article review and analysis

Description

The following are included in the summary: – The main idea of the article – The lessons learned from the article – Your reflection and analysis of the article – How can we connect the main idea of the article to the Emirati culture, which is defined as “collectivist, male dominante, high-power distance, high uncertainty avoidance”you only need to share your opinions with readers without doing a thorough analysis of the text. Here are some other pointers on how to efficiently summarize an article: Recognize the key concepts. As you write your draft, try to underline the concepts you want to include. Next, look over these issues and decide which ones have relevance to the author’s viewpoint.Don’t write excessively. There aren’t a lot of pages to write because this is a short piece. Avoid using lengthy phrases and repetitions. Keep it succinct. The originality of your writing Don’t use the same phrases; instead, restate the author’s thoughts in a new way. Any information from the original work cannot be copied or quoted. However, you should relate your personal perspective to the author’s primary points. Length The project should be typed (double-spaced), with a font size of 12 times new roman and no more than 10 pages. Along with the summary word file, a creative and informative PPT will be submitted. The project report and PowerPoint presentation should be specific and provide an accurate reflection of the efforts put into the paper.COLLEGE OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
Semester: Fall 2022-2023:
Course: Management and Organizational Behavior
Group Project
Instructor’s Name: Prof. Dr. Mohamed Behery
E-mail: mabehery@ud.ac.ae
Telephone: + 971 045566911
GROUP PROJECT GUIDELINES
A. Project overview
Teams of 5 people each have to be formed in advance to do the project tasks. Each team member
is expected to contribute significantly to the project and to operate cooperatively as a unit. This
project, which counts for 20% of the final mark, is a crucial requirement for this course. In more
detail, this project’s goal is to help students gain a greater knowledge of leadership. Each team
will be tasked with summarizing an article on a different topic.
The following are included in the summary:
– The main idea of the article
– The lessons learned from the article
– Your reflection and analysis of the article
– How can we connect the main idea of the article to the Emirati culture, which is defined
as “collectivist, male dominante, high-power distance, high uncertainty avoidance”
Length
The project should be typed (double-spaced), with a font size of 12 times new roman and no
more than 10 pages. Along with the summary word file, a creative and informative PPT will be
submitted. The project report and PowerPoint presentation should be specific and provide an
accurate reflection of the efforts put into the paper.
Ethical Consideration
1|Page Copywriter Act (Professor Dr. Mohamed Behery)
Every project must be free of plagiarism. As a result, the instructor (and only the instructor)
will use the Turn-it-In software to detect plagiarism.
Submission and presentation
Two weeks before the final exam, the final report and powerpoint presentation will be
delivered.
2|Page Copywriter Act (Professor Dr. Mohamed Behery)
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Toward a More Adequate Myth:
The Art of Leadership
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Leadership Can Be Taught:
A Bold Approach for a Complex World
By
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Sharon Daloz Parks
Harvard Business School Press
Boston, Massachusetts
ISBN-13: 978-1-4221-2392-8
2392BC
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Copyright 2007 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
This chapter was originally published as chapter 9 of Leadership Can Be Taught:
A Bold Approach for a Complex World,
copyright 2005 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for
permission should be directed to permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu, or mailed to Permissions,
Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
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You can purchase Harvard Business School Press books at booksellers worldwide.
You can order Harvard Business School Press books and book chapters online at
www.HBSPress.org, or by calling 888-500-1016 or, outside the U.S. and Canada, 617-783-7410.
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Toward a More
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The Art of Leadership
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I K E M O S T of our ways of life, acts of leadership are in-
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formed by tacit metaphors and unexamined myths. Making these more visible can be a first step toward enlarging
our range of possibility and choice. In chapter 6, we observed that
the practice of adaptive leadership as Heifetz and his colleagues have
developed it can shift perception and behavior and has enduring usefulness, in part, because it is distilled in a compelling set of metaphors.
It is my growing conviction that these metaphors are mere steppingstones to a yet more significant shift—the transformation of the prevailing myth of leadership from hero to artist.
It has become almost a cliché among leadership theorists to disavow a heroic command-and-control model of leadership. But the
heroic image of leadership that prevails in the conventional mind is
more than a model. It is a deep and abiding myth.

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Myth cannot be dismissed as mere fiction. Myths are epic,
powerful stories that arise from, pervade, and shape the cultures we
breathe. They are formed from our collective capacity to understand, interpret, and shape our world. The potency of myths is
that they provide ways for us to make sense of our experience, to
make meaning we can count on and share with others. Myths give
us anchoring images and stories, and they seed the assumptions by
which we understand who we are, what is true and untrue, right
and wrong. Myths interpret the past, locate us in the present, and
shape our expectations of the future. Myths define reality—especially when they catch us unawares and we are swept up within a
great myth that presents itself as simply the way things are. Myths
are not easily swept away. The transformation of myth is always an
adaptive challenge.
The images of leaders that prevail in society today—the one in
charge, the chief (CEO, CFO), president, governor, general, captain, dean, director, head, chair, or simply the boss—all draw on the
mythic power of more ancient and still resonant images of shepherds, warriors, and kings. In the more contemporary and popular
imagination, these heroic roles of power and authority are distilled
in the myth of the Lone Ranger and his equivalents (the Army
Rangers, Batman, Superman, Agent 007, Indiana Jones, Braveheart,
Spiderman, the Terminator). These images stir the blood. They are
powerful and attractive in the American psyche—exported through
the media to the global commons.
Though the Lone Ranger is not used explicitly as an image of
managerial authority, in the culture of American individualism it
holds sway as a background motif in our conception of leadership
across most business and professional sectors. This image suggests
that a leader should be powerful, male, effective, and able to use force
(or at least the threat of it). He is a heroic figure, needed especially
in times of crises, appearing just in time to save the day. He is always
on the right side and those who oppose him are on the evil side.

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Above all, he is independent and conveys a confident, self-sufficient
identity—with just a touch of mystery! 1
Those who look to others for leadership and those who aspire to
be leaders themselves are vulnerable to a deep belief that leaders are
most recognizable when they ride tall in the saddle with an unquestioned, clear, and steady purpose, taking decisive, unambiguous action. Whether male or female, most who carry leadership responsibility
know something of what it is to experience the expectations of a
heroic–Lone Ranger model of professional and organizational leadership—a model of authority that provides enormous reassurance in the
personal and social psyche, especially in times of stress and fear.
The images of shepherd and sheep, hero and rescued victims,
find their analogue in the relationship of leaders and followers
as generally conceived. Shepherds, warriors, and kings wisely and
powerfully preside over flocks of others who depend on the leader
for their well-being (and ultimate fate). The power and protection
arrangements of these heroic command-and-control images retain
their strong mythic pull because, as Heifetz has put it, “they are
comforting.” 2
The most potent expression of this imagination in recent times
has been what Joseph C. Rost has described as the twentieth century’s myth of leadership: “leadership as good management.” In this
conception, good management is the apex of industrial organizations and an industrial economy is unthinkable without it. In this
frame, Rost observes, “leadership is rational, management-oriented,
technocratic, quantitative, goal-dominated, cost-benefit driven, personalistic, hierarchical, short-term, pragmatic, and materialistic.” 3
This is a stark and bald account. But it conveys central assumptions
about the practice of managerial leadership in which dominance,
efficiency, and material productivity (and therefore a kind of security) are central values.
Now, however, we have moved into a postindustrial, nuclear,
information-rich, and ecologically informed age in which an inten-

