Following Leading in Risk

Following-Leading in Risk
A Humanising Dynamic
Dr Robert Long and Craig Ashhurst

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Authors: Long, Robert and Ashhurst, Craig
Title: Following-Leading in Risk, A Humanising Dynamic
Robert Long and Craig Ashhurst
ISBN: 978-0-646-9284-32
Subjects: Risk-taking (Psychology) Risk perception. Risk – Sociological aspects.
Social choice.
Dewey Number: 302.12
Scotoma Press
10 Jens Place
Kambah ACT 2902
www.humandymensions.com
© Copyright 2014 by Robert Long and Craig Ashhurst.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ISBN 978-0-646-9284-32
Graphic design and layout by Justin Huehn and Craig Ashhurst
Previous Books in the Series
Next Proposed Book in the Series

Tackling Risk, A Field Guide to Risk Engagement
This book is an A4 workbook and curriculum
for teaching the Social Psychology of Risk.
For release in 2015.
Following-Leading in Risk
A Humanising Dynamic
Dr Robert Long and Craig Ashhurst

iv Following-Leading in Risk
Contents
Foreword.............................................................................................................................ix
Introduction.......................................................................................................................xi
Field Guide Postponed............................................................................................................. xi
Acknowledgements (Craig)...................................................................................................... xi
Links to Previous Books.......................................................................................................... xii
About the Book Logo.............................................................................................................. xii
A Special Note on Collaboration............................................................................................. xii
A Special Note on the term ‘Collective Coherence’ (Craig).................................................... xiii
What This Book Is About....................................................................................................... xiii
Structure and Use of the Book................................................................................................xvii
A New Look At Leading............................................................................................... 1

Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading..........................3
The Occupy Movement............................................................................................................. 3
The Paradigm of Traditional Leadership.................................................................................... 4
The Hero Myth.......................................................................................................................... 8
The Leading-Following Dynamic............................................................................................ 10
An Overview of Social Psychology.......................................................................................... 11
Interests of Social Psychology.................................................................................................. 12
Commentary on The Secret Meeting....................................................................................... 21
Workshop Questions............................................................................................................... 22
Transition................................................................................................................................. 22
Ethics in Leadership...................................................................................................... 23
A Social Psychology of Ethics in Leading............................................................................... 26
Violence: A Test of Ethical Method........................................................................................ 30
Transition................................................................................................................................. 31
The Power of Following in Following - Leading .....................................................33

A Focus on Following..................................................................................................... 35
Following................................................................................................................................. 36
Understanding Power.............................................................................................................. 39
Secrets, Transparency and Power............................................................................................. 42
Transition................................................................................................................................. 44
Cultic Followership......................................................................................................... 45
The ‘Mac’ Cult - A Case Study in Followership...................................................................... 45
Coming Out of Cultic Followership........................................................................................ 50
Technique, Reflexivity and Satisficing..................................................................................... 52
The Mechanistic Worldview and the Dehumanisation of Risk................................................ 55
Transition................................................................................................................................. 58
Introduction v
Wisdom & The Following-Leading Adaptive Toolbox............................................59
A Model for the Following-Leading Dynamic..............................................................61
Leading in the Following-Leading Dynamic.......................................................................... 63
The Zone of Reciprocal Relationship...................................................................................... 67
Dialogue in Following-Leading............................................................................................... 75
Cultivating Resilience in Following-Leading.......................................................................... 76
The Nature of Risk in The Leading-Following Dynamic........................................................ 78
The Fallibility Factor and What to Do About It..................................................................... 80
The Seduction of Measurement in Management..................................................................... 83
Following-Leading as Due Diligence ..................................................................................... 86
The Following-Leading Adaptive Toolbox.....................................................................91

Wisdom, Discerning and Learning......................................................................................... 93
The Adaptive Toolbox.............................................................................................................. 97
Before Opening The Adaptive Toolbox................................................................................. 100
The Opened Adaptive Toolbox.............................................................................................. 101
List of Adaptive Tools............................................................................................................ 103
Surfacing................................................................................................................................ 104
Boundary Crossing / Bridging............................................................................................... 105
Personality Types................................................................................................................... 106
Temperament Listening......................................................................................................... 107
Influence Mapping................................................................................................................ 108
Workspace, Headspace, Groupspace...................................................................................... 109
Memory iCue™..................................................................................................................... 110
Organisational Sensemaking................................................................................................. 111
Collective Mindfulness.......................................................................................................... 112
Theory – Practice Tapestry..................................................................................................... 113
Dialogue Do’s & Don’ts......................................................................................................... 114
Conversation iCue™.............................................................................................................. 115
Open Questions, Observing & Listening.............................................................................. 116
Risk & Safety Maturity Matrix............................................................................................. 117
Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 118
The Close - But It’s Not The Close........................................................................................ 119

Fifty Questions for Leading-Following Discussion............................................................... 120
Thanks to................................................................................................................................ 122
Glossary................................................................................................................................. 123
Reference List........................................................................................................................ 127
Further Directions................................................................................................................. 136
Post Graduate Program......................................................................................................... 136
Training Programs Offered by Human Dymensions............................................................. 137
The Authors........................................................................................................................... 138
vi Following-Leading in Risk
Table of Illustrations
Figure 1a. The Traditional Model of Leadership in Risk. ..................................................................... 6

Figure 1b. The Traditional Model of Leadership in Risk - Expectations............................................... 7
Figure 2. The Hero’s Journey................................................................................................................ 10
Figure 3. Milgram Advertisement in Local Paper................................................................................ 17
Figure 4. Arrangement of Experiment................................................................................................ 18
Figure 5. Proximity Configuration....................................................................................................... 18
Figure 6. The Cognitive Dissonance Cycle ......................................................................................... 20
Figure 7. One Brain, Three Minds....................................................................................................... 53
Figure 8 Optimising and Satisficing ................................................................................................... 54
Figure 9. A Model for the Following-Leading Dynamic.................................................................... 62
Figure 10. Discerning the Relational Self............................................................................................ 64
Figure 11. The Culture Cloud.............................................................................................................. 65
Figure 12. Within the ‘zone’................................................................................................................ 68
Figure 13. ‘Zone Defence’.................................................................................................................... 69
Figure 14. The Non-Measurable Qualities of Leading........................................................................ 82
Figure 15. Due Diligence and Culture................................................................................................ 88
Figure 16. My first purchased work tool.............................................................................................. 97
Introduction vii
viii Following-Leading in Risk
Foreword
Professor Michael Gaffney, University of Canberra
Professor Michael Gaffney, Convener of the Doctor of Education Program at the University of
Canberra. Mike has specialist expertise in educational policy and management and holds a chair in
educational leadership.
Leaders are people who make a positive and meaningful difference to the lives, work and
learning of others. They do this by exercising influence and persuading people to follow
them. True leaders are different from bureaucrats who exercise authority and expect
obedience, and from tyrants or sociopaths who exercise coercion and force others to capitu-
late. In other words leaders develop and sustain relationships with their followers. Leader-
ship is a relational and reciprocal process. Without leaders there can be no followers, and
without followers there can be no leaders. This connection between followers and leaders is a
central premise of Following-Leading in Risk by Rob Long and Craig Ashhurst. Through-
out the book, they highlight the dynamics of follower-leader relationships in handling
organisational risk and hazard management.
The book is timely in light of the broader social, economic, political, cultural and envi-
ronmental trends that are affecting how governments, business, industry and community
organisations understand, appreciate, anticipate and respond to risk. The authors explain that
‘all risk involves a degree of uncertainty and subjective attribution’ (p25).
Different people worry about different things. For example some worry about leaving the
house to go shopping, or driving cars, or riding bikes, or going swimming at ocean beaches.
Others worry about investing, or flying, or losing their luggage at airports – as Monty
Python once recounted in their ode highlighting concerns about the baggage retrieval
system they’ve got at Heathrow. Some mitigate the risk by lessening their engagement or
exposure to these activities and/or taking out some form of insurance whether this be a com-
mercial insurance contract or a spiritual plenary indulgence. Others decide to live with the
risk – and take their chances. While others don’t see any risk whatsoever. It is the individual
that decides.
Considering risk at an organisational, community or societal level is more complex. The
decisions made in these settings tend to involve more people, be subject to a wider range
of (social, economic, political, cultural and environmental) factors beyond ‘the control’ of
managers and policymakers and have broader consequences.
These are decisions about risk that different people view differently in terms of significance,
that have a range of interacting causes and effects, and that have no ready or lasting solution.
Examples include ‘big ticket’ international policy issues associated with climate change
and terrorism; as well as ‘sector specific’ problems relating to the sources and consequences
of educational disadvantage, child protection and institutionalised sexual abuse, and the
use of drugs in sport. The challenge - not only for policy makers and managers but also
for everyone involved, staff and other stakeholders - is to figure out the risk, how it can
be mitigated, and perhaps used to advantage taking the view that, as Long and Ashhurst
suggest, ‘one person’s risk is another person’s opportunity’ (p25).
Introduction ix
In these circumstances, consultation, listening and dialogue are foundational concepts, and
this is where the need for wise decision-making is most apparent. Such decision-making
is evident where leaders and followers come together, discuss and understand the shared
nature of risk, and discern their most appropriate course of action. The ‘wisdom’ in this type
of decision-making comes not from hierarchical authority or managerial coercion, but rather
from the capacity and willingness of individuals to relate to one another ethically on the
basis of their expertise and evidence to influence others’ thinking and actions. This means
that individuals can and should exercise leadership and practise followership regardless of
their position on the organisational chart.
In fact, the dynamic contexts in which we find ourselves as members of contemporary
organisations confronting ‘wicked problems’ of the types listed above call for such adapt-
ability, flexibility and cultural innovation. The old ways of ‘command and control’ simply no
longer cut it. The dangers with persisting with ‘top down’ approaches to working with risk,
that focus attention solely on the role and responsibilities of those in authority or the per-
sonality of the ‘hero leader’, and neglect the wisdom, expertise, and the humanity of others
with a stake in the situation, are too readily apparent. Nowadays the actions of executive
government and the priorities of the 24 hour news cycle too often reflect the desire ‘to do
something’ or worse ‘appear to do something’ about risk without opportunity for consulta-
tion, listening or dialogue with those who have something to offer.
In this book, Rob Long and Craig Ashhurst offer a reasoned alternative perspective for
leading and following in risk. They highlight the shortcomings of traditional bureaucratic
and ‘hero-leader’ approaches to risk and hazard management (Section 1), explain the value of
leadership and followership as a cultural dynamic that needs to be fostered in organisations
(Section 2), and offer a range of ideas and strategies for making wiser decisions in discerning
risk (Section 3). The value of their approach is that it offers a constructive way of countering
our tendencies toward ‘easier’ solutions characterised by authoritarian personalities, objec-
tives-focussed assessments, and the creeping bureaucracy of the ‘nanny state’. Instead they
call for leadership in understanding risk and motivation, and influencing others and creating
followership based on a solid, moral and ethical code of practice.
Having known both authors, Rob and Craig for over twenty years, I have a high regard
for their professional expertise and integrity, and a deep appreciation of the perspectives
they bring to leadership, learning, and the values, ethics and practices for living a good life.
Their contributions in this book on the dynamics of leadership and followership associated
with risk are consistent with their worthy personal outlook and professional platforms, and
are reflective of their significant experiences as successful teachers, researchers, company
directors, and consultants across a range of educational, business, industry and community
contexts. I commend their book to you.
x Following-Leading in Risk
Introduction
Welcome to the fourth book in a growing series on risk. This time, Dr Rob Long has teamed
up with long-time friend and colleague Craig Ashhurst, to explore following-leading in risk.
Field Guide Postponed

