Leadership Qualities
Leadership in information rich
environments
Gunter Heim, Aachen,
Germany
September 2002
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The Challenge of Deciding
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[1] From his very beginnings
right through to our times man was never at rest.
Rivalling hordes of fellow men, wild animals, climatic
changes or diseases: man was always in peril and usually
there would have been more than one way to to react. |
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[2] A number of general
strategies have evolved over millions of years and one of
them involves the strong initiative of a leading
individual. |
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[3] One or two million years
ago some of our ape-like ancestors may have felt
threatened by the presence of another horde living
nearby. Should they try and find a new home somewhere far
away? Or would it be better to attack the intruders with
warlike grimaces, stones and sticks?
Such behaviour may have
brought
success in the miocene
Or would it even be a good idea to make friends with
the new neighbours? Or, should nothing be done at all?
Surely, a decision had to be taken and carried out.
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[4] And how should a small
group of wandering indo-europeans have reacted to an
attacking jaguar? Would individual flight be better than
collective defense? Quick and decisive action might have
made all the difference between death and life in those
days. |
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Flight or fight: all or
none!
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[5] And in Cesars times,
what alternative options did the ancient Swiss
contemplate before they decided to enter the territory of
Roman allies in their hundreds of thousands? In his book
"Bellum Gallica" Cesar tells us how desperate
these Alpine people were because of worsening
environmental conditions and why they might finally have
opted for a military adventure into Gaul. |
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[6] About 1500 years later,
in the Middle Ages, two thirds of Europes population died
in a great epidemic disease called the Black Death.
Epidemological knowledge then must have been rare, but
still some observant people seem to have known that
wide-scale burnings of infected areas could check the
spreading of the disease. So, again, there was a decision
to be taken and to be carried out: should a whole village
be burnt to save those who have yet survived? |
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[7] And in our times, too,
there is a constant need to decide and act. How real is
the threat of a climatic catastrophe and what should we
do now? How much money should be spent on meteorological
research if, for political reasons, the same money could
also be used to relieve the immediate effects of a
drought somewhere in Southern Africa? |
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[8] In this essay I want to
make one central point. It is the following. During the
long history of human strive, the need to decide and act
has never really diminished. But the exploding number of
humans living within individual societies has
fundamentally changed the role individuals should play.
Particularly, and that will be the main point of this
essay, the role of the classical leader, boss or superior
is becoming less and less important, although it won`t
totally disappear. The first reason for this is that the
amount of potentially relevant and available information
to be considered is rapidly growing and has long
surpassed the capacity of any single human in many cases.
Secondly, the coordinated execution of decisions depends
more and more on institutionalized workflows that don`t
require personal leadership. |
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[9] Before we go on to look
at the importance of social conventions and how they
could be adopted to changed needs, however, we first have
to characterize the nature of modern decision making as
opposed to the way our ancestors could manage things in
pre-historic times. |
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[10] Let us look at the way
humans would deal with climatic changes now and many
thousand years ago. |
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[11] In pre-historic times
people lived in nomadic tribes counting a few dozens of
members at the most. Geographical, meteorological or
historic knowledge was probably somewhere near nil. If
times got worse in terms of prey to be hunted or food to
be gathered there must have been a very limited number of
options to be considered and there were few hard facts
known to be taken into account. |
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[12] Perhaps there were
rumours about evil ogres living in the land where the sun
rises. Perhaps, there was some sort of oral tribal memory
of deserts lying in the opposite direction. And perhaups
there were some stories of old that told about similar
situations and how the ancient spirits should be invoked
for advice. |
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[13] Speaking in modern
terms, there was comparatively little knowledge work to
be done. There were no archives to be sifted, no experts
to be consulted, no computer simulations to be evaluated
and no sophistacted laws to be considered. |
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[14] In those long-gone
days, any individual with some fair amount of common
sense could have taken the decision just as well as any
other member of the community. |
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[15] The real challenge for
a tribe in those days was not so much to find the best of
all possible decisions but to guarantee unity of action. |
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[16] Then, probably much
more than today, the immediate success of a course of
action was determined by the number of people that
followed it. |
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[17] Consider how much more
precarious genetic survival must have been in a group of
ten rather than in a group of twenty adults. A few
homosexuals, one or two impotent mates, the odd tigre
snatching away a stray toddler and an infortunate
sequence of still-births might have put a small group to
extinction where a slightly larger group might have
survived genetically. |
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[18] And, a little bit less
abstract, consider how much the success of scaring away
an attacking lion must have depended on a large enough
number of strong adults participating. |
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[19] It would not have been
such a good idea to split up in case of disagreement.