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sified connectivity and complexity are primary features of the landscape—the new commons. In every domain, externalities break in
on even the most heroic attempts to lead and protect. These include
not only fast-moving technological developments and the shocks
of terrorism, but also a growing awareness of social and humanitarian claims and the unintended consequences of human action
upon the more-than-human (natural) world. Even seemingly unassailable commanders are vulnerable to finding themselves tangled,
bogged down, or blindsided. The mythic power of heroic commandand-control leadership has not become irrelevant, but it does appear to be increasingly inadequate.
What is at stake is not simply whether myth and metaphor drawn
from an agrarian age and central to an industrial age can be translated
into contemporary life. Rather, growing numbers of people intuitively recognize that although these metaphors have positive features within certain contexts, they are limited and even dangerous in
the conditions of our present life. Many leaders, whether chief executive, mayor, head of agency, or even leaders of religious congregations, experience a growing resistance to the shepherd-warriorking image or its command-and-control offspring.4 As societal stress
mounts, however, others embrace the heroic leadership myth more
fiercely than ever, as, for example, the imagery of empire gains renewed currency. In either case, few would deny that the heroic myth
remains a dominant player in the commercial, social, and political
psyche.5 Whether we are dealing with fame or blame, we continue to
prize and promote the myth of the individual person as autonomous
and in control in our assumptions about leadership.6
The heroic myth of leadership is resonant with Heifetz’s understanding of the role of authority. The big questions center in how to
practice the functions of authority that maintain equilibrium and at the
same time recognize their limitations in a time of profound change. We
need a more spacious myth of leadership, grounded in more adequate
metaphors that can embrace the complexity of systemic, adaptive work

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and the full range of perception, understanding, and skill that the practice of courageous and creative leadership now demands. Acts of adaptive leadership are acts of imagination and commitment. Practices of
authority and technical mastery alone are insufficient.Adaptive leadership is necessarily the practice of creating new realities. Bennis and
Thomas have described the adaptive capacity characteristic of effective
leaders as applied creativity.7 Thus, a practice of leadership for today’s
world is rightly informed by the practice of artists.
The poet David Whyte has written,
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The inherited language of the corporate workplace is far
too small for us now. It has too little poetry, too little humanity, and too little good business sense for the world that
lies before us. We only have to look at the most important
word in the lexicon of the present workplace—manager—to
understand its inherent weakness. Manager is derived from
the old Italian and French words maneggio and manege,
meaning the training, handling and riding of a horse . . .
images of domination . . . and the taming of potentially
wild energy. It also implies a basic unwillingness on the part
of the people to be managed, a force to be corralled and
reined in . . . most people don’t respond very passionately or
very creatively to being ridden . . . Sometime over the next
fifty years or so, the word manager will disappear from our
understanding of leadership . . . It is the artist in each of us
we must now encourage into the world, whether we have
worked for the Getty Foundation or for Getty Oil.8
The call to acts of leadership, which can be practiced from wherever we sit, is also an invitation to reclaim the creative capacity within
every human being—especially those who are willing to engage the
complex, adaptive challenges of our time.
This invitation to a greater awareness of the self as an artist does
not thrust another demand upon the already burdened back of those

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who would lead. Rather, as we shall see, it is a pathway toward releasing constraints that heroic models imply, liberating the capacity
to move in more limber and authentic modes, honoring the creativity dwells that at the core of what it means to be human.
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A More Complex Myth
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Whether or not the power to exercise leadership has ever been as
simple and forthright as the image of command and control implies, clearly a seismic shift has been under way for some time for
what leadership may now mean. Titles such as Complexity by
M. Mitchell Waldrop; Leadership and the New Science by Margaret
Wheatley; Force for Change by John Kotter; The Fifth Discipline by
Peter M. Senge; Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge
by Geoffrey Bellman; The Connective Edge by Jean Lipman-Blumen;
Birth of the Chaordic Age by Dee Hock; and Tempered Radicals by
Debra E. Meyerson—all have signaled new understandings of cosmology and organization coming from physicists, mathematicians,
economists, engineers, biologists, computer scientists—and leadership theorists.9
Insights from the new science and the metaphors to which they
give rise find a pocket in the contemporary imagination because
they are the stuff of new, more adequate and satisfying myths. They
convey an emergent story that we experience as more truthful.
They are resonant with our growing experience of complexity,
diversity, and overwhelm. Nonlinear interconnectedness, field theory, self-organizing systems, ecological perspectives, strange attractors, and information-rich reality yield significantly new sets of images
that point toward a fundamental reordering of our understanding of
how life works and catalyze a cultural, mythic shift—not instantaneously, but relentlessly.

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Alternative images of leadership that are more congruent with
this new reality have begun to emerge—for example, “flattening
the pyramid” and “servant leadership”. Both of these metaphors are
attempts to modify the shepherd-warrior-king myth. But as useful
and meaningful as such imagery is for many people—and significantly liberating and reorienting for some—it still retains a focus on
a presumed hierarchy of control (and the servant imagery has limited attraction for women and minorities). What we seek in a more
adequate myth of leadership is a wealth of inspired stories and images that rigorously and deftly portray the practice of adaptive leadership within the uncertainty of swamp conditions. As one seasoned
practitioner put it, “In today’s commons every issue is a swamp issue.
When you really don’t know what to do, all you can do is become
an artist. The notion of creative leadership is not a matter of whimsy,
it is a matter of survival—making the future work.” 10
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Rigorous in its Own Terms
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From the perspective of professional practice, a mythic shift is long
overdue. In attempts to understand leadership, a persistent conundrum is that professional knowledge as often conceived and taught,
coupled with the heroic leadership myth, simply does not address
the complex, unstable, unpredictable, and conflictual worlds of practice. Yet some professionals—whether they are business executives,
lawyers, engineers, policy makers, physicians, journalists, or clergy—
are manifestly more effective than others in their ability to work out
useful solutions and ways of proceeding in indeterminate zones that
lie beyond the boundaries of conventional professional knowledge.
“The difficulty,” Donald Schon wrote, “is not that critics fail to
recognize some professional performances as superior to others—
on this point there is surprisingly general agreement—but that they

