On Leaders and why they are not needed

Ivor Tymchak. Would you follow this man?
Ivor Tymchak. Would you follow this man?

Guest blog by Ivor Tymchak (yes he of Bettakultcha)

I came across a tweet calling for more working class leaders. I RT’d it with the caveat that we don’t really need leaders. Emma challenged me on this point… cue twitter firestorm of intense debate, involving many people, about what leadership is and how it inevitably works.

Such was the level of passion that it occurred to me that another platform was needed to explore the subject at much greater length and depth. I touted the idea of a conference to the participants on twitter and even (with deliberate irony) unilaterally appointed various people to get the ball rolling. They declined. It was then that I realised how things come about. If I wanted to see this event happen then I had to pick up the ball and run with it, I had to write the document that contains the idea that fires peoples imaginations that builds the bridge…

People do things because they care about the outcomes. And the people who naturally assume responsibility for an action are the ones who care the most. The passer-by who stops to help a collapsed pedestrian on the street leads by example because they care about the well being of another human being. They can empathise with the suffering of a stranger and act out of love, not a hunger for power. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, his outraged citizens cared enough to set the Arab region alight and give birth to the Arab Spring.

My issue with our current system of leadership is that it encourages the worst possible people with the worst possible motives to seek influence over their fellow citizens. If this is the best that humans can come up with then I don’t hold out much hope for our future—every civilisation in the history of Homo sapiens has collapsed. This one is just a matter of time.

I’m not going to go into the systems of leadership here, except to say that the current concept of hierarchical leadership is practically universal, no other system is allowed to compete. We have exactly the same situation with the concept of money*; it is so thoroughly dyed into our consciousness that we cannot imagine anything else taking its place. But it is a human invention, humans are ingenious creatures, creativity is what we do. It is often said that leadership is a ‘natural’ phenomenon directed by evolution. This is false. Evolution never directed humans to go into space and yet we are in space. We are in this hostile environment of space because we wanted to be there and so we invented systems that allowed it to happen. If we can challenge evolution with our ingenuity than surely we can challenge a simple man made invention?

Who among you has the imagination, the vision, and the strength of conviction to nail a list of demands on the door of history? I call upon the motivated people of Leeds to think the unthinkable and question the accepted ‘truth’ of the world. Who cares enough to put their name down?

*There is a TEDx Leeds event on February 29th 2012 on this very subject.

And a response from Hayden Cohen who argues the exact opposite

In my University days, I was as politically engaged as you can get. As a trustee and non-sabbatical member of the Birmingham Guild of Students as well as a NUS student representative to two national conferences, made me acutely aware of the pitfalls of leadership. The Guild was (and is) as formal as it gets. There is a constitution, vast arrays of standing orders, bylaws and yes, elected leaders.

On the flip side, I was also involved in a great student led arts festival called ValeFest. Now ValeFest is a great event. Full of music, spoken word, comedy etc, right in the heart of student land catering to 5000 attendees every year. It is the organisation though that’s really interesting. They have a supposed non-hierarchical structure meaning that they have no leaders. At least when I was involved, this aspect of Vale Fest was a misnomer. Leaders would emerge who would gently, but fervently tell you to do something or other. Committees would be formed to deal with logistics, artists, promotion etc. Even with the best will in the world, natural leaders emerged. They may have lead passively, but some people are leaders and others followers.

This is a great thing for we are all unique. Most people don’t want to be trendsetters and go getters. They want things to happen and maybe help out. That’s not necessarily apathy, it’s just that leadership roles haven’t spoken out to them.

Without a leader, organisations lack direction and when there is no ultimate voice, this causes distraction and the collapse of the collective. History has proven this, to my knowledge, without exception. It is important that our leaders are accountable and elected, but to not have leaders at all? Not only is it misguided, but completely and utterly unworkable.Tackling this idea of encouraging unsuitable leaders, it upsets me, that people are so disenfranchised from the political system. For full disclosure, I am politically engaged and a leader within my own community, but this is non-partisan, so I’d rather not get into the quagmire that these things regularly end up being. Suffice to say, there are good leaders and bad leaders. Bad leaders have all the characteristics you’d expect. They don’t listen, have an unwavering self afflicted vision and discourage any and all involvement that isn’t on their own terms.

Good leaders look for their replacement from the beginning. They instil positive values in the people that are below them in the simply wonderful hierarchical chain. They make stuff happen and take overall responsibility for their actions and those of the organisation. By far though, the most important characteristic of every good leader is that they listen and take action based on feedback.

Rather than saying that the model of leadership is wrong, instead let’s attempt to improve our current and new generation of leaders ensuring that they are moulded in our image. As the philosopher Tocqueville suggests ‘we get the government we deserve.’ If you don’t like your leaders, stop moaning and lead yourself. Someone has to.

12 comments

    1. I’m looking for alternatives to the model of leadership we have now. I don’t pretend to know which alternatives might be best, I just know that they must be out there. It’s also not that simple to give a blanket answer, the difference between Ghandi and Mother Teresa, for example, is enormous even though they would both assert that their motivation came from love (some writers maintain that Mother Teresa’s policies resulted in more human suffering and not less).

  1. Leadership is good – bad leadership doesn’t require leaderless philosophy.

    Leadership is intrinsically human – we’re an exceptional species on this planet, so we seek and see exception in each other.

    Leadership of course can be autocratic, participative, lassez-faire, narcissistic and toxic but each has a place in the right content, time, situation and culture.

    What’s perhaps a more interesting question is the meaning of leadership in a post-crash, post-democratic civilisation – where trust in institutions is low, but ad-hoc communities are forming and dissipating to address challenges all over the planet.

