Leading from the “radical centre”.

“The highest ideals on earth are realised when leaders strive to secure them through close attention to reality. Lofty idealism without pragmatism is worthless. What is pragmatism without ideals? At best it is management, but not leadership.”
Noel Pearson, 2010 John Button Oration.

In his 2010 John Button Oration on Friday evening , Noel Pearson joined other commentators in identifying a failure by the Labor Party in Australia to “renew its purpose” after the lose of the 2001 election. He sees the failure not as one in which the party is unable to show that it can manage the economy and ensure the continuing financial well-being of Australians but one in which talk of social justice has ceased to have any meaning or guiding power in the development and articulation of policy. He argued that social justice could and should be a real concept for any party that “… seeks to actively work to make a better society …” but that this can only happen if social justice is properly understood.

To make his point he then talked extensively about his concept of leadership. Firstly he made a distinction between structural leadership and natural leadership. Structural leadership is dependent, he suggested, on formal structures, be they political, organisational, cultural, religious or economic, that mandate authority, power and influence. Natural leadership, on the other hand, is simply the informal recognition of the power, inspiration and influence of self determination. He argues that there are many more natural leaders than structural leaders. I’m not so sure … but I’ll come back to this later.

This is very similar to view to that proposed by Ron Heifetz who argued in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers that leadership and authority are not the same thing. The important point being, I think, that it should not be assumed that simply because someone is in a position that is regarded as “having” authority that they will also exercise “leadership”. But neither does it exclude the possibility.

The point Pearson is making takes this a little further. He went on to refer to a pyramid metaphor of leadership with idealism on the one side and realism on the other. For him the apex of leadership is where the two sides meet. This is a place he calls the “radical centre”, that is, a point at which idealism and realism meet. What strikes me and what isn’t clear in the extract from the Oration published in The Australian, is just how tricky a place this is when viewed from the perspective of the person or group who seek to exercise leadership (in the idealistic self-determination sense) but not at the risk of achieving little or nothing.

Which brings me back to the question of whether there are more or less “natural” leaders. If I take a non-organisational view then it seems to me that structural leaders abound. Everyday each of us encounters people who by virtue of their role in relation to us and to others are deemed, or deem themselves, to have some form of authority or power, at least in the particular circumstance. These shifting power dynamics are integral to every relationship. What is often missing is the expectation that you or I or anyone else will, when we find ourselves adopting these identities in which we assume some “structural authority”, seek to find the “radical centre” – that unique balance among the competing forces that make aspiration and practical action a possibility.

Finding this “radical centre of leadership” whether it be in the public policy arena or in less grand contexts, would seem to me to involve the kind of mindfulness that Ellen Langer has been researching for the past three decades. This form of mindfulness consists of:

* Openness to novelty
* Alertness to distinctions
* Sensitivity to different contexts
* Implicit, if not explicit, awareness of differing perspectives
* Orientation to the present.

If we can be mindful in this kind of way, whatever we believe we have learned and much of what we take to be certain will remain conditional. In this state we will be much more likely to be able to hold the delicate balance between visions and ideals and their realisation through practical, engaged action.

Let me leave you with a quote from Peter Sutton’s book, The Politics of Suffering, winner of the recently awarded John Button Prize for 2010.

One of the costs of an era of social policy that has been dominated by cultural relativism, the rights agenda and the redistribution of power, has been the displacement of care as the primary determinant of special helping measures for citizens in trouble.