In the previous book, Real Risk: Human Discerning and Risk, it was suggested that the
fourth book in the series would be a field guide, but this has been put on hold. It became
clear from the Post Graduate Program that the important subject of ‘following-leading’
needed examining, prior to development of a field guide to influencing, tackling and leading
in risk in the workplace. It is proposed that the field guide will be a curriculum and learning
tool for all the concepts presented in books 1-4.
Acknowledgements (Craig)
In Rob’s first three books I had the pleasure of discussing the ideas and stories as he
developed each book’s outline. This time I have the privilege of co-authoring the book,
making a contribution at all the stages of its development. This has given me an appreciation
of the work Rob has put into writing and has also made me realise the work done by others,
mostly in the background. It is two of these people that I particularly acknowledge here.
Justin Huehn is a long time friend of Rob’s and has continually translated his ideas into
understandable and beautiful graphics. In this book I have enjoyed working with Justin,
knowing that my treasured ideas and sketchy diagrams would be turned into something that
better conveyed the meaning I was trying to get across.
The other person I want to mention is my wife and life partner Pip Ashhurst. She has
worked as an editor on the previous books but this time I was able to work closely with her,
which gave me a new appreciation of her skill, acute insights and patience. Both Rob and I
are full of ideas and passion and this can sometimes be hard to reduce to prose in a book. Pip
refined and improved our drafts, bringing life to out text as Justin does to our diagrams. She
is a joy to work with and worthy of respect.
Any faults or mistakes that remain are the fault of myself and Rob and demonstrate that we
are still learning, growing and improving.
Introduction xi
Links to Previous Books
As with the previous three books, many of the concepts here introduced will have strong
links to previous ideas and will often require a brief review of previously covered material.
This creates a small dilemma, as the reader who has read all the books only needs a brief
reminder, whereas a new reader may require a more in-depth introduction to these founda-
tional ideas. To help guide the reader I have decided to use a grey box, like the one around
this section, to denote material that has been previously discussed. Each box will provide a
summary of the concept and a link to where in a previous book the idea was first introduced.
I hope this will allow readers to skip the grey boxes if they feel they are already familiar with
the term being summarised.
About the Book Logo

The cover of this book is in keeping with the previous three books, each positioning charac-
ters across or around a cliff and crevasse. The foundation of following and leading in risk is
consultation, listening and dialogue. This is what is happening on the cover: people convers-
ing, listening and seeking dialogue in order to help in decision-making. The three logos at
the base of alternate pages indicate respectively: community, reflection and discourse. In
a social psychology of leading in risk there is no such thing as an individual; we maintain
human identity in relation to others. Similarly, the concept of the leader as the individualistic
hero doesn’t make sense for a social psychology of risk. All risk is shared, because the conse-
quence of risk is social, just as the influences on decision-making and thinking are social. So
the idea of leading cannot be separated from the community that follows. Effective leading
is always accompanied by effective following.
Just as all risk-taking should involve a ‘catching community’ (as was depicted in book
three, Real Risk: Human Discerning and Risk), so too there should always be a ‘dialogical
community’ in all leading in risk.
The second icon for the book signifies the importance of reflection as fundamental to
thinking and decision-making. When one knows that ‘everything matters’, then reflecting
and thinking on conscious and unconscious influence become critical. In our busyness of life
and the quest for quick and easy ‘fixes’, we forget that many human challenges are ‘wicked
problems’.
The third icon signifies the importance of understanding language and discourse. Discourse
is about the way power is embedded in all social arrangements and language. Sensitivity to
discourse is essential in a social psychology of leading in risk.
A Special Note on Collaboration

The idea of collaboration appears throughout this book and it is more than just a theoretical
concept for the two of us. We have worked collaboratively for over twenty years and our
very different personalities function together to broaden what we each might be able to offer
individually. Consequently, in this book almost every line has been adjusted by both of us.
xii Following-Leading in Risk

Therefore, we will generally use the first person plural (‘we’), but where a story is told which
relates uniquely to one of us, we will indicate who the ‘I’ is in that context by adding the
speaker’s name in brackets.
A Special Note on the term ‘Collective Coherence’

(Craig)
I invented the term ‘collective coherence’ to act as a container word within which could be
put a lot of technical words used in many different disciplines. Since we will use this term
frequently throughout this book it is worth providing a brief definition and description here
at the start.
My underlying assumption is that humans cohere into groups around a collection of
common elements that form a shared pattern in one or more domains, creating their own
conceptual world. Many disciplines and professions have identified something akin to
this description in their own field of expertise, using labels such as ‘worldview’, ‘paradigm’,
‘habitus’, ‘frames’, ‘mental model’, ‘schema’, ‘culture’, knowledge culture’ etc. To unpack this
a little further, even in everyday language we hear comments such as ‘What world are you
from?’ or ‘You could never do that in the real world!’ These phrases imply that the person
being spoken to is functioning in some form of alternate reality that makes no sense to the
speaker. Hiebert (2008 p.15) captures this nicely:
“below the surface of speech and behaviour are beliefs and values that generate what
is said and done. We become aware of still deeper levels of culture that shape how
beliefs are formed – the assumptions that people make about the nature of things,
the categories in which they think, and the logic that organises these categories into
a coherent understanding of reality. It becomes increasingly clear that people live
not in the same world with different labels attached to it but in radically different
conceptual worlds.”
It is in this sense that we are using ‘collective coherence’. ‘Collective’ simply means a col-
lection of people. ‘Coherence’ is used to denote the patterns held in common around which
a group coheres. It also refers to the internal consistency or congruence of those patterns.
These collective coherences may create incommensurable differences, boundaries or divisions
between social groups. The significance of this concept will be come clearer as it is applied to
the developing argument of this book.
What This Book Is About

The drive for writing this book emerges from studies conducted at the Australian Catholic
University and the Post Graduate Program in the Psychology of Risk. The Post Graduate
Program brings together a unique focus of social psychology and related disciplines, and the
challenges of risk. (An outline of the program is attached at the end of this book.) While
one purpose of this book is to support studies in the Post Graduate Program, it also seeks to
add to the foundation laid down in the previous books in this series on risk:
Introduction xiii
Risk Makes Sense: Human Judgement and Risk
For the Love of Zero: Human Fallibility and Risk
Real Risk: Human Discerning and Risk
This fourth book seeks to bring together many of the ideas in the previous works with a
direct application to ‘following-leading’ in risk. Both the follower and the leader in risk know
that ‘risk makes sense’ and that risk aversion is the enemy of risk intelligence. The dumbing
down of risk and human discerning in risk simply makes human communities more fragile
and less resilient in major and unexpected events.
Why the joined words in the title of the book, ‘Following-Leading’ in risk? This is most
important, just as the colour and layout of the book itself has semiotic significance.
Following-Leading is a joined word, as each component is the flip side of the other. Roles in
following and leading change with the social psychological environment. We are all followers
and leaders. There is no understanding of leading without an understanding of relationship
and following. Likewise, following is more effective when one understands and has some
insight into the challenges of leading. So in this book, both are joined together in a mutual,
synergistic and wedded relationship. We can’t really speak or think of one without the other.
Effective leading also knows of the dangers of binary opposition, fundamentalist black-and-
white thinking. Binary oppositions don’t account for relationship, complexity or synergy.
The ideology of absolutes should not be the driving idea for leading. Rather, the following-
leading dynamic requires understanding, tolerance and mutuality. For this reason it is critical
that followers and leaders are aware of the reciprocity and mutuality in ‘The Zone of Recip-
rocal Relationship’, that is, the space between following and leading where decision-making
takes place (we will explore this concept further in Chapter 3). To help illustrate this point, a
recurring thread relating to a real-life story about ‘The secret...’ will appear in each chapter.
Discerning is the key to effective decision-making. How can leader-followers know what
is ‘acceptable risk’ without effective mutual judgement? How can we discern risk without
mutual risk intelligence? How can we develop risk intelligence by risk aversion? How can we
understand high reliability or ‘sense-able’ discerning without respectful and mutual dialogue?
Leadership, while defined as the capability and actuality of social influence, has for years
been about the discourse of individual attributes and traits of leaders, what some call the
‘hero myth’ (Neville). Since the evolution of managerialist ideologies in the 1970s and 1980s,
leadership schools of thought, publications, MBAs, Six Sigma tools, CEO discourse and
leadership/management ‘centres’ have exploded. The rise of management and leadership
theory is marked by such publications as Charles Handy’s Understanding Organisations
(1979), Peters and Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) and Covey’s (2013) The Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People (first published in 1989 and selling 25 million copies). In
this book we much prefer to speak of following-leading than the focus on the leader as an
isolated distribute of power and influence.
Primarily, the focus of management and leadership ‘schools’ and leadership ‘experts’ has been
individualistic and corporate in focus. However, since 2004 changes associated with social
xiv Following-Leading in Risk

