The World's Fastest Leadership Test?
In order to properly consider one of the fastest, simplest, and most direct leadership indicators available, we will also have to consider the general sort of answer we would look for in response to the central question the test poses. That in turn will, in a certain sense, invalidate the test (we’re sort of giving away the answer here). So, before discussing the test, we should reflect a little on why we need it in the first place.
We need this reflection because this is no ordinary leadership test. It’s a leadership test that we cannot pass on the basis of current leadership paradigms prevailing in the dominant culture. This test looks for leaders capable helping us walk pathways to a better world—a quantum leap in innovation, creativity, well-being, peace, and justice . . . Clearly the test promises a lot.
That’s because it tests for a shift in consciousness so far present only in rather limited and intellectual ways in current business and leadership circles. This in turn means that giving away the general sensibility of the answer won’t really affect the spirit of the test, and thus it won’t become meaningless—depending on who administers it. Just as we can know the words to say in response to a Zen Master’s query but still fail to receive their approval, we can know the answer to this test in words and concepts but fail to understand (or wonderstand) the deeper shift it seeks to detect.
So . . . why a new leadership test? Don’t we have enough data on leadership by now? Reflecting on the state of the world gives many of us a sense that we need some kind of positive shift, a transformational leap. In recent books and on platforms catering to the business community, we find some evidence that our sense of leadership has begun to change in response to our changing context. Emotional intelligence has risen in importance while charisma lost some points.
Perhaps the top characteristic we look for in leaders right now has to do with maintaining calm confidence in the face of challenges. That can sound nice from one perspective. However, it looks rather suspicious when a calm, confident oil executive tells us calm, confident lies about the causes of an oil spill and what the company will do in response, perhaps with a seemingly sincere expression of empathy for the people affected.
A strictly business-minded evaluation of that sort of leadership performance might assign very high marks for such calmness, confidence, and apparent empathy under pressure—praising such a figure for their “executive presence” and their “emotional intelligence”. However, a more realistic and insightful evaluation of such a performance leads us to conclude we have a problem on our hands.
One way we can frame the essence of that problem: There’s a difference between what we may think we want in a leader (and in ourselves), and what ecological and spiritual realities may insist we actually need in our leaders (and in ourselves). That problem presents us with a lot to consider, not least because spiritual/ecological literacy has sunk to unprecedented lows.
Among other things, we should consider the fact that, at the end of the day, both our leadership ideals and our practical leadership performance get shaped by the dominant currents of our culture. That actually gives us two challenges in one: The challenge of understanding which ideals matter (and what they must include in their meaning), and the challenge of realizing those ideals in practice (such that we eliminate the sometimes tragic gap between the practical and the ideal).
When we consider the example of an executive who can remain calm and confident under pressure, and who even seems to presence emotional intelligence, we can see how leadership qualities can get co-opted by spiritual materialism. The term “spiritual materialism” refers to something unavoidable for each and all of us: Absolutely any idea, any practice, any philosophy, religion, or technique can be used to perpetuate, elaborate, and deepen structures of power, aggression, and ignorance (inside or outside of us), even if the intention of the idea, practice, etcetera is the opposite of this.
That means the challenge here holds beyond our politics or personal opinions. You may love the oil industry. You may work in that industry or have clients who do. Or you may have strong criticisms of it. Whatever the case, when an executive calmly and confidently lies to us, thus betraying the lie of their apparent compassion as well, we can all recognize that the supposed qualities and practices of good leadership have gotten co-opted into something unethical at best, and possibly sinister or downright evil.
We can use meditation, mindfulness, yoga, and various hacks based on neuroscience and psychology to help us control our emotions, more accurately perceive the emotional states of others, and tap into a rather impressive cleverness of thought. And we can then put those tactics to work doing less than savory things. We can bring in coaches and consultants who might help us understand elements of psychology, mindset, empathy, and more, and we can employ all of that for nefarious (or at least dubious) ends.
