Global Warming, Servant Leadership, and Foresight
This morning's headlines speak of a new report on global warming to be released later this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Things are going to get warmer. No news there, but what does it have to do with servant leadership?
Lots, but let's just talk about foresight, "the only lead a leader has" according to Greenleaf.
We've had global warming predictions for decades, the sum of which Al Gore calls "an inconvenient truth." Unfortunately, studies have often been presented as "dry, yeastless factuality," to borrow a phrase from Piscine Patel in the book Life of Pi. In Greenleaf's understanding, facts are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for foresight. After all, we only know facts after the fact, while foresight requires us to "have a sense for the unknowable and be able to foresee the unseeable." To climate experts it was unforeseeable at the turn of this century that a 1,255 square-mile Antarctic ice shelf would break off in 2002 and melt in 35 days, or that ice would disappear in Greenland at a rate that has now reached 53 cubic miles per year.
So what's a leader to do? Call a psychic?
No. First go ahead and get all the available facts; look for trends, employ some of the classic tools for prediction, like scenarios. But recognize that there will always be a gap between what is known and what needs to be known, and that the future does not unfold in a straight line. Don't call on a psychic; call on informed reflection and intuition. "Clear the screen" of personal political agendas, hang-ups and expectations, even categories. Wait in rich silence. Do so in the name love--of self, others, the planet, the future, the greater good. Maybe hints of the future will come, maybe not, at least at first.
Sound a little too New Age for you, a little too "woo-woo," as one of my friends frequently charges? Not at all. Like so much of Greenleaf's work, he not only based ideas on his own inner experience but on empirical research, reading everything and then asking leaders how they actually made the tough decisions that required going beyond facts. He even taught a sold-out course at Dartmouth on the role of intuition in business decision making.
Some issues, like global warning, are so mind-boggling that servant-leaders with foresight must work hard to overcome the denial of people who cannot imagine astonishing possibilities for good or ill. That's why Greenleaf suggested we use language that encourages a "leap of imagination" in the minds of readers and listeners.
We are just beginning to understand how Greenleaf's servant writings can affect transformation on a large scale. But we should never forget his mantra: "Everything begins with the individual."
Lots, but let's just talk about foresight, "the only lead a leader has" according to Greenleaf.
We've had global warming predictions for decades, the sum of which Al Gore calls "an inconvenient truth." Unfortunately, studies have often been presented as "dry, yeastless factuality," to borrow a phrase from Piscine Patel in the book Life of Pi. In Greenleaf's understanding, facts are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for foresight. After all, we only know facts after the fact, while foresight requires us to "have a sense for the unknowable and be able to foresee the unseeable." To climate experts it was unforeseeable at the turn of this century that a 1,255 square-mile Antarctic ice shelf would break off in 2002 and melt in 35 days, or that ice would disappear in Greenland at a rate that has now reached 53 cubic miles per year.
So what's a leader to do? Call a psychic?
No. First go ahead and get all the available facts; look for trends, employ some of the classic tools for prediction, like scenarios. But recognize that there will always be a gap between what is known and what needs to be known, and that the future does not unfold in a straight line. Don't call on a psychic; call on informed reflection and intuition. "Clear the screen" of personal political agendas, hang-ups and expectations, even categories. Wait in rich silence. Do so in the name love--of self, others, the planet, the future, the greater good. Maybe hints of the future will come, maybe not, at least at first.
Sound a little too New Age for you, a little too "woo-woo," as one of my friends frequently charges? Not at all. Like so much of Greenleaf's work, he not only based ideas on his own inner experience but on empirical research, reading everything and then asking leaders how they actually made the tough decisions that required going beyond facts. He even taught a sold-out course at Dartmouth on the role of intuition in business decision making.
Some issues, like global warning, are so mind-boggling that servant-leaders with foresight must work hard to overcome the denial of people who cannot imagine astonishing possibilities for good or ill. That's why Greenleaf suggested we use language that encourages a "leap of imagination" in the minds of readers and listeners.
We are just beginning to understand how Greenleaf's servant writings can affect transformation on a large scale. But we should never forget his mantra: "Everything begins with the individual."
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