media and ‘people movements’ (e.g. the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Snowdon, GetUp
and Wikileaks) have seen a shifting of focus from the leader-as-CEO as demigod-hero,
to a focus on following. Neville’s (2013) work The Life of Things has an excellent analysis of
the myth of the hero that we will discuss later in this book. Negri (2005) in the Politics of
Subversion chronicles the history of ‘people movement’ forms of leadership-power, showing
how new technologies have generated new dynamics in following and new challenges to
the ‘hero-leader myth’. One of the purposes of this book is to deconstruct the hero myth,
overturning the focus that approaches ‘leading’ from an individualistic CEO starting point,
to an approach that understands ‘leading’ through a social psychological focus on ‘following’.
The social psychological perspective is much more interested in what happens between
the follower and leader than what happens in the head or what comes out of the mouth of
a leader.
In the new millenium post-2000, there is now a greater distrust than ever for forms of
authority that were previously unquestioned. Indeed, the trend throughout social media is
that people would prefer to trust the opinion of an amateur than that of an expert or CEO
(Keen, 2007, 2012; Carr, 2012). The new challenge for following and leading is what to
do about this phenomenon. In this book we look at the nature of following from a social
psychological perspective and interrogate the process of leading in the context of following-
leading in risk. Our focus is on the processes of following-leading in judgement and
decision-making under uncertainty.
Most of us can tick off the accepted and common attributions of what makes an effective
leader, and some of us may have studied the nature of ‘charismatic’ or ‘transformational’
leadership. However, most are less aware that the discourse in orthodox leadership and
management theory is that of the ‘hero myth’. Every time there is an election in Australia or
the USA the focus of advertising is the ‘hero myth’. The message is ‘elect this person and he
will save you’. More recently the media and parties in Australia have sought to ‘Americanise’
the nature of politics in the hero myth tradition; for example, by bringing in advisors and
experts from the Obama campaign to an Australian election campaign. The emphasis is
on the individual leader, not the collective or social arrangements. It seems there is now a
direct correlation between the election of a leader and the amount of money spent on the
campaign to sell the ‘hero’. However, when followers challenge the power of leaders, they
then take the lead. This is how social arrangements (social psychology) affect leading, and
this will emerge as one focus of this book.
Whilst the media emphasizes the decisiveness of leaders, the followers will later dump that
leader at the polls because of poor decisions. Yet, those who challenge leadership decisions
are often viewed as ‘mavericks’ and troublemakers, not ‘mavens’ or change agents (Gladwell).
Riggio (2008, p. xxv) in The Art of Followership states:
Too often, followers are expected to be agreeable and acquiescent and are rewarded for
being so, when in fact followers who practice knee-jerk obedience are of little value
and are often dangerous. If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a
single rule, it would be to speak the truth to power. We know that toxic followers can
put even good leaders on a disastrous path – Shakespeare’s Iago comes immediately
Introduction xv
to mind. But heroic followers can also save leaders from their worst follies, especially
leaders so isolated that the only voice they hear is their own.
What Riggio emphasizes here is the social relationship or ‘contract’ between the leader and
the followers. This social contract between leading and following is a feature behind the
discussion of this book. Populist leadership discourse is most often about the the traits of
the leader. Somewhere along the way, managerialism discourse (power-transference) has lost
sight of the follower, social contract and followership context (social arrangements). Leader-
ship has most often become a study of the ‘man and the moment’ rather than a partnership
with people or indeed about feminine traits in leading. This is where social psychology enters
the discussion and asks the question: ‘What are the social arrangements that complement
effective following-leading?’
The use of language is critical for the discussion of this book and the intentional use of
the participle form rather than the noun form is important. The focus of this book is on
‘acting’ and ‘enacting’ the following-leading dynamic. So the use of the participles ‘following’,
‘leading’ and ‘organising’ are preferred where possible in the text. This emphasis shifts the
focus away from the object of leading, and the objectification of leaders, onto the action of
following-leading. Rather than focus on the categorisation of leadership, social psychology is
much more interested in the relationship between following, organising and leading.
Under the individualistic ‘hero’ discourse of leadership, mostly projected by orthodox
historians and leadership schools, the key to leadership is the acquisition of power by any
means possible and the exercising of that power by an individual. This is not the case with
the History of Mentalities or the ‘Annales’ school of history (social psychological history).
Chopra (2010, p. 11) comments:
… the leadership I’m talking about is not the leadership as we’ve traditionally defined
it. According to that old definition, leadership belongs to the few. In a group the
person selected to lead may stand out as the most popular, confident, or ruthless. By
these measures, not everyone can lead. When the strong and ruthless rise on the world
stage, we find ourselves led by kings and generals, autocrats and dictators, power-
hungry premiers and presidents. History traffics in myth-making, which is based
on personal charisma and uses spin to evoke an aura of destiny. But the measures of
leadership are flawed. None of the qualities mentioned here indicate that a leader will
actually improve the lives of those who follow him. Chances are equally good that
such leadership will bring misery, conflict and oppression. The old definitions of lead-
ership exalt power, and the use of power has always been directly linked to its abuse.
One of the great tests of following-leading dynamic is time. It is easy to develop a following
quickly with the false promises of ‘spin’ and ‘quackery’ made attractive to those who lack
discernment and desperate for hope. It is easy to con a following with shallow three-word
slogans about simplistic solutions. It seems relatively easy for the sociopath to attract
a following by promises and the manipulation of seductions. It is easy to obtain many
‘followers’ on Facebook and Twitter; indeed, followers can be purchased by the thousands
through ‘click farms’. This is not how social psychology defines ‘following’. Followership is
much more than just pressing ‘like’ on someone’s Facebook status.
xvi Following-Leading in Risk

One of the themes in this book is that leading and following need to be understood inter-
changeably and reciprocally as social activities. If these are social activities then the funda-
mental ethic of reciprocation is critical for understanding the ethics of leading and following.
It is instructive to do a search for publications on the ethics of leadership as compared
to those on leadership power. If leadership is a social, relational and ethical activity, can
unethical forms of relationship, influence and dominance be deemed ‘leadership’? Is leading
more temporary than permanent? Can one fall in and out of leading and following?
In the 2013 election in Australia it was fascinating to observe the open demonisation of
‘the other’ by a prominent tabloid including the direct portrayal of the Prime Minister as a
bumbling Nazi (August 9, 2013. Daily Telegraph, p. 1). Demonising ‘the other’ is a foun-
dational characteristic of all black-and-white, binary fundamentalisms (binary opposition),
and seems attractive to those who see leadership in a binary paradigm. In this modality,
leadership as an object is defined against the following of subjects. The binary model of
leadership understands itself against ‘the other’ (followers). Indeed in some models of hero
leadership, the follower is the one demonised by the superior leader. The social psychological
understanding of ‘in-groupness’ and ‘out-groupness’ is critical if we wish to understand how
prejudice, demonisation and dehumanisation are manufactured in this view of leading. This
has significant implications for how following, leading and organising tackles risk.
In this book we argue that the most effective way to understand risk is to better understand
the social arrangements that condition the following-leading Zone of Reciprocal Relation-
ship. We will explore ideas of trajectories and the ethics of leadership, cultic leadership,
when followers lead, the authoritarian personality and the importance of leading through
what we call ‘The Adaptive Toolbox’. Key aspects of social psychology of following-leading
will be emphasised through a case study of the Cult of Mac (the leadership of Steve Jobs,
co-founder of Apple) and numerous stories and illustrations from the experiences of the
authors.
The book concludes with the presentation of practical tools to facilitate the reciprocal
relationship in following and leading, with a view to better tackling risk.
Structure and Use of the Book

The book has been structured in three sections. The first two sections focus on the tradi-
tional model of leadership and the neglect of followers. The final section details a model of
following-leading from a social psychological viewpoint and then provide some practical
tools for using the model.
Section One: Traditional Leadership vs Following - Leading

In this section we will introduce a comparison between traditional forms of leadership and
the concept of following-leading. This will include a discussion on the hero myth of leader-
ship and the lost element of ethics in leading. This part also provides an overview of the
worldview, tradition and discipline of social psychology.
Introduction xvii
Section Two: The Power of Following in Following - Leading
Section Two shifts the focus to the ‘following’ element of the following-leading dynamic,
including a discussion of the Cult of Mac. One of the important things we learn from a
study of a cult is the nature of ‘cult’-ure and how leadership is exercised culturally. Under-
standing culture and how social arrangements affect decision-making is critical to leading
and following in risk.
Section Three: The Following-Leading Adaptive Toolbox