And the plot thickens. It’s not just that a genuinely good leader wouldn’t put powerful strategies and tactics to work in accord with wicked intentions, but that an ideal leader would have a lot more sensitivity to the ways even good intentions can go wrong, often because of a lack of spiritual and ecological literacy.
The main issue here: We can train a person to express any leadership quality that currently finds favor in the court of expert or public opinion, and yet we have to realize that this won’t necessarily make the person the kind of leader we need. They may display fine leadership characteristics that they nevertheless put to use for purposes they either rationalize away or sincerely think of as acceptable or even good, and yet a great deal of suffering may result.
For some of us, the realization that we need new tests of leadership may seem obvious. We can consider recent blunders, like the one in which a CEO quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. in a termination email. It appears like an incredibly telling moment for leadership in the dominant culture, and not just an error on the part of one person. The CEO wrote—in an email terminating 7% of the company’s global workforce—that they were reminded in times like these of the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.”
We find several issues of concern here, not least of which the fact that this quote comes from King’s Strength to Love, a collection of sermons about how all of us need to cultivate . . . the strength to love. It has nothing to do with leadership, except in the sense that all of us must cultivate a capacity to walk together, in mutuality. So, the quote is not about a “leader” as someone who stands above the rest of us. Rather it has to do with our own capacity to lead by example.
What example? The borrowed passage appears in a sermon on becoming “a good neighbor,” or “a good Samaritan,” whom King describes this way:
“a good man, whose exemplary life will always be a flashing light to plague the dozing conscience of mankind. His goodness was not found in a passive commitment to a particular creed, but in his active participation in a life-saving deed; not in a moral pilgrimage that reached its destination point, but in the love ethic by which he journeyed life’s highway. He was good because he was a good neighbor.”
The sermon touches on what King describes as universal altruism and dangerous altruism. Dangerous altruism—the kind of altruism that threatens structures of power and domination—seems to imply that a leader would find a way to keep 7% of their global workforce employed, or in some other way to work toward a justice that demands far more than simply firing them. The quote, then, seems to rationalize behavior that the book as a whole would invite us to transcend.
We might try to write this off as anomalous, but I think we can all imagine leaders across the corporate world trying to see themselves in such a noble light, somehow trying to project a kind of gravitas onto their workaday lives, and trying to make the dirty work of business seem somehow virtuous. It seems safe to suggest that King, following Socrates, would find a good many of our leaders mostly sleepwalk through their lives.
To what extent does the current system restrict our practice and realization of virtue? To what extent do the patterns of insanity that characterize the dominant culture keep us asleep in our own lives?
This discussion has nothing to do with criticizing—let alone shaming—this particular CEO, or even CEOs in general. This particular CEO, like countless others, might be a genuinely nice person we would count ourselves lucky to know. And they may very much want to aspire to high ideals in their personal and professional lives. One question we might ask is whether our own highest ideals actually accord with the work we do.
And that may mark off a disconnect between the values we would profess upon careful reflection, and the sorts of things that actually count in the world we have created. For instance, this particular CEO seems to enjoy a rather good reputation as a business person.
In fact, this particular CEO was featured in Forbes for the “4 People-Focused Principles” (sounds like good neighbor sorts of practices, right?) which they had “Leveraged to Build a $2 Billion Public Company”. The problem we face appears in those headlines: We can no longer accept a monetary measure of leadership, and we need to get beyond the superficial levels of “executive presence,” “emotional intelligence,” and “flow states” we fancy our leaders possess.
We’ve come to a point in the whole scope of human history—indeed we’ve come to a point in the state of the planet itself—in which leadership has to mean more to us. This applies not only to those of us in the world of business, but also those of us in the sciences, the arts, education, and more. We need a visionary sense of leadership, a holistic, rigorous, and properly scientific standard of leadership that will ensure not only the survival of human culture, but the thriving of life on Earth—diverse, creative, abundant life on Earth.