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cannot assimilate what they recognize to their dominant model of
professional knowledge. So outstanding practitioners are not said to
have more professional knowledge than others but more ‘wisdom,’
‘talent,’ ‘intuition’ or ‘artistry.’” He goes on, however, to observe,
“Unfortunately, such terms as these serve not to open up inquiry
but to close it off. They are used as junk categories, attaching names
to phenomena that elude conventional strategies of explanation.”
He then argues, “Artistry is an exercise of intelligence, a kind of
knowing, though different in crucial respects from our standard
model of professional knowledge. It is not inherently mysterious; it
is rigorous in its own terms . . . ” 11
Within this larger frame, the yet deeper significance of the approach to the formation of leadership that Heifetz and his colleagues have developed can be recognized. They call forth a practice
of leadership that is less like command and control and more like
artistry. What they are practicing in both theory building and casein-point teaching is best understood as akin to processes of creativity—evoking innovative and more adequate ways of seeing and
responding within organizations, communities, corporations, societies, and cultures in a time of extraordinary cultural change. By
definition, adaptive leadership mobilizes people to address the
toughest of problems that require new learning; such learning is
driven by a potent mix of constraint and curiosity, and it spawns
new capacities, competencies, strategies, a clarified set of values,
and new organizational and institutional forms within the context
of the particular adaptive challenge being engaged. (Note that this
is a very different process than merely identifying an example of best
practice or industry standard from another context and attempting
to plug it into the context at hand—a technical solution.) On-theground creativity is integral to such learning.
Indeed, though they have not argued for a mythic shift from
hero to artist per se, Heifetz and Linsky have described leadership as
“an improvisational art,” and their approach to teaching leadership

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is aligned with that perspective.12 Heifetz and his colleagues do use
language that is associated with command-and-control models such
as strategy and tactics. But we have also heard a cascade of language
that explicitly evokes a practice of artistry in the service of adaptive
leadership: innovation, dance floor, tuning, improvisation, singing,
pressure cooker, walking the razor’s edge, courage, orchestrating
the conflict, listening and thinking musically, and creative deviance
on the front line—all pointing to an understanding and practice of
leadership that are rigorous in their own terms.
Leadership as Artistry
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How a new, more adequate myth of leadership may finally be
named remains to be seen. The phrase “the art of leadership” is certainly well worn. But consciously recognizing the practice of leadership as artistry has received little attention.13 For now, I simply
suggest that art, artist, and artistry be given a more prominent place
within the lexicon of leadership theory and practice.
Affirmation and Resistance
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The image of artist, cast as a metaphor for those who provide
acts of leadership, immediately evokes two primary responses—affirmation and resistance. Those who think of themselves as artists in
the conventional sense of the word—for example, painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, architects, photographers, and some athletes
and gardeners—may pick up the metaphor with ready enthusiasm,
recognizing that incorporating their artist-self into their practice of
leadership opens into a horizon of powerful possibilities. But those
who suffered through their last required art project in school, or
who hold the stereotype of an artist as nonrational, asocial, marginal, or soft—may cast a more jaundiced eye upon this metaphor.

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It is highly likely, however, that the jaundiced eye belongs to someone who in some aspect of his or her professional or personal life
exemplifies the power and qualities of an artist: the ability to work
on an edge, in an interdependent relationship with the medium,
with a capacity for creative improvisation. (Entrepreneurs and some
politicians, physicians, and educators, for example, are akin to artists,
seeking to bring into being what has not yet taken form.)
Working on an Edge
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Within any profession or sector, one of the primary characteristics of the artistry of leadership is the willingness to work on an
edge—the edge between the familiar and the emergent. Heifetz
honors this edge when he speaks of the capacity to lead with only
good questions in hand—and that acts of leadership require the
ability to walk the razor’s edge without getting your feet too cut
up—working that edge place between known problems and unknown solutions, between popularity and anxious hostility. Artistic
leadership is able to remain curious and creative in the complexity
and chaos of swamp issues, often against the odds. As we have seen,
those who practice adaptive leadership must confront, disappoint,
and dismantle and at the same time energize, inspire, and empower.
The creativity that emerges from working on this paradoxical edge
is integral to adaptive work, building out of what has come before,
yet stirring into being something new and unprecedented—the character of leadership that is needed at this threshold time in human
history.
Do
Interdependence with the Medium
Artists work within a set of relationships that they cannot fully
control. In regard to the practice of leadership, one of the most
potent features of thinking like an artist is that the artist necessarily

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works in a profoundly interdependent relationship with the
medium—paint, stone, clay, a musical instrument, an orchestra, a
tennis court, a slalom run, or food. Artists learn “everything they
can about the medium(s) with which they work . . . what they can
expect from it and where it will fall short.” 14 A potter, for example,
must learn that clay has its own life, its own potential and limits, its
own integrity. The potter develops a relationship with clay, spending time with it, learning to know its properties, how it will interact
with water, discovering that if you work it too hard, it will collapse,
and if you work with it, it will teach you its strength, your limits, and
the possibilities of co-creation. “Even in drawing,” notes an architect, “though we think of the artist as imposing something arbitrary
on the page, when you draw even a single line on the page, it begins
to speak back to you. The kind of pencil you use and the tooth of
the paper will affect the message. The design emerges in the dynamic interaction of the relationships among architect, pencil,
paper, client, site, building materials, budget, and contractor.” 15
The practice of adaptive leadership requires the same awareness
of working within a dynamic field of relationships in which the effect of any single action is not entirely controllable because in a systemic, interdependent reality, every action affects the whole. On
the other hand, if one learns to understand the nature of the system
that needs to be mobilized (the underlying structure and patterns of
motion), he or she can become artfully adept at intervening in ways
that are more rather than less likely to have a positive affect in helping the group to move to a new place, creating a new reality.16
Linda St. Clair, who served as a highly successful personnel
manager for manufacturing in a major technology firm, is keenly
aware of how her earlier experience as an artist-director of theater
productions informed her practice of leadership within a corporate
context. “When I was at my best in the corporation,” St. Clair tells
us, “I helped the people who reported to me get what they needed
to be effectively creative. Over time I got to help select a talented

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team, but it remained my responsibility to be clear about what we
were supposed to be doing as an organization and enable every person within the system to know how the work of each one contributes to the whole.” 17
Heifetz and his colleagues regard giving the work back to the
group as a hallmark of adaptive leadership, and recalling her experience in the theater, St. Clair confirms the same: “More even than
a captain of a team or the conductor of an orchestra, in a theater
production at some point the director has to let go and know that
the cast will make critical decisions.” But the director isn’t the only
one who has to learn how to give the work back. There is a whole
constellation of artists who are giving the work back to the group,
within a system in which no one is fully in control. The playwright
gives the play to the producer, who gives it to the director, and thus,
St. Clair contends, the director has a sense of stewarding something.
“You are not the playwright, the producer, or the actors. Something came before you and will come after you. It doesn’t mean that
you don’t have a critical contribution to make and gifts to give. The
same is true in a corporate context.”
“A part of your role,” she continues, “is to practice an anticipatory imagination, asking the question: ‘What will be needed to get
there with comfort?’” Which means, in part, attention to timing—
or to what Heifetz refers to as ‘pacing the work.’ There is a set date
for the opening night. “By the time dress rehearsal arrives,” says St.
Clair, “the director has given the work away, becoming an observer,
taking notes, but talking about it later—becoming less ‘a director’
and more a coach, guide, mentor, companion, ally.”
In Heifetz’s terms, a director in a theater production must exercise both the functions of authority—maintaining equilibrium
within the social group—and the practice of leadership—mobilizing the social system to create a new reality. “One of the vital tasks
of the director,” St. Clair continues, “is to comprehend a dynamic
complex of interactions.” This includes appreciating the artistry of