The third section moves the discussion onto the idea of wisdom and discerning in risk - how
risk makes sense through the reciprocal following-leading dynamic and the wise use of
dialogic tools. An example of an Adaptive Toolbox is provided along with a small collection
of relevant tools.
xviii Following-Leading in Risk

SECTION
ONE
A New Look At Leading
2 Following-Leading in Risk
CHAPTER 1
Introducing Leadership, Social
Psychology and Following-Leading
1
The occupy movement is driven by individuals like you coming together to
create real change from the bottom up. - Occupy Movement Website
We seem unable to unshackle ourselves from conventional and seductive

accounts of leadership. - Amanda Sinclair
The Occupy Movement

On 17 September 2011 approximately one thousand protestors gathered in
Manhattan and marched up and down Wall St. The momentum for this gathering
was precipitated by an advertisement in the July issue of counter-culture magazine
Adbusters (https://www.adbusters.org/magazine). (Adbusters co-founder Kalle Lasn
registered the OccupyWallStreet.org web address on 9 June). Protests of all sorts
are common in New York, but this time things were different. Adbusters tweeted a
call to action (including to ‘bring tent’) in the months before September, and on 23
August Anonymous threw their support behind ‘#occupywallstreet’ with rapid activity
across social media. On 17 September, two thousand people attended the protest with
approximately two hundred deciding to stay overnight in Zucotti Park, a few blocks
down from Wall St.
The Anonymous message reads: ‘flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens,
peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months … Once there, we
shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.’ No one could
have known that the occupation was going to become monumental. For a brief
documentary account you can view this YouTube clip <http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=VkBMrFE9p0g>.
After a few days arrests began, the movement to occupy went viral on social media,
and others began to flood to the protest out of empathy for the protestors. By 24
September more than eighty people had been arrested, streets were permanently
blocked and police began using pepper spray and a technique of separation called
‘kettling’. The use of these nets to segregate and then spray caused outrage across news
and social media.
Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 3

On 1 October protestors attempted to cross the Brooklyn Bridge resulting in more
than seven hundred arrests. By 5 October, with the support of unions, students
and the unemployed, the number of protestors swelled to more than 15,000. More
meetings and protests occurred in other cities in support of the Occupy Movement in
New York.
By 15 October protests had spread to 900 cities across the world, spawning slogans
such as, ‘We are the 99%’ (originally sparked by a Tumblr blog page) and ‘We won’t
bail you out again’. In the days following, solidarity mounted as the message against
greed and corruption in high places spread across Twitter, Facebook and countless
social media sites, a phenomenon termed (by Occupy) ‘citizen journalism’.
On 26 October the police raided Occupy Oakland at dawn, injuring an Iraq War
veteran called Scott Olsen, a name which swiftly trends across Twitter. By 29 October
the number of Occupy protests around the world reached two thousand. On 5
November protestors hold ‘Bank Transfer Day’ with over 600,000 people shifting
their funds from large banks to small credit unions.
Over time, energy for the Occupy movement began to wane and after some surges
and waves of intensity things began to settle back to normal. The Occupy website
<http://www.occupytogether.org/> remains a focus of activity against corporate greed,
poverty and corruption.
What is most interesting about the Occupy movement is the power of its activities and the
spread of its support without any recognisable ‘leader’. The real leaders of Occupy are Twitter,
Facebook, Anonymous and other social media. Similar can be said of leadership provided by
Wikileaks and follower movements like the Arab Spring. These sorts of movements create a
dilemma for those who hold to the traditional view of leadership: how can these movements
have achieved so much without the vision and direction of a powerful leader?
The Paradigm of Traditional Leadership

A quick search for ‘leadership’ in Amazon books results in 120,000 possible purchases,
the overwhelming majority of which espouse the traditional view of leadership. The most
common discourse in the traditional language of leadership and management is a ‘top down’
approach, focusing on power transference, with models of leadership starting with the
individual and founded in the ‘hero myth’. (A deeper discussion of the hero myth will be
undertaken later in this chapter). The leadership and management genre is littered with ‘the
three steps’, ‘seven habits’, ‘ten pathways’, and ‘fifty-nine characteristics’ approach to leader-
ship. The tendency is toward a formularistic (and mechanistic) approach and each theory
(anthropological and power focus) inherits a stylistic name (transformational, authentic,
transactional, service, etc). The following quote is typical of this type of thinking:
Leadership is inspiring others to pursue your vision within the parameters you set, to the
extent that it becomes a shared effort, a shared vision, and a shared success. (Steve Zeitchik,
CEO of Focal Point Strategies)
The focus therefore is on the (usually male) leader, his vision, attributes etc. In many of the
populist books on leadership one could be forgiven for thinking that effective leadership
required no understanding of followers; rather, it is all about the characteristics and capabili-
ties of the individual at the top. A counter, minority view does exist and is growing stronger.
We live in a new age where the idea of the individual hero-leader model is inadequate to
face the complex issues of the 21st century. Leadership needs to be liberated from the hero
myth. Fletcher (2004) calls this an era of ‘post-heroic leadership’, a time in which leadership
will become less individualistic and more relational.
The idea of ‘leadership over others’ needs to move to ‘leadership with others’. How can it be
otherwise, with the new and rapid accountability that social media has brought into the mix?
Sinclair (2007) has called the hero mythology of leadership the ‘seductive account of leader-
ship’. Now with social media, this seduction and its accompanying hubris are being more
and more exposed.
Leadership in Risk: Accentuating the Hero

The traditional view of leadership is accentuated in the world of risk management, with the
hero myth represented more starkly in the related literature. It is important for the purposes
of this book to remember that our primary focus is on risk. Risk permeates most things
in life, including organisational life, and the focus in this series of books has been on how
organisations, regulators and people in general deal with risk in practice. There is no doubt
that the industries of security, risk and safety have grown exponentially since the 1990s.
The greater the regulation of the risk industry the more absurd have become the measures
developed to manage risk. The previous books have made it clear that the fixation on risk-
aversion in western society has become an obsession. The industries of risk management,
security and Work Health and Safety have blossomed under the legislation and regulation of
risk. Most medium to large organisations now have a Safety Manager, a Risk Manager and
Security Management in place to manage risk. This has led to an increasing dumbing down
of risk under a model of leadership by dominance, policing and authoritarianism.
When one looks at leadership in risk, it becomes very clear that the model of authoritarian-
ism dominates. When it comes to fear of risk, humans seem to lose all rights, even the right
to harm themselves. In the quest for absolutes under the rubric of zero, all injury and harm
is declared ‘evil’. Under this rubric of perfectionism, all control must be exercised and all
evil exorcised to prevent harm. This is why the ACT Regulator in Canberra, Australia has
adopted the comic-book hero motif of Hazardman <http://hazardman.act.gov.au/> who
swoops in to arrest citizens, protecting them from harm. Here we have the model of the
hero leader par excellence openly advocated by the regulator as the paradigm for risk and
hazard management. The focus of Hazardman is on every petty risk, micro-management at
its worst. There is no reciprocal dynamic in the relationship between leaders and followers
in this model of leadership, just command, control, intervention and dominance. While this
absence of the following-leading model is evident in the general literature on leadership, it is
even more striking in the world of risk management.
Despite a range of variation in the model, the traditional approach to risk leadership most
often starts with the leader as shown in Figure 1a.

Figure 1a. The Traditional Model of Leadership in Risk.
CONFORMING
In the traditional model, risk management begins with the leader, who sets the parameters
and direction for the followership. Communication is primarily one-way through telling,
instruction, direction, etc. The responsibility of the followers is to further refine the ideas of
risk management through conformity, resulting in quality risk management. For the moment
it is important to note that one’s anthropological assumptions guide one’s view of leading
and following. The fundamental question here is: what is it to be a human being? Social
psychology assumes that humans are socially identified, that is that one is defined by one’s
social psychological being. As Buber states, there is no such thing as an individual. We are
only known in relationship to others. There is no ‘I’, only ‘I-Thou’. Similarly, one’s concept of
leadership indicates one’s starting point.
This traditional focus on leadership results in different expectations for the leadership and
followership, as shown in Figure 1b. The leadership is expected to be internally motivated
and constrained. The leader’s values and vision provide the scope and direction for the
organisation’s approach to risk. He may well engage in consultation with others but they
will usually be peers or outside consultants, not his staff or workers, who could be confused
or unsettled by these strategic discussions. This explains the line of secrecy, the idea that the
bulk of the leadership discussion must be kept ‘commercially in confidence’ and only the
official non-confusing vision and direction is passed down through the line of secrecy in a
primarily one-way communication.
Figure 1b. The Traditional Model of Leadership in Risk - Expectations
LINE OF OPACITY
CONFORMING
STANDARDS CONTROL
In contrast to the internal constraints of the leadership, the followership is constrained exter-
nally. Standards are provided and various forms of control are applied to help the follower-
ship respond in line with the vision of the leadership. This freedom through conforming
helps to refine the approach to risk until an appropriate risk management system is in place
that can be measured.
The traditional approach in practice (Craig)

I was engaged as a minor consultant to support a major change program in a large
government department. A couple of management gurus were employed to work with
the executive management and introduce a new mindset for leadership, including
risk. I was personally impressed with the approach and with the impact it was having
on the top three layers of the organisation. Everyone involved was pleased with the
impact on the leadership, and I was asked to work with an Executive Level One
manager to assess how well the vision and message were getting through to the
thousands of workers below the executive management levels. A series of focus groups
were conducted and almost all came up with the same result. The followership saw the
change initiative as one more executive management ‘fad’, which would have a limited
(and negative) impact on most workers. In many cases the focus group members
laughed out loud at the new slogans and vision statements, ridiculing them as consult-
ant speak and likening them to Dilbert cartoons. While very few demonstrated any
sort of active rebellion, the general approach which emerged was a resigned, external
conformity that would gently sabotage any efforts to change their work.