Leadership in those days, above all, required the ability
to enforce a coherent, coordinated action on all memebers
of the community. It was perhaps in those days that the
ideal leader was imprinted as an archetype on the human
psyche. A leader had to be physically strong to dominate
rivalling members. He (or she?) had to have charisma to
enthrall and enchant his social environment and to focus
all attention on his word and deed. He had to yield
enough authority to prevent unfruitful palaver when
direct action was called for. Dissension would have done
no good. |
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Viking raiders could
only be
successful as unified groups.
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[20] But what should be so
different today, one may ask. Today, too, a company, a
nation or even the whole of humanity needs to act in
unison to be successful. In the face of the climatic
catastrophe perhaps waiting for us it would be no good to
act half-heartedly. If one half of the earth favoured
renewable energies and the other half encouraged the
further use of fossil energies, energy intensive branches
of industry would simply migrate towards regions friendly
to coal, oil and gas. And the overall effect would be one
of wasted ressources in more than one sense of the word. |
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[21] And if an oil-producing
company decided to change its image from a ruthless
global quasi-monopolist towards a democratic,
ecologically and socially responsible benefactor of
humankind then obviously public relations, production
planning, operative divisions and the general management
must not give the impression of tactical falsehood. The
company should act as a coherent whole. |
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Since its Brent Spar experience, Shell
seems to be undergoing such a change. |
[22] And to guarantee such
collective behaviour, you may continue to argue, strong
leadership is needed just as much as for confronting
lions during the Stone Ages. |
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[23] In so concluding, you
are right and wrong at the same time. Of course, strong
leadership is needed to ensure consistent collective
action. But unlike in former times, decisions taken today
can be carried out by a multitude of institutionalized
and anonymous instruments. Environment friendly behaviour
can be just as well be put into action by penal law,
taxes or educational curricula as well as by personal
charisma. The pre-historic alpha-leader did not have
laws, curricula or taxes. |
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[24] So, finding the best of
all possible actions and putting it to effect must have
been entrusted upon living people in our tribal past. |
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[25] Today, decision-making
and enforcement of action are much shaped by the practice
of division of labour. Not only may those who are
involved in decision-finding knowledge-work today be
different from those executing the decisions. The idea of
division of informational knowledge labour goes much
further. |
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[26] In modern cyberspace
there exists a superabundance of potentially useful
information. No single human is capable of seizing up all
that may be important to any single decision. |
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[27] We all cannot but be
content to reflect some tiny aspect of whatever is
important in relation to some complex topic. The idea of
a single and personal alpha-leader taking important
decisions at the level of large and complex social groups
all on his own should be as obsolete as the discovery
that flintstone makes excellent and most durably sharp
edges. |
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[28] The focus of personal
leadership today is much more on the process of mediating
and correlating knowledge-work and interests from a
variety of sources and actors. This quite adequately
mirrors the rapidly increasing amount of distributed
knowledge potentially accessible to decision makers.
Executing a decision today is more of an administrative
business rather than a matter of social competence.
Making a good decision, however, requires more and more
social skills. |
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[29] Before we go on to look
a the kind of personal leadership demanded for such an
environment, let us first look at the legacy of our
genetic past. Let us first characterize and appreciate
the type of leader that was moulded in the old days but
still holds much ground today. Let us call him the
classical leader. |
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The Classical Leader
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[30] The classical leader is
male and he has an intuitive sense of good style in
dressing. When walking together with his inferiors, he is
always guarded by someone on his left side to shield his
heart. This has probably been so ever since the Miocene. |
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[31] When chancing upon a
group of inferiors talking with one another he feels no
natural retraint to wait until asked. He straight away
says clearly what he has to say. |
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[32] A statistical survey
would reveal that he significantly more often stands
right before someone else`s face than vice versa.
