The Headless

In 1945 one especially tenacious chicken didn’t die after beheading. Mike The Headless Chicken pranced around for almost two years becoming somewhat of a celebrity. But that’s an exception. We know that when a higher animal’s head is cut off, it dies. And it that aspect we tend to think about organizations the same way we think about higher animals.

Recently I watched Terminator 2. In more than 25 years since I saw it the last time my thinking changed a lot so I was able to notice something that didn’t matter to me when I was a kid. The evil machines that were sending terminators to the past to kill John Connor, the leader of human resistance, or his mother used the same thinking we use when we think about animals. Cut their head off and they will fall. Of course the movie’s focus is the action– it’s not a sociology primer. But it reflects the tacit assumptions about human organizations that most of us have.

Nick Obolensky in ‘Complex Adaptive Leadership’ calls is the oligarchic view of leadership in which people believe that leadership is something done by a capable, heroic, and charismatic few to hapless others. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others are not stepping up because they are not allowed and they don’t develop their leadership. This way of human organization is fragile. It’s terminate-able. This mental model is so deeply entrenched in us that it’s reflected in our language. We refer to a role as the head of something meaning that this person is in charge. To head as a verb means the same, to be in charge or it’s other meaning emphasizes the directionality of movement.

Is there an alternative? It might seem like common sense that we need a hero to lead us to tackle some huge business or social challenge. As humans we need our heads to think for the whole organism and choose the direction for it. And organizations appear to need their ‘heads’ to think for all their members and choose the direction for all of their members.

But does the metaphor work that well?

In ‘The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations’ Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom compare how the organization structures of Aztecs and Apaches have led to a very different set of outcomes. Apaches who didn’t have one omnipotent and heroic leader were able to preserve their independence and continue fighting for centuries while the Aztec Empire fell in less than a decade. Aztecs had their emperor, the head to cut off, Apaches did not.

Hierarchical organization is intuitive and simple. However, as easy as it is to establish, it is equally easy to be toppled. If the leader is the nexus of decision-making, strategic thinking, and accountability, he or she is also the greatest risk.

Devolving the leadership to many, establishing in Obolensky’s terms ‘polyarchy’ can create a system that is much more flexible and resilient. It is also much less intuitive and scrutable for our rational brains that strive to see a simple pattern. We want to see someone in charge. And when we don’t see someone in charge and running things, that seems like a blunder to be immediately corrected. Could we learn to tolerate the situation when there is no leader in charge? Could we welcome leadership that is a spontaneous and emergent quality of communities and organizations rather than a form of a decree?

Heroic leadership makes great stories. When leadership is distributed and when we all take leadership for our lives and work, Terminator type of stories don’t make that much sense.

Would in the war with machines humans be that much dependable on just one person? I highly doubt that. But it makes a great story and fills our craving for a savior type of leadership. The opposite is dull and requires us to take responsibility.