So here in practice was a fairly typical outcome for a traditional top-down leadership
approach. The leadership funnel had achieved a level of refinement and focus for the leader-
ship, but the line of secrecy had not protected the workers but instead alienated them. So
why does this keep happening? Surely these management gurus are very smart and would
realise this problem exists. The reason lies in the fact that the problem is not about intelli-
gence, but about worldview and paradigm. The traditional view of leadership is supported by
the dominance of the hero myth of the leader and this makes followers almost invisible and
their views unimportant.
The Hero Myth

Management and leadership discourse (managerialism) since the 1970s has been dominated
by the ‘myth’ of the hero. The use of the word ‘myth’ carries the notion of an underpinning
worldview or ideology that is primarily fictitious. The myth of the hero has its foundation in
a cultural story dated back to the foundation of Babylon (2800 BC). The first psychologist
to study and document the hero myth was Otto Rank (1914). Rank investigated mythology
as a way of understanding ‘laws of the human mind’, ‘the theory of elementary thoughts’ and
‘traits of the human psyche’ (p. 3-6). He makes clear that all myth-making has an aspiration
to spiritual otherness as an escape from fallibility and finiteness.
While there are many variations of the hero myth, they all relate to defining what it means
to be a human individual. Greek mythology provides a range of ‘archetypes’ that enable
humans to understand themselves and their place in the world. Neville (2012) explores
the Greek myths through a Jungian lens and shows how the hero myth dominates cultural
identity. He states:
The therapist takes on the mission of Prometheus, using her skills (including the
skill of relationship) to liberate her client from the power of impulse and compulsion
from conditions of worth, from a poor self-concept, from self-destructive habits, from
inappropriate self-talk, from dependence on the therapist, or whatever. Neville (2012,
p. 29)
The centre of this relationship is the heroic ego as asserted so clearly by Freud. Neville argues
that when we are enmeshed in cultural mythology we learn that ‘this is the way the world is,
it can be no other way … Assumptions that are taken for granted are mistaken for unassail-
able truths’ (p. 30).
He goes on to say: ‘Our lives are pretty deeply embedded in the Hero narrative’ (p. 31).
Whether we look to an individual, technique or ideology (e.g. Marxism, capitalism or
socialism), humans aspire to the world beyond themselves and attribute salvation to the hero.
Hook (2008, p. 3-4) states:
The basic fact that provides the material for interest in heroes is the indispensability of
leadership in all social life, and in every major form of social organisation. The controls
over leadership, whether open or hidden, differ from society to society, but leaders are
always at hand – not merely as conspicuous symbols of state, but as centres of respon-
sibility, decision and action. There is a natural tendency to associate the leader with the
results achieved under his leadership even when these achievements, good or bad, have
resulted despite his leadership than because of it.
Hook (2008, p. 12) knows, as do we in hindsight, that the notion of savior-as-human is
an attribution.
Whoever saves us is a hero; and in the exigencies of political action men are always
looking for someone to save them. A sharp crisis in social and political affairs – when
something must be done and done quickly – naturally intensifies interest in the hero.
Hook (2008, p.20) elaborates further about the attraction of the hero myth:
The psychological sources of interest in great men may, with as much justification,
be regarded as means by which great men exert influence on their followers. These
sources are, briefly, (a) the need for psychological security, (b) the tendency to seek
compensation for personal and material limitations, and (c) the flight from responsi-
bility which expresses itself sometimes in grasping for simple solutions and sometimes
in surrender of political interest to professional politicians.
There is a minority view in the management literature that opposes the hero myth and
has sought to expose the consequences of this belief. A key author in this area is Henry
Mintzberg, who has written extensively on management and leadership in organisations. In
his book Managers Not MBAs he devotes a number of sections to the hero myth of leader-
ship (2005, pp. 104-111). In particular he notes how this myth perpetuates a disconnected
style of management and is used to give the impression that it is the leader who achieves all
the organisation’s successes. He supports this through an example from Harvard where one
management education program was described as looking at
“... leaders ‘in action’ to see how they develop a vision of the future, align the organisa-
tion behind that vision, and motivate people to achieve it. It examines how leaders
design effective organisations and change them to achieve superior performance.” All
by themselves! (Mintzberg 2005, p. 106)
The hero myth and journey has been expressed diagrammatically as the hero’s journey cycle,
as represented at Figure 2, The Hero’s Journey. We will revisit the hero’s journey in the case
study of Steve Jobs in Chapter 4.
Jones et.al. (2008, p. 5) draw together this need to seek the hero, stimulate the imagination
and bind together the collective cultural unconscious:
So, the hero narrative and myth of the hero are ideologically wound up in the way
humans psychologically and socially create meaning in self and leadership. The human
attraction to, and attribution of the hero, say as much about ‘following’, social arrange-
ments and the psyche of the followers, as they do about the time, context and nature
of the leader.

Figure 2. The Hero’s Journey.
CAL
L TO
ME A
HO DV
EN
TU
RE
KNOWN
UNKNOWN
THRESHOLD
(Beginning of
THE HERO’S
Transformation)
TRANSFO
JOURNEY
S
RMA
ION
TAT
TIO
MP
N
TE
D
AN
ES
NG
L LE
CHA
POINT OF
FAILURE
The Leading-Following Dynamic

In comparison to the hero leader model, a social psychological approach views leading
through an understanding of a following-leading dynamic. This will be explained in detail in
Chapter 5 but a brief comment now will help to provide a sense of where we are going.
Once leading is viewed as part of a following-leading dynamic, there emerges a necessary
emphasis on relationships, discourse and language between leaders and followers. In the
social psychological view, one cannot be effective in leading without an understanding of the
interdependent relationship between following and leading.
To develop a social psychological understanding of following-leading, one must first
consider starting points and trajectories. A social psychological approach to leading begins
from the perspective of social arrangements. Social psychology understands that ‘everything
matters’ and that human decision-making is socially and psychologically determined. This
means that the social psychological view of leading begins not with the individual but rather
with the social arrangements and context (culture and climate) of the ‘following’.
Therefore, before proceeding any further in the book it would make sense to explore the
discipline of social psychology.
An Overview of Social Psychology
Social psychology is about the study of human social behaviour, with an emphasis on how
people think towards and relate to each other under the influence of social arrangements.
Because the mind is the axis around which social behaviour pivots, social psychologists
tend to study the relationship between the human mind(s) and social behaviours. Social
psychology is also the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviours
can be influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. The following is a
summary of the discussion of this topic from the previous book, Real Risk: Human Discern-
ing and Risk.
In 1908 William McDougall published Social Psychology, and in 1924 Floyd Allport
published a book by the same title. The latter sparked an explosion of research as social
psychologists began a wave of experiments to assess how individuals were influenced by
social arrangements.
Cialdini (2009) describes how people are influenced and persuaded by social arrange-
ments, identifying six underlying social dynamics that affect human judgement and
decision-making:
1. Reciprocation. Anthropologists consider reciprocity to be a universal social norm.
2. Commitment to Consistency. According to Festinger (1957) people are reluctant to
behave in ways that are inconsistent with their public commitments.
3. Social Proof. If we see many other people doing something, we are more likely to do
it. The psychology of mass movements is foundational for understanding cults, ‘group
think’, the authoritarian personality, gambling and risk, eugenics, xenophobia and a
host of social movements/sub-cultures in society.
4. Authority. If someone is recognised as being in authority we are more likely to do
what they say. The experiments and work of Stanley Milgram (which we will look at
later) demonstrated this.
5. Liking. People are more likely to be persuaded if they feel liked.
6. Scarcity. When we perceive something as scarce we are more likely to want it.
Kurt Lewin, sometimes identified as the ‘father’ of social psychology, coined the term
‘group dynamics’ (1947), which he described as the way in which groups and individuals act
and react to changing circumstances. Lewin theorised that when a group is established it
becomes a unified system with unique dynamics that cannot be understood by evaluating the
members individually. This idea quickly gained support from sociologists and psychologists
who understood the significance of this emerging field. One of the foundational areas of
study for social psychologists is ‘in-groupness’ and out-groupness’.
One of the reasons people confuse social psychology with other psychological disciplines is
that there is significant overlap between the various sub-sets. Social psychology draws on
a number of other disciplines and methods of research, particularly cognitive psychology,
psychology of the self, social anthropology, educational psychology, sociology and sociolin-
guistics communication.

