Druidic management
The position of the founder and manager as the place where the buck stops is a tough one. Internal and external stakeholders rely on you to do the right thing, but everyone has a different definition of right and a different approach for determining what ‘right’ is.
Ultimately, you translate the chaos of opportunities and risks into the order of managed expectations, outcomes and actions. This is the art and science of leaderships, from the chiefs of tribes who inhabited caves before history was written to fortune 500 CEOs today. There is something fundamentally mystical about leadership, something beyond the ken of MBA curricula or the writings of Peter Drucker.
Today we explore this unfathomable aspect as technologists and children of an age where rationality, equality, self-determination and the scientific approach to all things define our paradigm.
Big data, management by algorithms and machine learning seem to provide very powerful tools to the executive to face chaotic reality and determine the ‘right’ course of action. At the same time, developments in this area are so fast they themselves are perceived as chaotic forces by a workforce who struggles to keep up.
Meanwhile, states are far behind the times and, when they act, tend to view technology as a way to centralize information and power rather than as a way to share and distribute. To grasp these developments requires a level of digital literacy that is very hard to maintain by anyone, citizen or state.
Ten years ago people could embrace twitter and facebook to self organize into powerful revolutions. Now, people in the same position as potential firebrands are directed or astroturfed into revolutions by using the same tools top-down rather than bottom up by organizations that have temporarily become more empowered in their use. Conversely, where the US Federal police thought itself powerful and advanced in the use of Stingray cellphone snooping technology, it must now acknowledge that other, unknown actors have become active users of this technology on US soil, and they are powerless to do anything about it.
So we see that ‘ordering’ technology, by its existence and rapid development, creates chaotic situations where rapid learning and decision making are key to maintaining initiative and indeed existence. The dystopia of a technological society is not one of absolute control, nor of anarchy. It’s one of uncertainty and large inequalities. It falls again to leaders to negotiate the uncertainties of the near future and chart orderly paths forward.
At the current peak of our power over reality, where everything from the climate to our personal fitness seem to be things we can and aught to control, we must still be that druidic chieftain who, not knowing the future, decides, and acts, and provides a measure of certainty in an uncertain world.