    It’s too easy to fetishise scale-free, leaderless networks like Twitter as great emancipatory mechanisms, but there are consequences too as people coalesce around only those with whom they have affinity, reducing tolerance for alien ideas and concepts.

    What does leadership mean in a network society? Indeed, where are the new philosophers for a connected culture?

    1. A post-apocalyptic world would be an excellent place to hypothesise how new models of leadership might work… the urgency for such an exercise is greater than most people think.

      1. Much as evangelicals fantasise about the end times, there’s a streak of activism that gets a boner for impending collapses – what Kevin Kelly calls Collapsitarians – rooting for an apocalypse and a blank slate before tackling complexity.

        ( Peak Oil! Peak Tuna! Peak Human! }

        I don’t know how urgent things are… we’ve only just begun to comprehend things at global scales, so are they really any worse, or just simply that we can start to grok things at scale now.

        Change doesn’t necessitate an apocalypse 😉

        1. I’ve heard this criticism so many times now and I’d be embarrassed to bring up the apocalypse scenario again except for one thing; evidence. It was strange how so many economic ‘experts’, post 2008 ‘saw’ the financial crash coming. Anyone with any critical thinking skills could look at the numbers and work out that such debt levels was heading for a fall, indeed, the debt levels are still there and the crash is in the position of the cartoon character still suspended in the air whilst the cliff edge has long since fallen away.

          Personally, I would want to avoid an apocalypse as history has shown us that revolution simply replaces one extreme system with another equally extreme system, albeit with a different agenda.

          Globalization is the last refuge of unsustainability… there is nowhere left to go from here, no other worlds to plunder. If a catastrophic scenario was ever more likely in the history of humans, it is now. The complexity is too great for humans to fathom (I point to the financial example yet again with its wonderful algorithms and mathematical certainties) and the signs are too confusing to divine accurately.

          I hope I’m wrong but a Plan B is always a good strategy.

    1. Interesting article. It almost intimates that the concept of leadership has been subsumed by the concept of ‘markets’. More and more ‘care of the citizens’ is being outsourced to profit-seeking organisations. Indeed, we see this government prostrate itself before the financial emperor in the city, the mighty profit of market wisdom. Perhaps even leadership has become a commodity to be traded in the global market…

  2. I’m intrigued by the idea of exploring new methods of interacting with others. Our “political” leadership is seriously flawed – the latest revelation re Thatcher & Liverpool – let them rot shows the huge gap between what the image says and what they really intend.
    A benevolent dictatorship would only be acceptable if it was me, a committee, well enough said.
    I’ll be interested in the TEDx Leeds event.

    1. Good point about the recent revelations concerning Liverpool. The strange thing is, we never seem to make the cognitive leap that if our leaders were double dealing us twenty odd years ago, they must be doing it now…

  3. Perhaps I was being zealous in my attempt to get people to question the current status quo. Clearly, in any society, there will be alpha males, matriarchs and unique individuals who will have skill sets and ideas that benefit the group. The questions concerning the group are, what does the group want and how do they go about achieving it? If it is just to find food, have sex and get drunk occasionally, then no ‘leadership’ decisions need to be made. If infrastructure is to be built however, then clearly, some organisation and administration is required and decisions will have to be made—who does what, when, where etc. It is this stage that I am interested in.

    In a hunter-gatherer society, decisions would be made on a, ‘who is best suited to make that decision?’ basis. The tribe would follow what they thought was the best advice. In our set-up, a leader can override any decision even when it is clear to the majority of the tribe that going against the advice is dangerous or even fatal. I don’t want that kind of leadership for myself or my children.

    I got a lot of my inspiration from Ricardo Semler’s book called Maverick. It was a massive experiment that challenged the existing rules of the day and, for a time, triumphed.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maverick_(book)

    What I hoped to do with this blog post was to make people question the current leadership model and to undermine it by exposing its catastrophic flaws. I thank everyone who has contributed so far.

  4. “Leaders” The Trojan horse of Cameron’s “Big Society” a global network working to what ends for whos benefit ?

    ResPublica, Demos, Cabinet Behavioural Insight Team, Media Standards Trust

    Linked to Tavistock / Frankfurt School / Rockefeller Foundation & much much more. Philip Blond check him out consider his education.

    Common Purpose takes over Bradford

    dh | 21.03.2007 02:47
    How a controlling organisation, under the guise of a diversifying one can permeate a city’s infrastructure
    See capitalised entries at bottom of article
    This only claims to be a partial list

    Tip to read the “hidden text” select it all to cut and paste.

    http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/leedsbradford/2007/03/365733.html

    Common Purpose aims to improve the way society works by expanding the vision, decision making ability and influence of all kinds of leaders. The organisation runs a variety of educational programmes for leaders of all ages, backgrounds and sectors, in order to provide them with the inspiration, information and opportunities they need to change the world.’

    From such bland descrïptions come two questions immediately: A common purpose to what end? And ‘change the world’ in what way exactly? We need answers here because Common Purpose is sweeping through the UK ‘training’ leaders in all areas of society and if they have a ‘common purpose’ we ought to know about it.

    The organisation now has training programmes in every major town and city in Britain and since 1989 more than 60,000 people have been involved with 20,000 ‘leaders’ completing one or more programmes. These are:

    Leaders: Matrix and Focus
    Emerging leaders: Navigator
    Very young leaders: Your Turn
    Leaders who need a local briefing: Profile
    National leaders: 20:20
    The benefits of Common Purpose training are the following, the sales-pitch

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