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many others: set design, lighting, casting, acting, costuming, make-up,
sound engineering. Each and all must create something new. While
helping each part to move in a common direction, the director
needs to be mindful that every part needs to be as creative as possible, honoring everyone’s artistic power—and all the conflict thereof.
Tough decisions have to be made, and the director (authority) must
be willing to do so—jointly when possible—which means a lot of
interaction and process.
“Rehearsals can be a dynamic, creative time,” she says, “and
good directors hold back from making ‘world-without-end’ decisions early on so that unforeseen possibilities have room to emerge.”
Good directors dwell in a significant measure of ambiguity—again,
that edge between the known and the unknown. “We have to play
a bit—practice,” says St. Clair.
Later, in the corporate context, this concept of rehearsal and
practice remained central. She continually reminded her people,
“Try it out. We aren’t making decisions yet, we can try out ‘what
ifs.’” The day came when the sign on the corporate “war room”
was changed to “music room.” “You have to get the metaphors
right,” she insists. “We are trying to create something, not destroy
something.”
Theater, leadership, and teaching are all communication arts requiring constructive feedback in a demanding, consultative mode.
St. Clair sees parallels with jazz. “As you are playing, you are listening to one another, intuitively modulating into new possibilities, a
more effective product, and a more successful organization.”
Do
Improvisation
Whether adaptive leadership is practiced in the corporation, the
neighborhood, or within an international alliance, it does, indeed,
require something very much like the artistry of skilled jazz musicians—bringing tradition, intuition, technique, and the power of

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imagination and innovation to that edge where the toughest challenges and greatest possibilities are located. Similarly, when describing the art of teaching adaptive leadership using case-in-point,
Heifetz frequently has invoked jazz as a metaphor to convey the
strength of the framework, the demand for improvisation, and what
it is like to work on an edge within a field of interdependent relationships. He muses,
Do
No
tC
Case-in-point teaching is similar to the experience of an
improvisational jazz group. Jazz musicians will select a structure to work within. The structure might be a set of key
changes—“we’re going to move from this key to that key to
that key.” It might be a structure where “we’re going to start
with this tune and then do variations on that tune, and
everybody is going to get their turn improvising and providing a variation on that theme.” It may be a structure in
which “we’re going to first do a trumpet solo, and then a
drum solo, and have an order in which each takes a turn.” If
it’s blues, it’s not going to be Bach. So the musicians have
created for themselves all sorts of boundaries and limits
within which they improvise.
Any jazz musician is good at experiencing moments of
doubt and confusion—moments of, “Wait a second, this
guy just threw me a phrase, and I don’t know what to do
with it, and I’m going to just play with it until I figure out
something to do, or I’m going to let somebody else catch
the ball until I can come up with something.” There’s always these moments of doubt, action, doubt, action, what’s
the next action? It’s part of the adventure, and what adventure doesn’t have uncertainty and doubt in it? Adaptive
leadership asks for that capacity to move from doubt to action and back to doubt again and again. Similarly, teaching
case-in-point is filled with uncertainty and doubt—but

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there is a framework, a structure, a discipline within which
you work.18
Interestingly, when Dean Williams speaks of his experience of
case-in-point teaching, he also uses a metaphor from the arts:
op
yo
Teaching case-in-point is like there is a canvas, and you are
going to create on that canvas, but it’s neither arbitrary nor
capricious. There is a design underneath it all—the framework we’re working with, but the manifestation of that
framework is new every time. So, as with any artist, you
don’t create out of nothing. Artists have their palette, their
tools, and their orientation. There is spontaneity and improvisation, but underneath that is the design, the model,
the skill, the technology that allows us to do it relatively well.
Developing the Courage to Create
Do
No
tC
Because creativity requires a disciplined relationship with a dynamic medium and the ability to improvise on the edge of the unknown, and because many people in today’s society have been led
to believe that they are neither creative nor artistic, the call to be an
artist can seem to be merely one more difficult expectation, and the
invitation to be truly creative can be scary.19 In PAL-101, a few
weeks into the term, the theme for the week is creativity. How do
you teach creative, adaptive leadership using case-in-point within
the confines of a lecture hall?
Dean Williams begins the class session by simply playing a tape
that combines African wedding music and classical European choral
music—but he says nothing to the class about the music. When the
tape has finished, he is quiet and gives space for the students to respond, which they do in varying ways. About a third of the way
into the class session, Williams comments that the students appear

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to be responding in accordance with their preset roles (as students,
various ethnicities, professional or nonprofessional musicians) and
the constraints posed by the norms of how they think they should
be responding in a classroom dialogue. This observation is prompted
in part by a student’s observation that being in a classroom may
have “sucked some of the creativity out of work that we could be
doing.”
op
yo
“Yes, so there’s a prevailing paradigm that holds the system,” responds Williams. “So how does someone come in and disrupt
the paradigm? Who is ever willing to do that, to see if maybe
they can shift that prevailing worldview to a different location?
That requires enormous creativity, and the world is scared to
bits of creativity. This group is scared to bits of creativity.”
Josh disagrees:
“I don’t think we are scared—”
tC
“I think you’re scared. I think you’re really scared,” Williams
interrupts.
Josh insists,
“We’re not scared at all. I just think . . . ”
No
“I think you’re terrified of it. [Laughter] And you more than
anyone, probably,” Williams persists.
Do
Shifting his stance a bit, Josh hangs in:
“Perhaps, but perhaps that is because I’m scared that other
people here take themselves too seriously. As soon as we stop
talking across each other and start talking to each other as a
class, we will stop being scared. And then the creativity will
come out. The essence of creativity here is to define our
objective.”

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Williams picks up this additional thread:
“So that’s what you think, Josh. You’re still stuck in that view
that once you define the objective, only then does the creative
process begin.”
Maria asks,
op
yo
“Can I speak for a moment please?”
Williams responds,
“You’re free to speak at anytime in this class.”
Somewhat surprised, Maria asks,
“Oh, we can just jump in, that’s the rule? Okay.”
“No, it’s not a rule,” Williams clarifies. “But you are free to
speak at any time in this class.” [In other words, he is suggesting that Maria may discover that as a creative agent she is less
encumbered by rules than she supposes.]
tC
Whether or not she truly grasps this, Maria continues,
Do
No
“In relationship to the paradigm that you were talking about, I
think that what I would like to offer the class is this. According
to Thomas Kuhn [one of the readings for the day], societies
change when groups of people are pushed by competitive
pressures.20 Now if we look at what Heifetz wrote about
Ruckelshaus and the EPA, I think the intervention that Ruckelshaus made was because he saw that there was a possibility
that this society could think differently because they were
pushed beyond passivity, under enormous strain.21 He intervened to try to manage the pressure and frame issues so that
the competitive pressure could move to a shift in paradigms,
if you like, or creative outcomes. So essentially, maybe if we
were all pushed in some particular way, and if we could allow

