When the Centre Cannot Hold: Leadership in Times of Unraveling
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Turning up when the sun shines and Ted, the dog, needs walking is a tightrope kind of privilege that feels at odds with witnessing the massacre of an entire people, and knowing that in many other parts, the sun burns through the skin of both earth and humans. And here I am, trying to stay centered and focused and not let it all fall apart—for what good would that do?—when I could be doing something useful? Or not...
I know that there is a time for holding the line (the dog needs to be walked before the heat sets in), and letting the threads of the everyday unravel is to be within the gnawing discomfort of bearing witness. But even that feels like an academicized hollow gesture that keeps me intact, when the horror of letting it all fall apart might only be wallowing in my own inadequacy. Yeats puts it well:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats
The innocence of denial is drowned for sure. I cannot be the only one thrashing around in search of a thread through. Yet it rarely enters my coaching work with leaders unless gently invited. The urgency to take action is palpable, but no one draws breath for long enough or mentions the falling-apartness of it all.
We are still attached to models of innovation that disguise a tendency towards competitive do-or-die growth.
Pat wants his model of the world reflected in how his team implements a new reporting system. He believes it will lead to more funding from a shrinking government pot, but he doesn't see how the prospect of success is dreaded by some project team members who are struggling to cope with the day-to-day grind. They serve a community-based client group just that bit less able to hold their lives together than the staff are. He wonders why they just don't get it and fill in the forms. The more he meets, the more time he spends picking up on more things left undone, until one day his strongest ally ups and leaves. And the battle continues until he admits he is at a loss. He does not know how to go on: the small world that is his domain sits within a larger world of infinite decline, and the exceptionalist stance that "this work is too important" has been breached.
He, like me, has no choice now except to "get over ourselves." Amarantho Robey offers a really important insight into leading by becoming the eye of the storm rather than trying to control it. He writes about shifting from reactive control to creative leadership (https://lnkd.in/eWXTrbwf.).
For me, this starts with becoming aware that we are, in the words of Kathia Castro Laszlo, #systems beings—recognizing that getting over ourselves is "an inside job, a learning journey" that embodies an expanded sense of self and knowing that there is no exceptionalism when it comes to our shared humanity, and the animals and plants with whom we share this living earth. And taking it from there.
There were a couple of things we learned about Ted when we let go of the leash and stopped roaring after him until he had gone far enough to ensure we were still in view: when he swims after ducks, they fly off. When met with waves, he jumps over them. And when he runs downstream and finds his return involves a steep ledge, he can do parkour. That, in the words of Amarantho, is to unleash potential.