Statistics would also reveal that when walking in a group
he would maintain a steady speed and pace thus forcing
others to either accelerate or step back when walking in
curves. |
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[33] Statistics, being very
powerful in revealing the subconscious, would clearly
show that the amount of time he waits before he is
allowed to speak is negligible as compared to the amount
of time his inferiors have to wait for the same
privilege. |
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[34] Statistics, however,
are not needed to make obvious the fact that the
classical leader has the biggest car amongst his
followers. It goes without saying that a big car is
synoymous with status. |
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[35] Unlike his inferiors
the classical leader feels no qualms about parking his
car right in front of any main-entrance with a clear sign
saying that parking is not allowed there. Quite on the
contrary. Rather than suffering from a slight but amiable
pang of bad consciousness the classical leader regards it
as his divine and unalienable right to stand a little bit
outside the petty and annoying laws of common men. The
classical leader is aristocratic by nature and he has a
healthy instinct how to act his superiority: |
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Aristocratic parking
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[36] Accordingly, those
living around a classical leader as his inferiors have a
decent instinct for pragmatic subordination. Decisions
taken by a leader are, as a rule, not questioned openly.
Decisions made explicit by a leader are hardly ever
confronted publicly by alternative decisions thought up
by inferiors. A little tragically, the classical leader
is rather flattered than alarmed by such questionable
tokens of approval. |
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[37] Another unfailing
indication of the peoples` high esteem for classical
leaders is the immediacy with which they attend to minor
technical problems their leader may have. A broken
telephone cable, login problems with a computer or
mislaid car-keys: the really classical leader may
reliably expect helping hands in all such situations. |
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[38] The really truly
classical leader is even helped with his or his families
private problems. Inferiors fixing some computer
software, helping out with the offspring`s schoolwork or
even washing private cars relieve the classical leader of
such lowly work so that he can concentrate more fully on
applying his exceptional qualities for the good of the
group. |
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[39] In short, the classical
leader and his flock live in perfect symbiosis.
Respective social roles are implicitly and silently
accepted. And this is, more or less, how it should be for
small groups somewhere below 20 members. Groups of less
than twenty people are well below the threshhold of
mechanisms of collective and anonymous information
processing. Therefore, the most important function of the
leader is to stimulate coordinated action rather than
encourage too much pseudo-democratic activity. |
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[41] I want to finish this
reflection on the archetypal leader of small groups with
two rather curious observations. |
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[42] The military is
particularly dependent on absolutely reliable execution
of commands and unanimous collective action on the scale
of small groups. Small operative units in times of war
may come very close to life as our ancestors lived it in
times of external threats thousands of generations ago.
And perhaps some quaint remnant of our racial genetical
past has survived as a living fossil in the military. |
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[43] Our ape-like forefathrs
had a strong cranial (?) extrusion at the top of their
heads and large bulging extensions at the sides of their
heads. These acted as levers for the muscles moving the
lower jaw. The more prominent these extrusions were, the
more force was available to the individual for biting
purposes. Bulging extrusions around the upper head stood
for immediately available power. The following sketches
of military helmets may therefore respond to some
genetically encoded sheme (?) to recognize alpha-leaders: |
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Some historic headforms
indicative
of our genetic past
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<= Greek warrior of about 500 B. C. from
Dodona, Prussian "Pickelhaube", and heads of
recent apes |
[44] The second example of
our archaic past still alive in our brains is more
curious still. It refers to a common act of communication
between alpha-leaders and inferiors of a certain species
of apes (unfortunately, I don`t remember which). If an
inferior wants to demand the right of passage of an
alpha-animal physically controlling the desired path the
following behaviour may be observed. The inferior
slightly lowers his head and puts his flat and
outstretched hand somewhere near his front. If the
alpha-animal responds in a similar way (without lowered
head) the right of passage is granted. The striking
likeness to the formalized act of military greeting needs
no further explanation. |
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Man as an imperfect being
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[45] So far we may conclude
that for small social groups where unison of action can
be brought about more easily than a well considered
decision with much information work behind it the human
type of the classical leader fits the role perfectly. |
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[46] But modern life, alas,
is more complicated. Modern societies are not made up of
clearly defined, stable groups of 20 or 30 people any
more. Any single human belongs to a multitude of
constantly chaning social groups of all sizes. |