The state of our ecologies, the state of our politics and economic, the state of our cultures indicate to us that we very much need a new test of leadership, a new way of cultivating true leaders. And we already have that test, thanks to the multidisciplinary scientist Gregory Bateson. Bateson delivered this test in a speech, the text of which you can find in his book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (better leadership depends on our capacity to liberate ourselves into larger and more vitalizing ecologies of mind . . . to take steps not only toward an ecology of mind, but also to take steps toward a mind of ecology).
The test is rather simple: If I hold up my soma-typical human hand, how many fingers would you say I have?
Here’s how Bateson explains the way a wiser, more visionary leader might respond:
If I ask you how many fingers you have, you will probably answer, “Five.” That I believe to be an incorrect answer. The correct answer, I believe, is, “Gregory you are asking a question wrongly.” In the process of human growth, there is surely no word which means finger, and no word which means five. There might be a word for “branching” . . . . You should be counting not the things which are related, but the relationships . . .
It behooves us to recognize that things are stranger than Bateson at first indicates—which shows the subtlety of this test of leadership capacity. Even Bateson falls back into “counting”. And thus, “systems thinkers” everywhere who think “systems thinking” will let us pass this test may need to think again.
In reality, relationships aren’t things, and they aren’t localized—which means they’re not really countable. We can’t possess what we can’t count, so to speak. But counting and possessing as we know it go together in a certain style of consciousness or way of thinking and knowing. We need leaders—we need people in general—who can presence this kind of understanding or wonderstanding of relationship and mind: mind itself is relational, reality itself is relational, we should not reify relationships, we cannot localize mind. By default, most leadership, including “systems-based” leadership will localize the mind and reify countless “things” that aren’t things at all.
Bateson tries to help us get in touch with a radially different style of consciousness, even if only in the most partial, preliminary, and modest way. As we try to follow along with him below, it helps to understand that we cannot possibly know ourselves well enough to fulfill our greatest potential, we cannot possibly know the world well enough to help it realize its greatest abundance, and we cannot know skillfully and creatively enough to optimally lead even a small group of people (let alone a major corporation) if the way we know remains out of accord with ecological and spiritual realities, which he here refers to as “biological”:
Look at your hand now . . . very quietly, almost as part of meditation. And try to catch the difference between seeing it as a base for five parts and seeing it as constructed of a tangle of relationships. Not a tangle, a pattern of the interlocking of relationships which were the determinants of its growth. And if you can really manage to see the hand in terms of the epistemology [i.e., the way of knowing—n.p.] I am offering you, I think you will find your hand is suddenly much more recognizably beautiful . . . I am suggesting to you, first, that language is very deceiving, and, second, that if you begin even without much knowledge to adventure into what it would be like to look at the world with a biological epistemology, you will come into contact with concepts biologists don’t look at at all. You will meet with beauty . . .
It’s not a new idea that living things have immanent beauty, but it is revolutionary to assert, as a scientist, that matters of beauty are really highly formal, very real, and crucial to the entire political and ethical system in which we live.
. . . . Is the word “possession” applicable at all to relations?
Perhaps it will suffice to show that what I am saying, if taken seriously—and I say it in all seriousness—would make an almost total change in the way we live, the way we think about our lives, and about each other and ourselves.
. . . . We face a paradox in that I cannot tell you how to educate the young, or yourselves, in terms of the epistemology which I have offered you except you first embrace that epistemology. The answers must already be in your head and in your rules of perception. You must know the answer to your question before I can give it to you. I wish that every teacher, schoolmaster, parent, and older sibling could hear the thunderous voice out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without understanding? . . . Dost thou know when the hinds bring forth? . . . Where wast thou when I set up the pillars of the earth”? I mean the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, and fortieth chapters of the Book of Job. The pietistic silly old man thought he was pretty good and thought God was just like him, but finally he was enlightened by an enormous lesson, a thunderous lesson in natural history and in the beauty of the natural world. (Steps: 310)
We find an inconceivable shift in leadership here. If the immanent beauty of the world—the relational dynamism of the world—has crucial implications for science, politics, and ethics, then no sane leader can go without training in how to make this shift in their style of consciousness and their style of thinking, speaking, and acting.