Rather than undertake a history lesson, it is perhaps better to look at the kinds of things that
interest social psychology. Further information abounds on the Internet, with the following
sites as good examples:
• Social Psychology Network <http://www.socialpsychology.org/>
• Society of Australian Social Psychologists <http://www.sasp.org.au/>
• Wikipedia - Social Psychology <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_psychology>
Interests of Social Psychology

Social psychology is interested in how social arrangements affect relationships and decision-
making. It is important that social psychology not be confused with the terms ‘organisational
psychology’ or ‘psychosocial’. Organisational psychology focuses on the business of Human
Resources in work contexts, mostly in the areas of recruitment, staff selection, learning and
development, leadership and talent management, career development, change, performance
and well-being. A psychosocial focus has an emphasis on all issues associated with well-
being, including fatigue, ageing workforce, work hours, work-life balance, workplace climate,
workload, ergonomic effects on humans, stress, mental health, violence, effects of injury,
management and supervision stressors, organisational injustice and relationships at work.
Social psychology is a discipline that focuses on human interactions and how social arrange-
ments (actual, imagined or implied) affect human judgement and decision-making. Social
psychology is interested in how people think (as affected by others), what they feel and
what they do. In order to assist an understanding of social psychology, the following list of
interests and relevant authors is presented as a helpful guide. The authors and publications
are also listed in the reading list at the end of this book. The reading list should serve as a
guide for further study and research.
Table 1. Interests of Social Psychology
Subject Interest - Suggested Researchers Subject Interest - Suggested Researchers

Addictions - Mate Heuristics - Kahneman, Plous
Aggression - Aronson, Homeostasis - Wilde
Attachment - Hogg & Vaughan Human relationships - Schein
Attraction - Hogg & Vaughan Implicit knowledge - Gladwell, Polyani
Authority - Milgram Influence - Klein, Caldini
Belonging - Bandura Language (priming) - Bargh, Fairhurst
Bounded Rationality - Simon, Gigerenzer Learning - Robinson, Palmer, Claxton
Bystander Effect -Tuffin Motivation - Higgins, Moscowitz, Deci
Cognitive Biases - Kahneman, Gigerenzer Organisational Sensemaking - Weick
Subject Interest - Suggested Researchers Subject Interest - Suggested Researchers
Cognitive Dissonance - Festinger, Plous Perception - Slovic
Collective Mindfulness - Weick Persuasion - Higgins, Deci
Communication - Wolvin, Newberg, Power - Klein, Neville
Tannen
Community - Wenger Prejudice/Discrimination - Zimbardo,
Plous
Conformity - Milgram, Meissner, Ashe Pro and Anti-social Behaviour - Zimbardo
Culture - Schein, Cameron and Quinn Reciprocation - Hogg & Vaughan
Decision-making - Plous Salience - Hogg & Vaughan
Discourse - Wodak & Meyer, Shapiro, Semiotics - Chandler
Fairclough, Tuffin, Tannen.
Ethics - Hamilton, Ellul Social Politics - Neville.
Followership - Riggio, Kellerman The Authoritarian Personality - Adorno
Groups - In and out groupness Unconsciousness - Jung, Neville, Bargh,
Gigerenzer, Claxton, Norrtranders
Helping - Schein
One of the features of social psychology is the examining of human behaviour, both through
constructed experiments, and in real-life examples (such as the Abu Ghraib case <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse>). The social psycholo-
gist wants to know why people think and act as they do socially, then posits a theory that
explains that collective behaviour. They look at social behaviour and ask: Why? What forces,
pressures, dynamics, influences and stressors make people consciously and unconsciously
make decisions that result in certain behaviours?
Perhaps the best way to understand the focus of social psychology is through discussion of
three key concepts in social psychology - The Authoritarian Personality (TAP), Obedience,
and Cognitive Dissonance.
However, before we look at these three concepts let’s read about ‘The Secret Meeting’ as
a ‘frame’ and ‘anchor’ for the discussion. The Secret Meeting story helps bring together
both the methodology of social psychology and the key principles of the following-leading
dynamic that will be explored throughout this book. It is focused on the ‘line of secrecy’
that the traditional model of leadership sees as essential to protect the followership and
the organisation.

The Secret Meeting (Craig)
Let me set the picture. It was 1991, in a private school based in a Christian funda-
mentalist tradition, with a new principal who had recently been promoted from the
deputy role. For the purposes of this story, let’s call the school Hezekiah School.
Hezekiah was founded on the principles of morality, obedience, the authority of the
Bible, submission to authority, compliance, the language of love, and discipline. The
Social Science faculty (comprising History, Geography and Economics) was popular
with students and was populated with teachers who were critical and creative thinkers,
one of whom was Rob. I was a young teacher who had recently come to the school,
attracted by the calibre of the staff in the Social Science Faculty. It was here that Rob
and I first met. One of Rob’s goals with new, young teachers was to ensure that their
first experiences in teaching were positive, supportive and developmental. I flourished
in this environment and assumed it represented the approach of the whole school.
However, I soon learned that the discourse of the Social Science faculty sat on a
‘fault line’ of two cultures. The Social Science teachers were working to facilitate the
students’ learning in skills of critical thinking, articulation of ideas, deconstruction of
history (and its manufacture), and understanding of bias. This focus was in tension
with the culture of obedience, authority and compliance that characterised the rest of
the school.
One day I was called in to meet with the headmaster to discuss finalisation of a
job offer for the following year. This was not a surprise; only a week prior I had
approached the Principal to ask if my contract would be renewed for the next year,
having been offered work with a previous employer at three times the pay offered by
the school. In response I had been told that my first year’s probationary report was the
best in the school’s history, and assured that I would have ongoing work at Hezekiah.
So I entered the meeting, unaware that I was about to become the subject of a crusade
and inquisition. The first thing I noticed was that there were more people present than
I expected. I sat down, noting the serious and disapproving looks of the principal and
both deputy principals. Clearly something was amiss, but when the initial question
asked was, ‘How do you think you are going?’, I replied confidently that ‘things
seemed to be going very well’. Suddenly, the world changed, as though I had entered
a parallel universe. The principal pronounced that my work was appalling and accused
me of being the cause of all the recent problems and unrest at the school.
Stunned, I asked for details, which brought forth further accusations, in the course
of which the positive attributes of the Social Science faculty were reinterpreted as
defiance, disobedience and being anti-Christian. As the accusations mounted I asked
whether all this meant that I was not going to be employed as promised. The response
was that I would be placed on further probation (against legal requirements of
probation), and that I would have to report daily to the principal or deputies regarding
all conversations I had with any staff. Finally, the principal demanded that this
meeting be kept secret and was not to be discussed with anyone, including my family.
The meeting concluded with a threat that if I didn’t comply with all of this, or if
anyone found out about the meeting, I would be promptly sacked.
How do we explain this meeting? We can begin to make sense of it if we understand more
of the background issues happening in the school prior to the meeting and the leadership
reaction to the issues involved. There had been considerable negative reaction towards a
variety of decisions that had been made by the principal and executive without consultation.
Staff had voiced concerns about dress regulations, relationships with the school Council, a
lack of transparency, punctuality issues, meeting compliance and a range of issues around
competing ideologies. Rumours were rife, some staff left the school without much explana-
tion, and factions had begun to develop. The leadership had responded by publishing several
public letters to enforce compliance and obedience to authority. These were backed up with
meetings demanding staff cease expressing their concerns. In reaction the staff had elected
two union representatives, one for the primary school and one for the secondary school. The
elected representative for the secondary school staff was Craig. This had occurred a week
before the secret meeting.
So how did things change for Craig so drastically in just one week? The answer lies in
three concepts: the authoritarian personality, obedience and cognitive dissonance. Let’s
take a closer look at these and see what light they shed on our developing story of the
secret meeting.
The Authoritarian Personality

The concept of the authoritarian personality was briefly discussed in the third book in
this series, Real Risk: Human Discerning and Risk (p.114). Now we will look into it in a bit
more detail.
The authoritarian personality (TAP) type was first posited by researchers studying the Nazis
in the aftermath of World War II (Adorno, 1950). It describes the type of person who puts
his or her value in strength and leadership, and who believes that those who do not think
similarly are simply weak. In addition, this personality type is often unwavering and critical,
with a superstitious and unfailing belief that a power larger than him or her is governing
fate. They tend to be arationally dependent on parental and other authorities. The researchers
developed the hypothesis that such a personality predisposes one to accept or be attracted to
fascist ideology.
Authoritarians, it seems, exaggerate the differences between the in-group and the out-group.
In-groupness provides a frame of reference for self-definition. This idea builds on an analysis
of the importance of in-groups and out-groups in understanding the nature of prejudice
(Allport and Tajfel, 1981), and is foundational for understanding inter-group dynamics in
organisations.
Meissner (1971, p. 118) has identified nine characteristics of the authoritarian personality:
1. Conventionalism - rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values.
2. Authoritarian submission - a submissive, uncritical attitude toward the idealised moral
authorities in the group.
3. Authoritarian aggression - a tendency to be sensitive to, and condemnatory and
punitive toward, those violating conventional values.