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people to frame issues differently, we might actually be more
creative and less like rats in a maze.”
Williams responds,
op
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“Well, that’s part of the challenge, isn’t it, Maria? I mean, what
does that challenge look like inside this room? Everyone talks
about it, as you just did, by repeating the case study, or the quotes
from the book, but it’s impossible to manifest it in this room.”
Donna picks up the challenge:
“Well, I think it’s exactly what you’re trying to do, Dean.
You’re trying to push us into some kind of competitive pressure to shift the environment, hoping that while you’re pushing us we will just break out of these constraints.”
The conversation continues including several additional voices,
and then yet another student remarks,
tC
“I’m still way back stuck on the horns of the dilemma of creativity as an essentially singular, personal act, and then how
does it end up hanging out with the group? . . . I mean, I know
how to create off in my own little private Idaho. But I haven’t
got a frickin’ clue about how to use this group as a canvas.”
Do
No
The Social System as a Canvas
The instructor is artfully working on the edge of what the students assume about leadership and creativity and what can emerge as
they begin to experience themselves as artists working interdependently with the medium of the social system. What new reality can
be created within the collective field? An artistic practice of leadership recognizes that the process of sociopolitical-cultural creativity is
mediated through the human imagination. Moreover, the canvas of
the social system is composed within each individual’s imagination

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and also within the imagination of the group as a whole. The capacity of a person to work creatively within the potential of the collective imagination (in contrast to his or her own little private Idaho)
lies at the heart of the practice of adaptive leadership.22
op
yo
Imagination—A Dynamic Process
No
tC
The art of leadership can be illuminated by using a model of the
process of creativity, understood here as the process of imagination.
Imagination is not the same as mere fantasy. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others have observed, imagination is the highest power
of the knowing mind—integral to reason, perception, understanding, judgment, and conscience. The human mind is not a very good
transmitter but it is a powerful transformer, continually composing
reality from the many elements of our experience.23 The work of
the imagination is to grasp what is real and to create new, more adequate compositions of reality—that is, more truthful, viable patterns of knowing and acting.
The work of the human imagination may be understood as a
dynamic process composed of five moments, and the practice of
artist-leadership continually moves among them. These are the following: (1) conscious conflict (held in relationship), (2) pause, (3)
image or insight, (4) re-patterning, (5) interpretation/testimony and
testing.24 The framework of ideas and the pedagogy developed by
Heifetz and his colleagues can be understood as a way of encouraging the process of the individual and collective imagination.
Do
Conscious Conflict
The creation of something new emerges from what isn’t working
or fitting—from dissonance, doubt, confusion, irritation, opposition,
devastation, gaps between values and practice, or the unexpected

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curiosity appearing on the horizon that has all the properties of the
proverbial Trojan horse. As Alma Blount tells her students,
op
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Your first clue to adaptive work is when there is resistance
or conflict. Then learning how to read conflict so that you
don’t get stuck on the surface conflict leads you to where
the underlying, hidden issues are—it’s a kind of intelligence. It’s a capacity you develop by doing it, and especially
by doing it with others—it takes the whole group to do it.
It’s like peeling away layers, but as the hidden issues appear
(along with the work avoidance) and you orchestrate them,
the group can begin to move.25
Do
No
tC
This phase of the imagination process requires wading into the
swamp of conflicting passions, forces, values, perspectives, personalities, and factions. It requires also creating a container (time, place,
norms of working) in which the conflicts can be orchestrated to become productive. Orchestrating the conflict requires naming the
truth and uncovering the work that needs to be done—however attractive or painful it may be—at a rate that can be borne, and regulating the heat that is being generated. It depends on a practice of
presence that makes it possible to build trust, partnerships, and alliances within the conflicted field and to clarify the purpose and future prospect that make the current anguish and angst worthwhile.
In the class we just observed, we can see that the instructor is provoking (or recognizing when others provoke) some kind of conflict
or question that can become what Leonard and Swap have termed
“creative abrasion” that can catalyze the reimagination of the practice
of leadership.26 The instructors are particularly artful in reading the
expected norms, disappointing them, and managing the consequent
stress and conflict in ways that will be productive, using the course
design and a trustworthy rapport between instructor and students as
a container—a crucible—for the transformation of assumption, habit,
and default settings. The discovery that there are always conflicting

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factions within any social group ensures that a creative possibility is
also present—if a worthy framing of the conflicts (the adaptive challenge) can be surfaced and worked constructively.
At the close of the class, Williams presses this point—and the
depth of the challenge that it represents:
op
yo
“The factions are an element of group reality. There’s no singular group. There are going to be multiple, conflicting factions all over the place. And part of the challenge is to move
those factions to do adaptive, creative work, to get them learning. Who has to learn what? And it’s not simply a case of society progressing by having a discussion and building upon
people’s good ideas and things will work out well. Some of
those factions will have to give up an awful lot.
No
tC
“I was just down in Atlanta, Georgia, and saw the Confederate
flag—the Stars and Bars—flying on the State House again.
That’s offensive to an awful lot of people who see it as nothing
more than a symbol of oppression, not only in Atlanta, but
also throughout Georgia and maybe the world. So how do
you get people to give up that symbol when their granddaddy
fought for that flag, and maybe died for it? That’s pretty
painful work. That’s not simply a discussion. They’ve had discussions until they are blue in the face. It’s going to be tough
work, because it’s really embedded in people’s values around
what they consider important. The moment you start messing
with people’s real values, that’s bound to generate conflict.”
Do
Janos asks,
“Are there benefits? When you challenge what people hold,
what they own, their wealth—whatever is dear to them—
when your creative ideas are dangerous to them, that’s when
you really run into problems.”

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Williams responds,
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“Absolutely. And so polite disagreement can turn into violent
riots very fast the moment there’s something considered sacred
embedded in what it is you’re trying to take away. When
progress was made in civil rights in this country, a lot of ordinary men and women came out to do that work. The real
work isn’t the passing of a technical law. Rather, who’s working the values? This is the tough work, the difficult work. This
requires enormous creativity, to get people’s attention and
then to get their engagement so they start to at least explore
what it is they hold precious, what it is they’re willing to give
up, and what it is they are willing to modify.
No
tC
“As both Rollo May and Thomas Kuhn [course readings] have
said, you’re not going to get much creativity unless there is
some degree of encounter, opposition, and something to bang
up against. You don’t create in a vacuum. And so if you are
going to have that kind of encounter, particularly in a social
setting, it’s going to be fraught with conflict, or—to use our
more technical word—a lot of disequilibrium will be generated when you start doing this adaptive work. And that can be
very painful and difficult. And there you are, your heartstrings
are resonating, and you get caught up in all that, and you lose
sight of even how to intervene anymore. Or you get sucked
back into your own particular group dynamic, your faction,
and just start representing that faction.”
Then Williams says something unexpected:
Do
“It would be enormously creative to step outside your faction
and put yourself in another faction and get a sense of their reality, and start intervening from that position.”
The class is quiet as this reality sinks in.