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[47] Of all sizes! Social
groups like a village, a nation, a company or a political
party are often made up of thousands or even millions of
individuals. The widespread application of division of
labour makes each one of us an epxert in some field of
life. A social streetworker has an insight into the
behaviour of street gangs that is certainly not shared by
an ordinary accountant who has spent all his working life
in the oil industry. |
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[48] A civil engineer could
perhaps figure out in what ways and how much more than
small cars a heavy truck destroys public roads. A man of
law specializing on European law, however, could tell in
what ways higher taxation of heavy vehicles would collide
or harmonize with existing regulations. |
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[49] A technical planner of
a large mining company would perhaps be able to produce a
number of possible scenarios on which minerals the
company could focus technically. A financial planner
alone, however, would be able to figure out whether a
scenario is executable from a liquidation (?) point of
view. |
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[50] Other hypothetical
decisions taken on the scale of such large social bodies
would produce an endless number of similar examples of
the value of expert knowledge. |
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[51] It should go without
saying that most decisions have far reaching effects and
that each experts opinion somehow a relevant aspect of
reality. |
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[52] For three reasons this
simple fact alone dangerously collides with the role of
the classical leader as defined before. |
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[53] Reason number one is
the fact that it is now practically impossible to
credibly produce an air of omniscience as a personal
attitude. Any leader acting in a complex environment
today must needs be in constant danger of being found out
as either downright wrong in what he says or at best as
poorly informed. In an environment where many facts and
thoughts play an accepted role no single leader would be
able to know or master them all. The classical leader,
however, is tuned to impress the group with his ideas and
pretending to know things best helps. |
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[54] Reason number two is
that in a complex environment the number of possible
decisions is often very great. And the quality of a
decision is now much more dependent on an adequate
consideration of the most relevant facts. Simply because
now there are more facts available than, say, in the
Pleistocene. A modern leader of complex social structures
must therefore possess high skills of gathering
information, weighing its relevance and mediating
isolated pieces of knowledge between all sorts of
experts. This leads us to reason number three why
classical leadership should not automatically be applied
to large companies, states or parties. |
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"Neural Management"
may be one way of dealing with complex decision making
processes. "Evolutionary Economics"
provide another way.
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[55] Reason number three why
the role of classical leaders is jeopardized in complex
social environments has to do with a basic fact of
motivation psychology. |
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[56] Ordinary people will
soon give up voicing their views if those views don`t
make any difference for no acceptable reason. But those
views often contain important information. Therefore, a
leader in complex environments should always make it
clear to as many people as possible why he has made his
choice the way he did. Even admitting a trivial truth
like not having had the time to listen to a certain
expert or even admitting a feeling of distrust and
scepticism towards certain persons or departments would
be better than simply saying nothing. |
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[57] The role of leadership
in complex environments, therefore, asks for some new
behaviour. The leader must give up his air of omniscience
and his inferiors must stop favouring bosses (and
politicians) that convincingly act like knowing
everything. |
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[58] As decision making
knowledge-work has become more diversified and more
demanding, executing decisions has become less of a
personal challenge. Many decisions today are transformed
into laws, contracts, computer software etc. Physical
dominance or even charisma are of doubtful use under such
cirumstances. The rules of quality management,
independent controlling departments or computerized
workflows carry out more and more decisions. |
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[59] Leading a large group
in a complex environment rich in potentially relevant
information should not really be called leading. Verbs
like "mediating", or "coordinating"
are more to the point of furthering complex decision
making. |
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[60] But by demanding such
"new" qualities of both leaders and followers
do we not ask for humans that do not exist? In the
following chapter I want to show that quite the contrary
may be true. For evolution always works along many lines. |
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Man as a cooperative being
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[61] When I argued that the
type of the classical leader evolved as a natural result
of the living conditions of early man I did so without
really knowing. Everyday life in the Miocene, Pliocene or
during the Ice Ages is rather unknown to modern man. I
presupposed that small tribal hordes of about 20 memebers
lived in a condition of constant external trheats. This,
I postulated, necessitated strong personal leadership.