By referring to a “style” of consciousness and thinking, we refer to something holistic. We don’t make this kind of shift because we took a course in systems thinking or went to a handful of workshops on flow states, executive presence, and emotional intelligence. We refer here to something subtle and profound, not to a bucket of information, a fancy tool for our toolkit, or a new intellectual object for the cabinet of curiosities we pry open when trying to sound insightful.
Bateson—a lifelong atheist—sought to bring us back to a sense of the sacred. As such, we have here a test to detect wise leadership, a test to detect leaders rooted, in wisdom, love, and beauty.
Wisdom means skillful relationality, or skillful interwovenness. Since dynamic interwovenness is the nature of reality—the nature of our own mind and the mind of Nature—then we need people who have achieved exceptional intimacy with this dynamic interwovenness. Such people don’t get to tell anyone what to do, but they would certainly merit our respect, would naturally propose compelling courses of action, and would speak with a level of clarity of mind and insight that we would naturally give them special consideration.
What’s the alternative to wise leadership? Some variety of ignorance. That plain fact reveals a tragic aspect of these reflections: No one would advocate for ignorant leadership, ignorant leaders, or an ignorant course of action, and yet, without a conscientious practice of cultivating wisdom and making it a primary criterion for leadership, we will likely have leaders whose most significant common characteristic is ignorance, and not the ideals of leadership we wish to project onto them (and ourselves).
What wisdom leads us to notice may differ from what our ego or the patterns of insanity that characterize the dominant culture would prefer we notice. The great majority of us wouldn’t stop to think twice when coming across the expression, “I have five fingers,” or even, “I know how many fingers I have on my right hand.” But that in turn relates to the fact that the great majority of us wouldn’t stop to think twice about the phrase, “We know how to put a human being in orbit,” or, “We know how to mine resources on the Moon and then launch a mission to Mars,” or, “I know how to build a billion-dollar corporation.”
At this point in the history of the planet, the answer to the question, “Do we know how to put human beings in orbit?” is something like, “You are asking wrongly—and terribly so.” That holds equally true for the question, “Do you know how to build a billion-dollar corporation?”
Worse yet, we may find wisdom at times inviting us to go so far as to say the answer to such questions is better put as “No!” than to put it as even a qualified “yes.” This can take time to appreciate, but we could water the seed and let it begin to germinate. An admittedly strange seed, it indicates the strangeness of our situation on the planet right now.
It also indicates the dangerous nature of wisdom, love, and beauty. Leaders of all kinds have to keep wisdom, love and beauty at bay, to varying degrees, and all their decisions inevitably rest on some degree of ignorance. We won’t truly thrive until we can stop doing that, stop keeping wisdom, love, and beauty at bay. A truly visionary leader will know how to let them in, in ways that cultivate the whole of life onward.
That’s the sort of thing Martin Luther King, Jr. was talking about: “the ultimate measure of a [person] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy.” Justice is a matter of wisdom, love, and beauty. Peace is a matter of wisdom, love, and beauty. A healthy world—abundant with biodiversity, strong and resilient, with clean air and water, with vibrant soils and souls, flowing with creativity and insight—that too is a matter of wisdom, love, and beauty.
Clearly, something in our cultural context challenges wisdom, love, and beauty, finds them controversial, and thus makes it hard on us to do the right thing at leadership scale, to achieve peace and justice, to do what spiritual and ecological realities call on us to do (perhaps in spite of what our egos think we want).
Let us no longer darken our own counsel with what we think we know, and with what so many of our “thought leaders,” CEOs, politicians, economists, and others claim to know (and have tried to get us to accept as inevitable). Let us find ways to lead ourselves and each other, in a spirit of mutuality, toward better ways of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world we share.
Wise leadership means skillful relationality—skillful interwovenness—and it has become critical for us to conscientiously practice and realize skillful interwovenness. Reflect deeply on this open-source leadership test for wisdom, love, and beauty (it goes incredibly deep, and we must experience those awesome depths), then use it freely, with profound care and even with a sense of sacredness.