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Williams concludes,
“We’ll see you Wednesday.”
Pause
Do
No
tC
op
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When the conflict or the gap has become clarified, as in the
previous conversation, it is time to pause. This is the moment in
which the active mind steps back, so a deeper process can shift into
gear. What is needed is a waiting and, as it were, a scanning for an
image or insight (a pattern within the chaos) that will simplify and
unify the disparate elements of the conflict. The pause may last for
only a few seconds or several years. The pause may take the simple
form of putting things on the back burner, or it may require enduring a sense of impasse and a long dark night of the soul. In a
world gone busy, moments of pause in which the contemplative,
deep mind can be at work (within an individual and within the
group) are perilously scarce, threatening our capacity to create meaningful responses and make progress on adaptive challenges. As long
as leadership is assumed to be manifest primarily in being decisive
and taking action, the critical capacities to be present to the complexity in ways that hold the tension, uncertainty, and ambiguity
and simply protect the space for heretofore unknown solutions to
emerge are thwarted and the opportunity costs are significant.27
Thus, Heifetz and his colleagues create space for pause—sometimes including, as we have observed, a surprising use of silence.
Note the opening of the first class (chapter 2), when Heifetz begins
with a long silence in which he simply looks around the room,
holding the group with only his presence, engaging people through
eye contact, catching conventional expectations off-guard, making
room for something new.
The primary way, however, in which this approach makes provision for pause is in the repeated injunction to go to the balcony to

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contemplate the action on the dance floor. Whenever one is swept
up in the dance, attempts to lead are all too readily blindsided by larger
patterns and forces. For that reason it is essential to acknowledge the
role of pause in the process of adaptation—the reimagination of self
and world.
Image or Insight
tC
op
yo
This is the moment of “Ah-ha!” or “Oh, I get it!”—the gift of
the pause.28 Here the conflict comes to resolution (or at least to a
new horizon of insight) in a form that meets us with a sense of reality—an image, a concept, a framework, a theory, a way forward.
Heifetz and his colleagues seed this possibility by providing images,
metaphors, stories, concepts, and frameworks conveying insight.
But foremost, they create the conditions that serve the internal process
of the students’ imagination so that they begin “to see for themselves what they most need to see”—that is, students begin to generate their own fabric of images, metaphors, stories, and concepts
to interpret their experience of themselves and their interactions
within the systems in which they attempt to lead. They deepen their
capacity to be artists.
Re-patterning
Do
No
In the fourth moment, previous assumptions are recomposed in
the light of the new insight. This doesn’t happen automatically. The
linkages between the new insight in one domain of experience and
the implications for practice at another point in time have to be
consciously forged. While the moment of image comes as a gift, the
process of re-patterning is hard work. But this connective work, revealing the emergent, more dependable patterns, is an integral part
of what artists do. They assist us in seeing the connections among
things and in building a systemic awareness—a larger consciousness
that helps the group to find the room in which to move to a new

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place. M. C. Richards, potter, poet, and teacher, suggests that this
function is embedded in the word “art” itself:
op
yo
When we trace it to its origins as best we can, we find an old
Indo-European syllable, ar, which meant “to fit together, to
join.” An example would be the word “harmony” which
comes from the Greek word harmos, which means “shoulder
where two bones are fitted together.” The idea of art being the
practice of finding connections, of fitting things together is
very open indeed . . . a wholeness made of diverse elements.29
tC
Heifetz and his colleagues have designed modes of practice by
which people become strengthened in their capacity to see the connections—the patterns—among things and therefore are able to
see and think more systemically and creatively. As students reflect
on their own cases of leadership failure, grapple with the questionnaires, uncover hidden issues, and trace the connections between
their interventions and the progress of the group, they are able over
time to perceive patterns of connections that they were blind to
earlier. They discover that they are working within a larger, more
complex and challenging field of action. Their working reality is
reconfigured in more adequate terms.
Interpretation/Testimony and Testing
Do
No
In this fifth moment, the new pattern of perception and action
is brought to an interested public for confirmation—or contradiction. This is vital for two reasons. Articulating a new perception
completes and anchors an inner process of learning as one bears
witness to what one has come to see as true. But that learning, that
new truth, must also be tested if we are to be saved from our own
subjectivity. We could be wrong. We may have made an erroneous
connection or failed to recognize critical linkages, thus forming a
distorted perception. Anyone attempting to practice adaptive leadership needs communities of confirmation and contradiction.

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As we have seen, through case-in-point teaching practiced within
the structure of the six studio-labs, Heifetz and his colleagues provide rich testing ground for discerning what will and will not work
in one’s practice of leadership. Students are encouraged over and
over again to intervene in the system by making observations regarding what they think is going on—if they think that it will be
useful to the progress of the group. Every time they do so, and every
time the instructor does so, it is a moment of both testimony and
test. The group serves as a community of either confirmation or
contradiction. “Yes, life is like that—this fits,” or “No, life is not
like that—this doesn’t work” (or ambiguous shades in between calling for further discernment).
There is no guarantee that one’s interpretation and intervention
will be timely and useful in the collective imagination of the group
and serve to create new realities. Again quoting Alma Blount,
Do
No
tC
You are creating as you go along, and in adaptive challenges
you don’t know for certain what it is that you’re growing
into together—what you are learning your way into. It has
to be an art, because what you do is always just going to be
your best guess. What you have to do is test it out. This is
what is meant by the notion of making an intervention,
asking a question, or providing an insight and then watching what unfolds in the social system. And then there is the
companion notion of holding steady in this dynamic process.
There is a whole subset of skills and competencies that
come along with working in this way.30
The Artistry of Adaptive Leadership
Understood in the light of this model of the imagination process,
there is a strong resonance between the process that artists undergo,
the practice of adaptive leadership, and case-in-point teaching. For

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op
yo
in the end, both the artistry of leadership and the artistry of teaching recognize the opportunity within the conflict—the gap between
how things are and the needs and aspirations of the social system—
the adaptive challenge. One learns, not only how to take action and
intervene, but also how to pause, to wait, to pace the work to let a
process the leader cannot fully control work its way to new insight.
The one who would lead allows the insight to re-pattern perception
in the cauldron of public learning—typically marked by the testing,
gyrating energy of confirmation and contradiction in the pull and
push of the search for a new equilibrium that will hold. This process
takes time—sometimes quick time, more often long and labored.
Working with Fire
Do
No
tC
In the long and labored work of adaptive leadership, the artistleader, like the potter, works in relationship to fire. Potter and clay
are both tested in the risk and promise of a co-creative relationship
with fire. Fire can be both foe and friend. In the ongoing creative
process, when the clay has been shaped, dried, fired, glazed, and fired
again, the complex potter-clay-fire relationship becomes at once
vivid and invisible. In the fire, the work may become a grotesque
distortion of the artist’s hope, it may be transformed into splendor
beyond what the artist could envision, or it may be reduced to simple shards. Over time, the artist can learn much about the way of fire
and strategically interact with its power. Nevertheless, when the
potter opens the kiln, it is always a revelatory, learning moment.
Acts of leadership that address adaptive challenges are also tested
in fire—the fire of competitive markets, the fire of the boardroom,
the fire of the legislative process, the fire of office morale, the fire
of public scrutiny, the fire of organizational dysfunction—the fire of
failure. Fire tempers arrogance, shatters illusion, threatens destruction,
bears gifts, keeps us open to complexity, ambiguity, and mystery—and
makes the ongoing creation of life possible.