However, looking at tribal communities still living in
stone age conditions today, quite a different picture
emerges. |
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[62] Amazon Indians,
Australian Aborigines, South African bushmen and Arctic
Inuit are often depicted as living in admirable harmony
with their surroundings (and with themselves). They are
not constantly at war with neighbouring tribes. They do
not fight with wild animals day and night and they are
not troubled by diseases 24 hours around the clock. And,
above all, they do not seem to live that kind of brutish
mental life as is often caricatured. |
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Stone Age people living
in a state
of cooperative harmony
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[63] Anthropologists reveal
that the internal social life of tribal communities can
be quite varied and rich. Matters affecting all are
discussed in the evenings, there are ritualized, that is
institutionalized, trials and other decision making
processes. |
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[64] We may expect that the
coexistence of sorceres, witches, story-tellers, shamans,
medicine-men, chiefs and the like stood for some sort of
division of knowledge-work. The chief, for intance, was
responsible for pressing for some final decision where
that was needed. He did, however, have to listen to a
shaman, for example. Because the shaman perhaps
represented the groups collective memory. He also had to
take into account a witches opinion as she knew best what
a group could do physically in terms of health, endurance
and child rearing. The witch, too, might have possessed
particular psychological knoweldge. |
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[65] Perhaps our
pre-historic past, in a way, provided both scenarios: in
more or less rare events of external threats a strong
leader was needed to guarantee direct and coordinated
collective action. Just like the Romans invented
dictatorship as a temporary subordination of the group
under an appointed individual, ancient tribes may have
given over command to a single leader in times of war or
some other peril. |
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[66] In ordinary, more
peaceful times, however, the group may have relied on
rather more sophisticated methods of decision making. The
ordinary mode of ancient tribal life may well have
produced many sequences of behaviour that today can be
used to tackle complex decision making processes in an
environment of uncertain and rich information. |
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[67] Our genetic and
cultural blueprints today may therefore contain material
fort both these modes of group-life. I want to call them
the action-mode and the thinking-mode. Examples for the
action-mode have been give above. I now want to give some
examples for the thinking-mode of social decision making. |
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[68] As I write this, an
election campaign is in full swing in Germany. On
September 22nd, the people of Germany are asked to know
and decide who will be better for Germany future. The
decision is not at all easy. There are some obvious hints
that a major climatic catastrophe on a global scale may
be at hand. Among many other things, we have to decide
about the further use of fossil fuels like coal, gas and
oil. Also, unemployment has remained frustratingly high
ever since the 1990ies. External threats like
international terrorism, too, are much discussed in
public. Finally, an international study on the standard
of education (PISA) is widely interpreted as to suggest
that Germany is not doing too well at all. |
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[69] Whoever seriously
inquires into the details of any of these topics will
soon have to admit how tricky things really are. They are
well beyond the ken of any single individual. Will the
Gulf Stream have changed its course in the year 2010 and
will Europe then really suffer from Siberian climatic
conditions? What would be the overall effect of rising
wages? A rise of private consumption and thus a need for
higher production and more employment? Or will it cripple
many companies and scare them off to low-wage countries?
Who really knows? Probably no one. |
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[70] When no single
individual is capable of truly knowing all the
consequences of certain decisions, then perhaps a larger
group of people may know. For the larger a body of people
with imperfect but non-indentical knowledge is the more
knowledge it has and the better can be its decisions. |
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[71] And so it becomes
understandable what is often critised in times of
political campaigns. Many people simply follow suit and
act the way the majority would act. For obviously, if I
am not well informed about a problem I must look for
others whose opinion is better founded than mine. |
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[72] Hence the great
importance mock-polls play in campaigns. On August 25th
the present social democrat chancellor of Germany,
Gerhard Schröder, and his Bavarian contester, Edmund
Stoiber of the Conservatives debated major issues of
German politics in a TV duel. Most comments in the
newspapers on that debate centred around the question who
had won the debate in terms of public approval. Both
political parties involved claimed to have won in the
sense that now they had more followers than before. It
may be deplored that so little attention is give to the
content of speeches and so much attention is dedicated to
their reception by the masses. But this reflects a
primarily healthy and useful social mechanism of
TV-watchers and newspaper readers. They justly feel that
the topics mentioned are well beyond their grips and that
a large group of people will be better informed than a
small (provided there are still people who are informed). |
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[73] Instead of unfairly
criticizing such behaviour as an Americanized version of
collective ignorance we should rather be thankful for it
as a useful piece of social decision making and voluntary
subordination of individuals under a larger and more
intelligent social body. |
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[74] Socially induced
self-degradation is another example of a grossly
misinterpreted human capacity. Many people have a
demeanor which more or less indicates how much they are
respected by their peers. A "good dressing
down" makes some people adopt a drooping gait. In
meetings some people would hold back their views if they
were the only person who had not been greeted by others
at the beginning or when being snubbed and ostentatiously
ignored as the meeting goes on. In an extreme form,
social disregard can even lead to serious so-called
psychosomatic illnesses. Generally speaking, the people
around us have a very strong influence on how actively we
participate in collective work and, abvoe all, decision
making processes. |
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[75] Tragically, people who
react in such a way are regarded as weak in will-power.
