Quantum Typographic Leadership and You

This is a transcript of a podcast recorded on leadership. We were asked to reflect on our understanding of the term and what advice we could give to make people better leaders in wherever they are.

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I think leadership is a lot like typography.

Unlike a lot of people, I have a favourite typeface. It’s called New Transport, and it’s an updated, digitised version of a typeface that I’m about 98% sure you will already have seen today. The reason I’m so sure is that Transport is the font used on every roadsign in the United Kingdom since 1964.

Transport was created by two designers, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Jock was convinced that the state of Britain’s road signs was chaotic and confusing, so he drove from central London to the then-new Heathrow Airport, photographing every road sign he came across on the way.

Up until that point, all these signs were commissioned by different agencies — some from local councils, some from national bodies, some from private companies. As a result it was chaos, and he used two issues of the design journal Typographica to document it.

As a result, Jock and Margaret were commissioned to design every road sign we use today. The cow in the red triangle, the girl crossing the road holding the hand of the little boy, the “Men at Work” sign that looks like a man holding a partly-opened umbrella, all the motorway signage and warning signs, all of it.

I’m telling this story for two reasons — firstly, because I think it’s adorable, and I’m not sure it would even be possible today for two people to do this scale of work, which is a shame.

Secondly, because I think it’s a pretty good example of the phenomenon of typography.

Which is a very grand phrase that requires some explanation.

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You’re listening to Dominic White, and this is one of a series of Digital Media Management podcasts on leadership.

We’ve created this series because we’ve been challenged to find out how we can become better leaders in the jobs and positions we’ll all find ourselves in over the coming years.

I have two problems here, though. One I can answer now, and one I’ll get to later.

The first is I don’t think there’s anything I can say that would be very helpful for people wanting to become better leaders.

Which I appreciate isn’t a useful answer.

I think there’s still useful information in why that’s the case, though, and the reason why is fairly simple but a little counter-intuitive.

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Before I can get there, though, I need to explain a little more about Jock and Margaret.

For those of you who don’t know the difference between kerning and ligatures, or italics and obliques, typography is the art and design skill of arranging written language.

Most of us have done typography — when we open a word document and choose a font, or make something bold or italic for emphasis in a blog post. When we choose the size of our type, when we change the weight (like making something bold), or the space between the characters (this is kerning), or the height between lines in our paragraphs, we are all amateur typographers.

Even if we stopped making new typefaces today, there are more typographical variations for any given sentence than anybody could count. There are tens of thousands of typefaces out there, professional and amateur, some with different weights and some just one, some with italicised variants and some without.

Which is brilliant, because type is deeply contextualised — what looks good on a government website would look terrible on a poster for a death metal concert.

When you see type, you don’t only see the message, you see all the messages you’ve seen before that look similar — when we see something written in Helvetica, or Arial, British readers will think of official documentation from bureaucratic government agencies — a New Yorker might see subway signage.

Which brings me back to Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert.

When they were building Transport, one of the things they did was research what typefaces other countries were using on their road signs. They went all over Europe, and saw dozens of examples of the kind of work they were aiming to do.

They saw beautiful sans-serifs in Italy, structured and regimental grotesks in West Germany, and attractive and functional humanist type in France.

They didn’t just copy them, though — they realised that what was needed was to build on the things they learned and create something new in the context they lived and worked in, that didn’t carry the baggage of all the times readers had seen that type before.

So they created Transport. Well, they didn’t just create it — they tested it, in hundreds of different scenarios; at speed, in the rain, snow, and fog, through dirty windscreens, at low speeds, all kinds of ways.

You will have seen it thousands of times, but it’s always worth another look — it’s functional and readable, at the same time as being pleasantly human in it’s roundness.

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So what does any of this have to do with leadership?

Typography is all those visual cues and tools I mentioned earlier — italics, weights, kerning.

Good typography is a little like the Potter Stewart definition of obscenity — you know it when you see it.

Go to any Swiss train station, or German motorway, and you’ll see more examples of good typography.

The reason why you don’t see the same font here as there is that Jock and Margaret were’t just good typographers.

They were more than the tools at their disposal.

They also had an understanding of the social, psychological and material context in which they were working.

And so much modern leadership theory is mere typography. Tools.