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op
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There is also another kind of fire. It is the fire of inspiration that
sustains the practice of adaptive leadership. Writers speak of the role
of the muse. They acknowledge that there is something that, as it
were, moves them, moves through them, and fires their imagination. Without inspiration, their art feels flat, fixed, lifeless—no matter how fine their technical competence. Likewise, those who would
lead can only move people and encourage their commitment over
the long haul when they themselves are moved, inspired, inspirited.
There is an energy that prods and sustains. Attuning to that energy,
that spirit, is the spiritual dimension of leadership. Mere ambition,
fear, or desperation can temporarily pass for inspiration. But authentic inspiration arises from a depth of worthy purpose and is the energizing (though often demanding) force that evokes possibility and
fuels the capacity to stay the course. Inspiration is the wellspring of
courage, arising from a way of seeing—or seeing through—that transcends and thus resists inadequate solutions that pose as ultimate. Inspiration nourishes a conviction of worthy possibility in the face of
the unknown.
Investment of Self
No
As is implied throughout this exploration of the experience of
the artist as a primary metaphor for the reimagination of leadership,
to be an artist is to be invested in the work. An artist is willing to
struggle (and if necessary to feel the pain) to bring forth the truth
of the imagination. Similarly, the art of adaptive leadership requires
a willingness to invest oneself in bringing forth the potential that is
within the group, organization, or society.
Do
Artists Within Heroes and Heroes Within Artists
Perhaps it has become apparent that the search for a more
spacious and adequate myth of leadership may not require an

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either-or stance in relationship to these two sets of metaphors—
artists and heroes. What does appear to be useful is a mindful shift
of field and ground. When we look carefully at the heroic model,
we often find considerable artistry within it. David, the Hebrew
shepherd-warrior-king, for example, was also a harpist, interpreter
of dreams, and purported composer of more than half of the biblical psalms. Alexander the Great was a master of the arts of oratory,
ceremony, and theater.31 When we reexamine the Lone Ranger
myth, we see that the image never captured the reality. The “Lone”
Ranger was not alone. Tonto was there. Tonto and the Lone Ranger
shared a profoundly interdependent partnership. But Tonto was a person of color, and in Spanish his name means “stupid.” Yet the truth
is that the white heroes who made names for themselves in the
Wild West of the United States were often accompanied by darker
natives whose multilingual facility, sensitivity to the environment,
and superior tracking skills proved essential to success and survival.32
Just as the artist is embedded in the heroic-commander myth,
the hero is embedded—albeit in transformed ways—in the artist.
The artistry of adaptive leadership requires the ability to respond to
high ground, technical issues as well as to swamp-like adaptive challenges. Strong in a differing way, adaptive leadership often shoulders authority—formal or informal—using it as a resource, bearing
significant responsibility, and acting heroically in the sense of acting
courageously.
Nevertheless, Heifetz and his colleagues are solidly located among
those who are challenging the conventional, prevailing myth of heroic
leadership in the service of an enlarged and more viable myth and
practice of leadership in alignment with the realities of a changing
world. Students of this approach are not only being initiated into
creative, adaptive work on behalf of their organizations and societies.
Seen from this perspective, they are a part of a growing field of inquiry and experimentation that is contributing to the adaptive work
of transforming the prevailing myth of leadership itself.

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C A N
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When we speak of the art of leadership, therefore, we are not
speaking of art as merely a mirror (reflecting the times), art as a
hammer for social protest, art as furniture (something to hang on
the walls), or art as only the search for self. When the practices of
leadership and teaching are recognized as art and artistry, we are
honoring the capacity of every human being to respond to the cries
and wonder of the world as an artist and to co-create with others;
that is, to cultivate a collective creativity—a shared excellence in the
art of life—a practice rigorous in its own terms.33

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C H A P T E R
N I N E
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1. “Orders derive much of their force from the aura of mystery, more or
less strong, with which the successful commander, more or less deliberately, surrounds himself; the purpose of such mystification is to heighten the uncertainty
which ought to attach to the consequences of disobeying him.” John Keegan,
The Mask of Command (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 315–316.
2. Beneath the Lone Ranger image is another more ancient but powerful
image—the image of the shepherd. The mythic voice of the shepherd-leader still
speaks through features of a cultural inheritance shared by Jews and Christians,
grounded in the stories of Abraham and Moses, shepherds who became leaders
of their people. From earliest times, there is an intimate link among the images
of the shepherd, the warrior, and the monarch who are identified, in part, as protectors of the defenseless. For example, David, the simple but courageous shepherd boy, becomes the young warrior, and then is chosen by God to become king.
Alexander the Great assured his troops, “I will make of shepherds, warriors!” Joan
of Arc, a shepherdess, became a warrior-leader. This imagery is also strongly linked
with Jesus, whose birth is attended by both shepherds and kings, and he is described later as both shepherd and king. This same sequence is echoed in a primary myth underlying the history of political leadership in the United States,
where men from humble origins become military men and then presidents.
3. Joseph C. Rost, Leadership for the 21st Century (New York: Praeger,
1991), 94–95.
4. A growing discomfort with the heroic myth of leadership emerges from
at least four points of awareness: (1) the heroic myth suggests that leaders are allknowing and that followers are radically dependent—hardly an adequate assumption in increasingly educated societies that aspire to democracy; (2) the heroic myth
feeds an illusion of control that fails to consider the decentralization of knowledge
spawned by Internet technologies, an explosion of information, and the embeddedness of any single individual or organization in an expanding, dynamic network of complex interdependencies (systems); (3) the flock-of-sheep image suggests
a homogeneity that masks the need for a practice of leadership that can function
within increasingly diverse, multifunctional, and multicultural organizations and
communities; (4) the heroic, shepherd-warrior-king myth is grounded in a willingness to die (or require the death of others)—metaphorically or actually. In the
heroic model, the leader makes a pact with death—to destroy or be destroyed. The
good shepherd was willing to lay down his life for his sheep, protecting them against
all predators. In turn, the warrior-king can only maintain power by sharing, or at