4. Anti-intraception - opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender (as
opposed to tough-minded).
5. Superstition and stereotype - belief in mystical determinants of individual fate, and a
tendency to think in more or less rigid categories.
6. Power and ‘toughness’ - preoccupation with control, power-submission, strength-
weakness; tendency to identify with power figures; exaggerated assertions of strength
and toughness.
7. Destructiveness and cynicism - generalised hostility.
8. Projectivity - tendency to believe that dangerous things are happening; projection
outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.
9. Sex - excessive concern with sexual fantasies.
Rigidity of thought, closed-mindedness, and other concepts related to cognitive (integrative)
complexity have also been used to describe the thought processes of authoritarians. Integra-
tive complexity refers to the combined ability of an individual to differentiate and integrate
complex information. A person of low integrative complexity will tend to use compartmen-
talised thinking, make premature closure in situations of conflict and be prone to mispercep-
tion and distortion of information. This is supported by the key work of social psychologists
such as Milgram (1969) who conducted experiments establishing conclusively that people’s
values and beliefs are shaped social-psychologically.
Obedience
In a 1961 research experiment, Stanley Milgram designed a test to see if normal, law-
abiding people would give a stranger a lethal electric shock. Milgram wanted to examine
how the Nazis could carry out the systematic slaughter of innocent fellow humans. The
simplistic answer is that the Nazis were monsters, but Milgram’s experiments showed that,
given the right social psychological conditions, we are all capable of this kind of behaviour.
You can watch a documentary on the Milgram experiments on YouTube <http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=mnBY0FCqJU0>. His findings have more recently been supported
by Derren Brown <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-fQnltrg6w> and social psy-
chologist Clifford Stott <http://stott.socialpsychology.org/>, <http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=4b7YFtiE5EA>.
The following discussion uses scans taken from Milgram’s (1969) Obedience to Authority
which is out of print.
Milgram advertised in the local paper for volunteers willing to participate in a study for a
fee. As in many social psychological experiments, participants were misled into believing that
they were participating in research with a different purpose to that of the real experiment. In
this case participants believed they were taking part in a study on learning. What they didn’t
know was that everyone else in the experiment was either a confederate or an actor.
The experiment initially involved three people each with a different role: the Experimenter
(an authoritative role), the Teacher (a role intended to obey the orders of the Experimenter),
and the Learner (the recipient of stimulus from the Teacher). The test subject and the
actor both drew a fake lottery to determine their roles, but, unknown to the subject, both
slips were marked ‘Teacher’. The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read
‘Learner’, thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the ‘Teacher’. At this point,
the ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’ were separated into different rooms from where they could not see
each other. The only means of communication between the two was via a microphone in
the teacher’s room, connected to a speaker in the learner’s room. Milgram also made a range
of variation in the experiment to monitor any differences in response, including changing
the proximity of the Teacher to Learner, adding more teachers, more learners or including
learners with a heart condition.
Figure 3. Milgram Advertisement in Local Paper.
Once the experiment was set up, the ‘teacher’ (the real participant) was given a sample of the
power of the electric shock from the electroshock generator. The ‘teacher’ was then given a
list of word pairs that he was to ‘teach’ the learner. The ‘teacher’ would commence by reading
the list of word pairs to the ‘learner’. The ‘teacher’ would then read the first word of each pair
and read four possible answers. The ‘learner’ would press a button to indicate his response.
If the answer was incorrect, the ‘teacher’ would administer a shock to the ‘learner’, with the
voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.
In reality, there were no actual shocks. After the actor was separated from the subject, the
actor set up a tape recorder synchronised with the electroshock generator. Prerecorded
responses were synchronised for each shock level. After a number of increases, the actor
would make noises (such as bang on the wall to demonstrate discomfort and pain). After
several times banging on the wall and complaints responses by the ‘learner’ would cease. The
silence in this case could indicate either being resigned to the pain or having been affected
by the shock, for example suffering a seizure.

If the subject wished to stop they were prompted by the Experimenter to continue. The
experiment was halted either once the ‘teacher’ required more than four promptings, or after
the maximum 450-volt shock had been administered three times in succession. In Milgram’s
first set of experiments, 65% of participants administered the 450-volt shock, though many
were very uncomfortable doing so.
Figure 4. Arrangement of Experiment
Figure 5. Proximity Configuration
The essence of obedience is how we view ourselves in relation to others. When we are
obedient we carry out the wishes of another person (due to attachment, cognitive dissonance
or social politics), and in so doing are able to divorce ourselves from responsibility for an
act. In some respects the Nazis demonstrated more than anything that they were simply
good public servants. During the collapse of domestic airline Ansett Australia in 2001/2002,
Rob had a friend who was a senior public servant and when asked about the suffering of
the Ansett employees, he responded, “Rob, I serve the Minister’. This is the dynamic of
obedience, a trade-off of one allegiance for another. The responsibility of the public servant
is to be obedient to the elected Minister. If this creates an ethical conflict for him, the public
servant has to juggle his loyalties and priorities so that he can rationalise his obedience.
We observe this with immigration policy and ‘Sovereign Borders’ activities under the current
Abbott Government in Australia. All sorts of cruelty and inhumanity can be justified under
the rubric of obedience to the democratically elected Minister. The public servant embraces
the politics of subversion (Negri) at their own peril.
As Milgram (1969, p. 1) states,
Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political
purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.
Obedience is a powerful motivator. It requires astounding strength of will to be disobedient,
resisting the need for belonging and acceptance through conformity.
Consider how much we struggle to understand why some people do the things that they
do. For example, why do some give away all they own to join a cult, or commit suicide for a
cause or belief, or maintain a habit or addiction till death despite knowing how much they
are harming themselves?
Human judgement and decision-making are strongly influenced by the power of authority,
obedience, belonging, social acceptance, identity in purpose, and the capacity to maintain
belief in the face of contrary evidence. Many of the decisions people make under these
dynamics are neither rational nor irrational, but rather non-rational (or arational). The
decisions have more to do with social arrangements than with a conscious thinking process.
The work of Deci (1995) and Higgins (2012) demonstrates that behaviour is not motivated
simply by a desire to maximise pleasure or avoid pain (as we might suppose), but rather by
belongingness connected to effectiveness of control, truth and value. When one is able to
distance oneself from the humanity of another, and turn them into an object, then any action
becomes conceivable. If that distancing leads to conflict between connection to authority and
rejection of authority, Milgram shows that most people will give higher value to the former:
connection to authority. Good public servants in obedience to the authority can commit all
kinds of atrocities as the Nazis demonstrated.
An understanding of the nature of cognitive dissonance sheds further light on why it can be
so difficult and distressing to be disobedient.

Cognitive Dissonance
The theory of cognitive dissonance and the model of the cycle involved (Figure 6) have been
discussed in previous books, particularly For the Love of Zero. First defined in the context of
learning by Jean Piaget in 1929, the concept was further developed by Leon Festinger in the
1950s. As compared to ‘consonance’, where ideas or opinions fit neatly together as a consist-
ent whole, dissonance occurs where two or more concepts or opinions do not fit together;
that is, they are inconsistent or one does not follow from another. This produces a sense of
discomfort and the need to reduce or eliminate the dissonance. These attempts may take one
of three forms: the person may try to
1. change one or more of the dissonant beliefs, opinions, or behaviours to remove the
perceived inconsistency
2. acquire new information or beliefs that will increase the existing consonance and thus
reduce the total dissonance, or
3. reduce, forget or deny the importance of those ideas (or evidence) that hold lesser
value to the person.
Festinger argued that, in addition to attempting to reduce the dissonance, the person tends
to actively avoid situations and information which are likely to increase it.
Figure 6. The Cognitive Dissonance Cycle
Commentary on The Secret Meeting
So how do the authoritarian personality, obedience to authority and cognitive dissonance
shed light on the secret meeting? A metaphor of parallel universes might help here: the idea
that people might be in the same room but effectively living in different worlds. Hiebert
(2008 p.15) captures this image nicely:
... below the surface of speech and behaviour are beliefs and values that generate what
is said and done. We become aware of still deeper levels of culture that shape how
beliefs are formed – the assumptions that people make about the nature of things, the
categories in which they think, and the logic that organises these categories into a
coherent understanding of reality. It becomes increasingly clear that people live not in
the same world with different labels attached to it but in radically different conceptual
worlds.
The principal and deputies were acting consistently with their authoritarian personalities
aligning with their authoritarian worldview. They were simply protecting Hezekiah from
those ‘troublemakers’ in the Social Science faculty, who were disobedient, as demonstrated by
their questioning and critical thinking.
Craig’s glowing probation report created dissonance for the school executive, which they
resolved not through learning, but by denial and affirmation of their original worldview. This
was achieved through a distortion of history and an exaggeration of my actions, to create a
story that, for them, justified the victimisation and harsh demands they placed on Craig in
the secret meeting. For the executive Craig’s choice was clear: comply and be obedient to
anything the authorities demand, or lose his job. [Craig discovered later that the executive
had dealt with similar free-thinking staff members in the past through similar threats
and secrecy.]
As an employee under this authoritarian leadership, Craig experienced his own severe
dissonance. He struggled to make sense of the contradictory messages he was being given:
between the one image as a shining new teacher versus the other as the cause of all the
problems in the school. He was willing to be obedient but could not obey demands that
he saw as unethical and wrong. Finally he wanted to fit in because he liked the school as a
whole. This dissonance was not resolved for him until some years after he had left the school,
having had the time to work through all that had happened without the ongoing threat and
abuse hanging over him.
So this story provides one example of how an extreme version of the traditional leadership
model may work in practice. Lets look now at our alternative model that includes leading
and following in a relational dynamic.