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All the top thinkpieces on leadership in the Harvard Business Review, in Forbes, on new-media platforms like LinkedIn and Medium, are all about teaching you the tools to deal with specific challenges.

Academic articles talk about the same case studies, the same managerial techniques, without any real understanding of the importance of context.

Even the more exciting and new techniques in leadership theory — the ones suggesting quiet people are the best managers, or that leadership is about admitting that you don’t know the answers to a given questions— are exactly as contextualised as those the old models.

The best example I can find of this is an article I read about the importance of divorcing ourselves from a culture of recognising individual contribution in leadership (what the author calls a ‘heroic culture’) because it doesn’t work when we use the same metrics for the selective breeding of chickens.

Leadership is an ex post facto study, driven by oral history and storytelling as much as by concrete advice and theory.

This isn’t a criticism — typography is precisely the same.

That there are only two major delineations in typography (the serif and sans-serif) isn’t indicative of a grand objective truth of typography, but reflective of our usage of the written word.

You can be an incredible and award-winning typographer without any understanding of the material conditions you’re working in, simply by making beautiful type.

The reason I had that first problem with the question, the reason I can’t really give good advice on how to be an awesome leader in whatever context you end up in, is that it’s all context.

Even in my own experience here at Hyper Island, the tools that have been incredibly effective in one group have been almost pointless in the next, and the only context that has changed is two of six people have been swapped for two others.

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So that’s one reason why I don’t think I’m very useful — I can give tools, I can give broad strokes, but the most important thing to understand is that leadership is more than the tools, more than the actions and the individualism.

This isn’t only my own little pet theory, either, and I’m not the only one to start questioning the basis for individualised leadership.

I’m not the only person who’s saying this — Martin Wood, at the University of Exeter, has written the most comprehensive study I’ve been able to find about this.

He talks about the history of leadership studies, and about how for decades we’ve been individualising and abstracting leadership in order to try to make it more replicable.

At the same time as he’s been talking about this, questions are being asked about why Anglo-american perspectives on leadership are failing — why companies using continental European collaborative leadership methodologies are working where the deeply individualistic and causal UK and US standards are failing.

To continue the analogy, why are European typographers better than their British and American counterparts?

I think the answer is in their understanding of context.

Wood calls this understanding ‘process philosophy’.

Process philosophy is a challenge to our normal conception of leadership behaviour — we normally see it as deterministic, as A leading to B leading to C.

People have an innate narrative bias, things make more intuitive sense and we believe them more easily when they are causative and deterministic, and we can track things back to root causes.

So, Manager John tells Worker Phillip to do a particular job a new or controversial way, then Phillip’s productivity improves, then profits increase.

This is the normal story of leadership — and we only really hear it told that way.

Process leadership is about the idea that, just like typography, the tools only get you so far. Process leadership is about understanding leadership action as events, as things that occurred in specific places and times, with very certain parameters, and between people.

The reason this is such a challenge to existing leadership models is that it breaks the deterministic, causal relationship.

It says the most important thing isn’t the individual saying “do this job this way”, but also the subordinate doing it, the location they’re in, the company they work for, the management structure, their schooling, their background.

Leadership is inseperable from environment, from conversation, from the process of work. Trying to abstract away leadership as being practiced by individuals misses the actual thing that matters — the sum of the actions taken.

Leadership is as much everything else in the room as it is the manager telling the subordinate what to do.

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But it’s not totally crazy, and in fact it ties into some groundbreaking research and really fascinating questions from the intersection of quantum mechanics and neuroscience.

Quantum mechanics is physics, but really, really small. It attempts to describe the behaviour of the things that make up atoms. It’s fascinating because it turns a lot of the things you learned in GCSE Physics totally on their head — we don’t live in a purely deterministic universe, where all actions take place as the result of a previous action. Quantum physics tells us that the speed of light can be beaten, at least on a minute scale.

Discoveries in quantum mechanics are along the lines of finding out that smaller humans are able to fly, or can use telepathy. They totally transform how we have to think about the universe.

Neuroscience is, as it sounds, the science of our brains, how we think and remember and create. It tries to break down why our brains react the way they do to light, to sound, to stimulus, and how things like memories are formed.