It is said that they lack the power of self-assertion and
that therefore they are not very useful for business or
political life. |
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[76] Little could be more
silly and unjust at the same time. Let us bear in mind
that we are talking about collective decision making
processes where no single individual can surely know what
is best. We are talking about problems where much more
information is potentially available to be discussed or
otherwise processed. We are talking about cooperative
information work where each individual represents one of
many interesting aspects. And we are talking about team
work where it can be supposed that at least statistically
the team knows more than its constituent members. |
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[77] Bearing all that in
mind, socially induced self-degradation suddenly begins
to make sense. During decision making processes like in a
meeting, the group as a whole constantly has to assess
the relevance of each aspect it could potentially
discuss. For time and attention are surely limited
ressources. If, therefore, the group comes to the
conclusion that the aspects a certain person puts forward
must be neglected for the time being, that person is
given some implicit hints to hold back. And quite
rightly, that person sacrifices his own point of view for
the good of the whole. And if a social body comes to the
conclusion that a certain person never really produces
anything useful at all and that therefore that person
should be substituted group pressure is applied. A heart
attack induced by continuous mobbing may be likened to
apopteosis (?) as observed at the level of single cells . |
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Self-degradation
and mobbing |
[78] At this stage of our
conclusion we must be careful not be be cynical. I am not
trying to say that mobbing should be justified or even
wilfully applied. What I am saying is that all gradations
of social disregard can be interpreted to be functionally
useful for collective decision making. We should
cultivate an attitude in which people are respected and
promoted that adopt their communications to the needs of
the group. What we should do is to appreciate and outgrow
our ancient past. This, however, will be discussed later
on. |
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Man as a semi-conscious being
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[79] In his best-selling
book "The User Illusion" the Danish author Tor
Norretranders convincingly showed that only a tiny
fragment of our behaviour reaches our consciousness. Not
only simple reflexes like blinking can go unnoticed by
conscious perception. Much of our social behaviour eludes
consciousness, too. A & P Pearse say that when a man
kisses a woman, the two brains concerned chemically
analyze the other persons saliva and draw their
conclusions as to the compatibility of the two immune
systems with regards to a possible offspring. One result
of this most certainly unconscious analysis is whether
the two fall in love with each other or not. |
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[80] The scientific
disciplines of etiology (?), socio-biology and psychology
in general can give many more such examples. |
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[81] Protecting a superiors
left half o his body to guard his heart is just as much
to this point as producing psychosomatic symptoms in
consequence of constant disapproval experienced at work. |
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[82] In fact, very much if
not practically all information processing work in our
brains runs smoothly and reliably below the threshhold of
conscious perception. |
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[83] What does this mean for
the daily work of leaders? It means two things. Firstly,
we are probably capable of doing much more knowledge work
as we are aware of. And secondly, it means that rather
often than not we cannot possibly know why we react or
decide in a certain way. |
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[84] Opinions rather than
facts, vague feelings rather than logical conclusions and
intuition instead of proof are the best we can sometimes
expect to do. And that can be quite good. |
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[85] Many problems cannot
yet be solved by logic and computational power alone.