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least appearing to share, the risk of death that his or her followers are expected
to undergo. This aspect of the heroic myth grasps certain features of the risks inherent in the exercise of authority and leadership. It also tends to eclipse the critical ability to stay alive in the midst of unprecedented and dangerous conditions
in order to preserve life and to do the hard work over the long haul of creating
new realities that will heal, productively sustain, and encourage life within our
new commons to flourish.
5. See also Leo Braudy, “An Army of One?” Compass:A Journal of Leadership 1, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 20–22.
6. The value we have placed on the power of the individual is not misplaced. A recognition of the inalienable rights and potential contribution of
every individual is an enormous achievement of civilization. But this value has
given rise to an ideology of individualism, which, as George Lodge prophetically
insisted, obscures the critical fact of our necessary and growing interdependence
within the natural, social, and global reality. See George Cabot Lodge, The New
American Ideology (New York: Knopf, 1975).
7. Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas, Geeks & Geezers: How Era,
Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders (Boston: Harvard Business School
Press, 2002), 101.
8. David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea:Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2001), 240–241. In my own teaching, I have
found that though many may initially resist the image of themselves as artists, the
artist in each of us is revealed when I invite each person to name the kind of artist
they would be if they were an artist.
9. M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity:The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order
and Chaos, (New York: Touchstone, 1992); Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the
New Science, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992); John Kotter, Force for
Change: How Leadership Differs from Management (New York: The Free Press);
Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline:The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization
(New York: Doubleday, 1990); Geoffrey Bellman, Getting Things Done When You
Are Not in Charge (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler, 1992); Jean Lipman-Blumen,
The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1996); Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age, (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler,
2000); Debra E. Meyerson, Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire
Change at Work (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001).
10. Conversation with Tom Ewell, March, 2004.
11. Donald A. Schon, Educating the Reflective Practitioner:Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987),
12–13. For an accounting of the kind of wisdom to which Schon refers as modeled within the business context, see the account of Level 5 leadership in Jim
Collins, From Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 17–40.
12. Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive
Through the Dangers of Leading (Boston: Harvard Business School Press), 73.

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13. See Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1983) especially pp. 48–49, 304–305; Peter B. Vaill, Managing as a Performing Art: New
Ideas for a World of Chaotic Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1989); and Stephen
D. Brookfield, The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the
Classroom (San Francisco: Jossey-Bassm 1990);
14. Richard Goll, “Artist as a Metaphor for the Youth Worker,” unpublished paper, January 2004, Hampton, VA.
15. Conversation with Donald L. Hanlon, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, June 15, 2003.
16. “Nancy J. Adler, Professor of Management at McGill University, has
been creating watercolors for more than a decade as a recognized artist. She is exploring the relationship of art and management. She writes, ‘Invited by the blank
paper, the best of my intentions and experience enter into a dance with uncontrollable coincidence. Neither the process nor the resulting art are ever completely defined. Which way will the colors run? . . . I purposely use water-based
media that don’t stay put where I place them on the paper. There’s never any illusion that I control the process. I only enter the dance . . .’ She is learning how
things move—yet recognizes that the more technical knowledge and experience
you have to bring to the work the better.” Artist Statement, Galerie Espace,
Montreal, 2003.
17. Author’s interview with Linda St. Clair, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, April 28, 2003.
18. See also Sharon D. Welch, After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring
Peace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 182–184.
19. Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea, 237.
20. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
21. See Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) 88–100.
22. See Robert Kenny, “The Science of Collective Consciousness,” What Is
Enlightenment? May–July, 2004, 78–79.
23. See Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study of Symbolism of
Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 42.
24. See James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment: Understanding Convictional
Experiences (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), 31–35; Laurent A. Parks Daloz,
Cheryl H. Keen, James P. Keen, and Sharon Daloz Parks, Common Fire: Leading
Lives of Commitment in a Complex World, (Cambridge, MA: Beacon Press, 1996).
125–153; Sharon Daloz Parks, Big Questions,Worthy Dreams, 104–126. See also
the resonance between these descriptions of the process of imagination and the
model of discernment and emergence in Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph
Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers, Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future (Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational Learning, 2004), 83–92.

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25. Alma Blount, transcribed interview, Whidbey Island, November 2002.
See also Robert Greenleaf: “As a practical matter, on most important decisions
there is an information gap . . . between the solid information in hand and what
is needed. The art of leadership rests, in part, on the ability to bridge that gap by
intuition . . . The person who is better at this than most is likely to emerge the
leader because he [or she] contributes something of great value . . . Leaders, therefore, must be more creative than most; and creativity is largely discovery, a push
into the uncharted and the unknown . . . [A] leader finds himself [or herself ]
needing to think like a scientist, an artist, or a poet.” from Robert Greenleaf, The
Servant as Leader (Indianapolis: The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership,
1982).
26. See Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, When Sparks Fly: Igniting Group
Creativity (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999).
27. See Richard Florida, “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis,” Harvard
Business Review (October 2004): 122–136; and Steven J. Tepper, “The Creative
Campus: Who’s No. 1?” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 1, 2004),
122–136.
28. See Rhea Y. Miller, Cloudhand—Clenched Fist: Chaos, Crisis and the Emergence of Community (San Diego: LauraMedia, 1996), 48.
29. M. C. Richards, “Toward M. C. : A Monograph by M. C. Richards,”
Studio Potter 14, no. 1 (1985): 2.
30. Alma Blount, transcribed interview conducted by Sharon Daloz Parks,
November, 2002.
31. When, for example, he faced the adaptive challenge of incorporating Persians into the Macedonian army (a kind of merger) and some veterans in command
who had been with him from the first were threatening to turn the army against
him rather than yield to retirement as Alexander proposed, he reminded them that
once they had been only shepherds who had become warriors and citizens: “Philip,
[my father], found you vagabonds and helpless, most of you clothed in sheepskins,
pasturing a few sheep on the mountain sides, and fighting for those against Illyrians, and Triballians and Thracians; Philip brought you down from the hills to the
plains, made you doughty opponents of your enemies, so that you trusted not to
the natural strength of your own villages but to your own courage. More, he made
you city dwellers and civilized you.” This speech was “only the opening act of a
three-day drama” including the staged death (and return) of Alexander himself. It
reveals Alexander’s keen awareness of the interdependencies within the whole system and the need for improvisation. Thus, the artistry of leadership is revealed,
even in a citadel of the command and control myth. See Keegan, Mask of Command, 57–58.
32. This dynamic appears also in the Gilgamesh epic—a classic myth including the essential bond between a cultural “lighter” brother and his darker,
wilder, and more in-touch-with-life brother. The same is found in the relationship of Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark.

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33. Suzi Gablik, formerly the London correspondent for Art in America,
observed that only in relatively recent times has the artist sought an asocial role,
eschewing communication with a public, asking no question, making no statement, offering no information, message or opinion, totally self-possessed, selfreliant, free, autonomous. It is only a certain generation of artists who as something of an enigma have doubted that art was ever meant to be integrated into the
work of society. In modernism’s “demystified” art, she observed, what is “conspicuously missing . . . is the sacramental vision that had been present in art for
nearly all of human history.” As the dangers to planetary survival escalate, she
finds the notion that art might answer only to its own laws to seem more than a
bit ingenuous. Along with growing number of others, she calls for a recognition
of the principle of interrelatedness and the renewal of the relationship between
artist and society in which the artist is self-consciously planting images of reality
that awaken us to our present condition, including images that empower the confidence that we can shape a positive human future. From Lightworks: Explorations
in Art, Culture, and Creativity, ed. Milenko Matanovic (Issaquah, WA: Lorian
Press, 1985), 8–14.

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