A paper from 2005 by Jeffrey Schwartz, Henry Stapp and Mario Beauregard tries to combine these two.

Schwartz and his team wrote about some of the core ideas of neuroscience.

Like the old models of leadership, neuroscience has been seen, ever since it’s conception, as a deterministic field.

That is, we think the way we do because we saw or heard or remembered certain stimuli, certain things that triggered chemical reactions in our minds.

Think of it as being like a big mechanical machine, where sounds and sights go in and change how quickly certain gears turn.

This paper suggests that with advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, those huge MRI machines you have to lie down inside that whir reassuringly and measure all the electrical impulses in specific regions of your brain, we have access to more and more data that could suggest an indeterminate brain — a brain that works differently from the determinate models.

We can change our minds when looking at specific stimuli, focus ourselves on particular responses. Our agency as humans isn’t only in that we react, but how we react.

The human brain is a machine that doesn’t only change speed according to what goes into it, but of it’s own volition.

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Remember earlier, I mentioned that I had two problems with the question of how you can be an awesome leader in any situation?

The first was that, just like in typography, I think it’s all in the context. The action taken by a given person is only as important as the surrounding environment, whether that’s physical, cultural, social, musical, whatever. Leadership isn’t only tools and methods, it’s also a phenomena.

The second is tied to this quatum mechanical intepretation of neuroscience.

I think new models of physics, like those proposed by quantum mechanics, offer better explanations for leadership than anything we’ve seen or read before.

I think leadership poses similar difficulties to measurability, to observation, and to abstraction, in organisational theory, that quantum mechanics does to conventional classical mechanical principles of determinism and locality.

Leadership is organisational quanta, the minute and contradictory bits of interaction and process that happen every second of every day.

Leadership is the friendly smile you shoot at a colleague as you both go to make coffee, or the passive-aggressive post-it you leave on your sandwich in the fridge warning people to keep off your lunch.

I think trying to identify each variable even in a single office in a single day is incredibly, mind-bendingly difficult.

The problem is, being a better leader is basically the same as being a better human.

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There’s a very neat web blog thing called the dictionary of obscure sorrows, a tumblr account that lists made-up words for very complex feelings and sensations.

My favourite of these is the word “Sonder”.

Sonder, according to this dictionary, is “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”

This is why it’s hard to measure leadership. I don’t think we’re able to abstract ourselves away from our broader realities.

In every office of thirty people, there are thirty extraordinarily complex stories, thirty different perspectives on office life, thirty different sets of expectations.

Every time we exercise what we’ve learned in a leadership textbook we’re trying to navigate these realities, these stories.

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And that makes answering the questions we’ve been set really difficult.

On the document we’ve been given, we have the following questions:

What kind of leader am I?

What are my strengths and weaknesses as a leader?

What leadership challenges have I faced?

What is important when forming new groups/teams?

What tool/methods can support leading a group/team through conflict?

And I think under this understanding of leadership, the one I think maps reality most accurately, these are impossible questions.

I think the only question I can realistically answer is what’s important when forming new groups, which I think is in establishing a shared, mutually understood and consent-based culture.

For the others, there are too many variables, too many possibilities and potentialities, to ever give any concrete suggestions. Working in an agency in Tokyo would have radically different answers to working in a factory in Detroit, which would be radically different to working in a cafe in Camden.

Even in those scenarios, the answers would have to vary according to those exact organisational quanta I mentioned earlier; they would be forced to change depending on the staff, the weather, the time of day, the customers, working hours.

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Which is all a little bit terrifying and overwhelming.

But it’s also liberating.

Because you don’t have to read the books and study the tens of thousands of journals of business leadership.

Just like in typography, the tools are helpful, and they let you try more new things together, that might be really effective in certain situations.

But they’re not the whole story.

You also have to be able to be human, and build relationships with co-workers instead of trying to “lead” them.

Which, a lot of the time, is a reward in itself.

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If you want to know more about culture design, and the importance of developing effective teams, you can find links to a culture design startup initiated by a few of my incredibly clever colleagues and myself in the description on Soundcloud.

You’ll also find all the works referenced in this piece.

My twitter handle is @dominicjwhite, feel free to ask any questions or leave any comments you have and I’ll try to get back to you.

Thanks for listening!