They are simply too complex and often many uncertain
factors play an important role. |
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[86] Leaders and those led
alike must accept that many decisions may still be good
although there is no communicable logic behind them. |
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[87] This is hard stuff for
classically minded people. It means that leaders should
accept vaguely voiced opinions of inferiors as
potentially highly relevant. But it also means that
inferiors must accept leaders who cannot explain fully
how they arrived at a certain decision and not
automatically attack them on these grounds. |
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Man as a variegated being
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[88] Before concluding this
essay with the formulation of leadership qualities
adapted to complex, information rich environments I want
to make one last preliminary point. Attributes like
"useless", "disabled",
"competent", "good",
"dynamic" or "no good" are sometimes
used to describe human individuals. Such words have very
strong connotations as to the overall worth of a person.
In business life particularly one often hears sentences
of fragments like "he is no good", "a good
man" etc. |
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[89] Quite wrongly this
often identifies a whole persons worth with his specific
usefulness in a certain business environment. Such an
attitude totally disregards the essence of decision
making and work generally in a a complex environment.
Every person whether by genetic programming or cultural
conditioning represents a potential aspect of reality, as
said before. Each person can contribute in a certain way
to the solution of some certain problem. |
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[90] As time rolls on, some
types of problems may disappear whereas new kinds of
problems may arise. In times of peace, for instance, the
merits of military leadership may be less in demand than,
say, entertainment abilities. But it would be totally
wrong to disqualify good soldiership and good soldiers as
useless when no war is at hand. |
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[91] Nature and perhaps some
cultural mechanisms "know" that nobody really
knows what types of persons will be needed in future.
Therefore, it is wise to have a tolerably large selection
of different types of humans in stock. Who knows whether
the strong capacity for human affection peculiar to
mongoloid persons may not be particularly helpful for
some future society. In the Netherlands, for example,
blind people are specifically employed by the police to
monitor telephone calls. Their fine sense of hearing
makes them very sensitive to the more elusive shades of
human voices. It is said that they can thus detect liars
more easily than ordinary people. And they have a good
ability to hear the specific social roles the members of
a group have just by listening to their voices. Thus we
may say, that for telephone monitoring purposes blind
people are not at all disabled. They are rather well
qualified for the job. |
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Conclusion
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[92] What conclusions are we
to draw from the fact that different kinds of decision
making require different styles of leadership? |
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[93] Primarily, we should
become more consciously aware of our tribal heritage.
That does not mean that we should dismiss it as outdated.
But we should consider carefully which role a leader and
his or her followers should play. Some things should
clearly belong to the past: |
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Only exceptional
situations may
excuse this in our times
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[94] Within small groups
that work under pressure of time the role of the
classical leader is probably near the best we can expect.
Inferiors should respect his monopoly on decision making
and some of his milder privileges as being part of the
game. |
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[95] Where, however, good
decisions can be brought about by the cooperative
interaction of many people, departments or social bodies
in general, classical leadership is in the way. |
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[96] In such environments,
leaders should encourage people around them to produce
their views, to be creative and communicative. They
should, above all, try and avoid depreciating others.
Leaders should make the process of decision making as
transparent as possible. They should make it clear to
everybody where openness is not possible, as may be the
case with negotations that require discretion. |
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[97] The people that are
being mediated, on their part, must accept that leaders
have the last say. They must acknowledge and respect the
leaders responsibility to bring about a decision. And
they must be forgiving if leaders do not give their
particular views full weight. For we are all only part of
something bigger. |
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[98] I want to finish these
thoughts with a reference to a most remarkable utopia
written by the English author H. G. Wells in about 1921. |
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Men Like Gods - a positive utopia by H. G.
Wells, written in about 1921 |
[99] In his book "Men
like Gods" Wells envisages a future society where
there are no clearly visible structures of power. All
decisions are being brought about by talking and giving
most of the weight to acknowledged experts. But Wells
also said that this somewhat anarchical state of affairs
was not brought about either by revolution or by a
political programme. It had evolved over hundreds of
years with single individuals following the ideal of
cooperation and commons sense. Perhaps we, too, have to
live through hundreds of years of technological and
economic turmoils and adventures before the role of the
truly classical leader becomes less and less necessary
and common decency has become identical with economical
efficiency. |
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Recommended Literature: Giuliania,
R. W.; Kurson, K.: Leadership. 2002. ISBN:
0786868414. The Republican Mayor of New York on leadship
principles
Morrell, M.; Capparell, S.: Shackleton`s Way:
Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer.
Viking Penguin, New York, 2001
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One Level up // Two levels up
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Contact
Last edited: February 20th,
2003
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