the brain’s left and right hemispheres attend to the world.
His two books on the topic run to 600 and 1500 pages respectively, so any attempt to summarise his body of work here must inevitably fall far short. 7
However, here are a few relevant lines from his treatment of the original Enlightenment of the 17th & 18th centuries: 8
“One principal distinction [between the two hemispheres] underlies most of the others; it is a distinction that has been understood and expressed in language since ancient times.
This is the distinction between, on the one hand, Greek nous (or noos), Latin intellectus, German Vernunft, English reason and, on the other, Greek logos/dianoia, Latin ratio, German Verstand, English rationality.
The first of these — flexible, resisting fixed formulation, shaped by experience, and involving the whole living being — is congenial to the operations of the right hemisphere; the second — more rigid, rarefied, mechanical, governed by explicit laws — to those of the left hemisphere.”
McGilchrist observes how, in the 200+ years since the Enlightenment, the left hemisphere has become ever more dominant, resulting in us experiencing:
“An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness.” 9
In the organisational domain, this left hemisphere bias led to the machine metaphor becoming deeply embedded and implicitly axiomatic in mainstream thinking.
This has led to the rigid, stultifying, dehumanising organisations Professor Antoinette Weibel of St Gallen University, Switzerland calls “suffering machines”. 10
The left hemisphere bias permeates conventional notions of leadership, crisply articulated here by former Harvard Professor John Kotter: “Leadership defines what the future should look like, aligns people with that vision, and inspires them to make it happen”. 11
In this worldview, a few people “define a future vision” and “align” and “inspire” others to “make it happen”. The defining, aligning, and inspiring is done by the few, the “leaders”, and done to everyone else, the “followers”.
Contrast this left hemisphere dominant worldview to the more holistic perspective of my former colleague Dr Peter Senge: “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future”. 12
The greater balance of left and right hemispheres reflected in Senge’s perspective doesn’t segregate “those who do leadership” from “those who have it done to them”.
When organisations adopt and operate based on this perspective, the capacity to shape the future is not only vastly increased but becomes inherently life-enhancing and sustainable — as the left hemisphere’s propensity to grasp, dissect, and manipulate is balanced by, and integrated with, the right hemisphere’s access to generative insight, inspiration, and intuition.
This balance is absolutely essential for creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Only with this balance between the hemispheres can sense making, decision making & action taking become ever more tightly coupled, rapidly and repeatedly iterated, deeply embedded and widely distributed throughout the organisation — fundamental to organisational effectiveness in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
Kotter did eventually acknowledge the failings of his notion of leadership in his book’s 2012 update, noting: “more agility and change-friendly organisations” and “more leadership from more people, and not just top management” are increasingly vital. 13
In effect, the 17th & 18th century Enlightenment was only really half enlightened.
It unleashed the power of the left hemisphere to manipulate and control but diminished the role of the right hemisphere that brings depth, richness, and beauty, liberates the human spirit, and gives life its meaning.
Without this, as McGilchrist points out, even if we did manage to reverse biosphere destruction and societal collapse, what would be the point?
We urgently need a genuine enlightenment — one that rebalances and rehabilitates the role of the right hemisphere, bringing meaning and richness back to life, and maximises human value in our organisations, society, and the world.
Do we have the imagination?
Albert Einstein, whose renowned left/right hemisphere balance transformed the world of physics, put it like this:
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” 14
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2009) p442
RANE Network paper “In Line, Online: Leveraging Behavioral Science to Reduce Workforce Risk” April 2022
Much of my own work helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia and the US create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness over the past 35 years has involved mopping up messes left behind by previous interventions by big consulting firms.
See my earlier Substack piece describing how culture is an embodied experience.
For more on this topic, download my 22-page report into the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently stifled, smothered and strangled organisational innovation, agility, and adaptiveness here. NB Habit #5 is Hired Help that Hinders.
Brand leader McKinsey made this admission here. Note they say: “We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support”. In fact it’s more the case that “We know that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, due to them being led by big consulting firms like McKinsey”.
The Master and His Emissary (2009) 600pp; The Matter with Things (2021) 1500pp.
The Master and His Emissary Chapter 10.
The Master and His Emissary p6
Here is Antoinette describing suffering machines.
Leading Change (John P Kotter, 1996).
The Dance of Change (Senge et al 1999 p16)
Leading Change (John P Kotter, revised 2012, preface).
What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck — The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929).