Leadership qualifications are widely misunderstood and often confused with having expertise. What’s missed is that expertise is an expression of knowledge and leadership is an expression of action. Our education system is designed to deliver knowledge, including experts, and does it well. What our education system seldom does is produce able leaders.
The difference between knowledge and action is easy to see if we look at something as simple as learning to drive a car or learning to ride a bike. Someone can explain either one to us and we can learn what we hear so well we can make a perfect score on a test. Yet what we know will not keep the car from stalling when we let out the clutch or keep us from falling off the bike when we lose our balance.
The world we live in is also widely misunderstood. Most of us assume we are limited in what we can do by how much we know. We have been taught that how much we know will determine how successful we are. This is an illusion that dates back to at least the time of Rene Descartes. At that time it was assumed that the physical world operates like a predictable big machine and that knowing how the machine works would determine how successful we are.
Scientists have since learned that the physical world is not predictable like a big machine. They have also learned that the observer makes a difference in what is actually seen and that intention can actually change physical properties. It has been proven over and over again in laboratories around the world since the 1980’s that our long held belief that the physical world operates like a predictable big machine is an illusion. These discoveries are devastating to our ideas of how physical reality works until we realize they were findings in the microreality of particle physics and not the macroreality we live in everyday. Historically, assuming we can rely on macroreality has served us well and still does. What we don’t know is whether or not the rapid change and ballooning complexity we see today will overwhelm our ability to ignore microreality in everyday affairs.
As a practical matter we can think of reality as a force field made up of many forces acting in many directions with wildly differing strengths. As we encounter these forces, we get stopped, we push through and we get pushed around. Weak forces can be so small they seem non-existent. Strong forces can be so large they seem impenetrable. It isn’t that strong forces are impossible to overcome, its that they are improbable to overcome.
Consider this:
could we expect an unknown young lawyer to eliminate British rule in India? It may seem impossible but it was only improbable. Mahatma Gandhi did it.
could we expect to put a man on the moon when we had no idea how to get there? It was improbable but Neil Armstrong became that man.
could we expect an unknown country minister to successfully change the civil rights mindset in the United States? It was also only improbable. Martin Luther King did it.
Today’s world is far different than that of our fathers and forefathers. Change and complexity are running rampant. If we compare the last 100 years with the prior 500 years, the increase in change and complexity in the last 100 years is mind boggling. In medicine we have seen wonder drugs, diagnostic magic and organ transplants. In transportation we have gone from automobiles to aircraft to spacecraft. In electronics we have gone from the telephone to computers to the internet. And these are just a few of the changes we have seen. We could say we have challenges far beyond any our forebears faced or we could say we have opportunities at every turn that far outstrip any ever before conceived.
The challenge for leaders today isn’t change and complexity, the challenge is to look beyond the confusion and turmoil they bring us to see what’s possible. What’s possible is the fertile ground for planting new ideas and harvesting their rewards.
What do we expect from our leaders? We want them to get worthwhile things done. We want them to find something that enables them to move on when they get stymied. We want them to keep on keeping on when things look bleak. When they are criticized unmercifully we want them to remember what Teddy Roosevelt said.
“Its not the critic who counts. Not the one who points out how the strong stumbled or how the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the one who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends themselves in a worthy cause. Who at the best knows the triumph of high achievement and at the worst, if they fail, at least fail while daring greatly so that their place shall never be among those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