Workshop Questions
1. Do a search on leadership and followership on the Internet and see what you find.
2. Do a search for concepts of formularistic leadership such as the ‘seven steps’, ‘five ways’
‘ten characteristics’ of leadership and see what you find. If leadership is only a matter
of doing these things, why do people not follow?
3. Do a search on YouTube for ‘social psychology experiments’ and see what you find.
4. How do the authoritarian personality, obedience and cognitive dissonance work
together to hold people in belief patterns? Do some research on ‘sunk cost’ and explore
what cognitive biases support the nature of these social psychological forces.
5. Raise a controversial subject with someone and try to convince them of the contrary
opinion. For example, discuss the problem of illegal immigration of asylum seekers,
take the contrary view and see if the temperature rises the more you question
assumptions or assert a different view. What is going on?
Transition
In this chapter we have introduced the traditional model of leadership and the hero-myth, a
central element of the traditional view. We have also introduced our ‘secret meeting’ story to
ground the concepts discussed in real life experiences; in particular, the role of the authori-
tarian personality (TAP), obedience and dissonance in the actions of traditional leadership.
As a counter to the dominant voice of the traditional model we have introduced a social-
psychological perspective and the insights it provides into the relationship between leading
and following. The challenge of social psychology is to observe the web of human behaviours
and decisions through social arrangements. When we understand that social arrangements
affect all thinking, decisions and behaviour then we see the nature of leading and following
differently.
If leading is conditioned by following, why are there so few texts and books on the subject?
Why such a dearth on ‘following’ but such excess on heroic models, individualistic charac-
teristics and recipe books on leadership? Is this because leadership in general is understood
as something that doesn’t require knowledge of following? Is leadership something we do to
others rather than with others? As Sinclair (2007) suggests, this is the ‘seduction’ of leader-
ship that is neither liberating nor illuminating.
Another gap in the discourse on leadership is published work on ethics. The silence on
this topic is astounding. Is the leadership discourse perhaps so fixated on what it can do to
others that the ‘other’ becomes dehumanised as an object of leadership? A social psychology
focus does two things: it puts the emphasis back on following and the social arrangements
associated with leading others as subjects, and it shines a light on the nature of relationship
between followers and leaders. So before we have a close look at following, we will cast a
spotlight on the issue of leadership and ethics.
CHAPTER 2
Ethics in Leadership 2
What does it profit a person if they gain the whole world but lose their own
soul? - Jesus
Virtues are not ideas. They are practices that must be learned. - Riggio
The Health Services Union and Corruption in High Places

In April 2009 the Sydney Morning Herald broke the news of improper use of funds
in the Health Services Union (HSUE) East branch. The HSUE was investigated
following actions by whistleblower Kathy Jackson (<http://www.smh.com.au/
federal-politics/political-news/damning-report-of-misuse-of-funds-in-health-union-
20120316-1vauc.html>).
The Health Services Union (HSU) was officially formed in 1991 by the amalgama-
tion of the Hospital Employees’ Federation (HEF) and the Health and Research
Employees Association (HREA). The specialist trade union had around 70,000
members working in all areas of healthcare and represented some of the poorest
employees in the Australian workforce. The HSUE was formed in 2010 following
several years of factional infighting.
Key players in the unfolding corruption scandal were Craig Thomson (who by this
time was a member of federal parliament) and Michael Williamson. They had respec-
tively held the positions of National Secretary and National President, the highest
offices in the union.
Following regulatory and administrative investigations and criminal trials, on 18
February 2014 Craig Thomson was found guilty of theft and of defrauding the HSU.
He was subsequently sentenced to twelve months imprisonment, with nine months
suspended over two years.
In October 2013, Michael Williamson pleaded guilty to two charges of fraud totalling
nearly A$1 million, one charge of fabricating invoices and another of recruiting others
Chapter 2: Ethics In Leadership 23

to hinder a police investigation. An earlier independent report showed that companies
associated with Williamson and his family had allegedly fraudulently received more
than $5 million from HSUE in the period from 2006 to 2011. In the NSW District
Court in March 2014, Williamson was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years of impris-
onment, with a non-parole period of five years.
The HSUE affair tormented the Gillard and Rudd governments, as Craig Thomson
held a crucial vote in the House of Representatives. The scandal dragged on for years
in the courts and the media, drawing continued attention to corruption in high places
and the lack of ethics in leadership discourse. The notion of entitlement and cor-
ruption in unionism in particular became a recurring theme for management during
this period.
In April 2012 the Australian Council of Trade Unions voted to suspend the member-
ship of the HSU on the basis of corruption.
The HSUE affair raises the importance of ethical practice in leadership. It is a truism
that corruption and unethical practice demonstrate a lack of leadership. This is seen
time and time again from small scale practices in the office and on site, to mega-scale
lack of ethics on the world stage such as by Enron (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Enron_scandal>) or in Australia by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corrup-
tion (ICAC) Obeid scandal (<http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/icac-inquiry-
finds-corrupt-conduct-by-former-nsw-labor-figures-eddie-obeid-and-ian-macdonald/
story-fni0cx12-1226688617206>).
Victims of Abuse in The Australian Defence Force

At the time of writing this book the scandal of unethical conduct within the Australian
Defence Force Academy (ADFA) was surfacing again. After many years of abuse across
the services, the launch of numerous enquiries (the latest being the DLA Piper Enquiry
2013), development of training in ethical conduct, changes to operations, the establishment
of the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce, yet another call for an enquiry into the ADF
echos across the media (<http://www.news.com.au/national/four-corners-airs-stories-of-
former-female-adfa-cadets-who-claim-they-were-raped-sexually-abused-or-denigrated/
story-fncynjr2-1226948755192>). According to a Four Corners investigation perpetrators
of abuse remain in the ADF. The comments of an independent and anonymous website set
up by a victim reflecting on the DLA Piper enquiry, entitled ‘Zero Tolerance - Zero Results’
(<http://www.adfabuse.com/Zero_Tolerance_-_Zero_Results.html>) are worth noting:
One of the supposed big wins coming out of the DLA Piper Report was the all
seeing, all singing all dancing ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’
As an elector, I really wish Defence would treat us with respect and assume we have
some intelligence.
I am sure you feel the same way.
The problem has never been an issue of having policy or law to prevent torture
and abuse.
The various discipline Acts (with the full authority of Parliament), the various Queens
Regulations And Instructions authorised by those and other Acts, and the various
Ship and Captain Standing Orders always said that unlawful torture and abuse would
not be tolerated and subject to severe disciplinary consequences.
We don’t need more paper warfare, we just need the law, regulations and orders
already in place actually enforced. What we need is for the senior officers of the ADF
to uphold those laws – not generate more policies.
If they cannot enforce the law as mandated by Parliament what hope is there for
enforcing a mere policy. Indeed after its release more scandals keep coming out. Please
don’t insult our intelligence. From all the hype and money they have spent on it, you
would think they were Moses coming out with the Ten Commandments.
It would seem that the senior officers of the ADF are armchair generals better at
executing a well written memo than displaying true leadership and commitment to
the law.
The author then refers the reader to the defence force website (< http://www.defence.gov.au/
fr/frpublications.htm>), continuing:
Try and download “A Guide To Fair Leadership And Discipline In The Australian
Defence Force ... as of 20 June 2012, it won’t open because it is corrupt. I think that
says something about the senior Management (I won’t demean the word by calling
them Leaders) of the ADF’s true position on the matter
Look at the Sexual Offence Management Guide issued 1/4/2004 – It has been
withdrawn. Look at “Management And Reporting Of Unacceptable Behaviour”
21.The complainant has a responsibility to:
a.where practicable, attempt self-resolution at the lowest appropriate level in the circum-
stances (refer to annex E); and
b.if they make a complaint, to state clearly they have an unacceptable behaviour
complaint, and provide a full, fair and honest account of the incident(s), include any
supporting information and identify the outcome they seek to achieve.
Those who have been through Torture and Abuse have seen that one before and have
only received the response what’s your problem?
We then get further torture and abuse for our error of trusting the more senior
managers (not leaders)
I believe the latin phrase ... res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself ) says it all.
As electors we should not accept this and approach our elected representatives to
address this problem.

We can ‘feel’ in this discourse the desperation about leadership without ethics. Punishment
of the victim or the whistleblower is the result of competing ethics of loyalty to the brand,
against that of mutuality and reciprocation. It is here in the example of the ADF that we see
the quality of leading demonstrated by followers, and a lack of ethics demonstrating that the
leadership are not leading. Add to this the farcical nature of the discourse of ‘zero harm’, and
the pain and torment of the victim becomes even more acute.
From our personal experience and what we have witnessed in organisations, the whistle-
blower is always punished regardless of espoused values or policy.
A Social Psychology of Ethics in Leading

There can be no real discussion of the social psychology of leading in risk without an under-
standing of discourse and culture. Discourse and culture are containers for the words and
language used in conversation and dialogue. One can learn about the discourse in an area of
life through the words and actions in use: by what is not said and done, as much as by what
is said and done. Our language and discourse in leading and risk indicate what inner values
drive our conscious living.
Our inner values are shaped by both genetic and environmental influences over time. Values
are essential for providing meaning and purpose in living. Values embedded in discourse
exhibit social or antisocial behaviour. Further, differing values activate different structures
within the brain (Newberg and Waldman, 2012, p. 112) and different cultural values activate
different areas of the visual cortex. Therefore, brain structure and neurological mapping con-
tribute to differing worldviews. Newberg and Waldman (2012, p. 17ff ) argue that the actual
words we use shape the neural mapping of our brain so much that fearful words, negative
words and sceptical discourse structure neural pathways that normalise a certain worldview.
The authors argue (2012, p. 197ff ) that without some sense of ‘neural resonance’ people of
varying neural structures will neither understand nor be able to empathise with each other.
This is an example of collective coherence, where this neural resonance helps a group cohere
around common values, while creating a boundary which excludes others.
This is why the discourse of absolutes and perfectionism embedded in the ideology of ‘zero’
matters, and why the discourse of zero is incompatible with a discourse about leading.
An ideology that understands its own success by the absence of harm, rather than what it
positively creates, will wire the neural networks of the brain to normalise negativity, scepti-
cism and cynicism. The hero myth embedded in the discourse of fallibility-denial seeks
perfectionist leadership and promotes the fear of uncertainty. So when a leadership projects
perfectionism in language and discourse in the tradition of the hero myth, the leaders them-
selves are found wanting by the followers. Perfectionism and no mistakes are expected of
the followers but are not expected of the leader. When this contradiction becomes apparent
to the followers, the leader is rejected and a new hero is sought. In that state of hiatus, the
dissenters, middle managers and whistleblowers become the temporary leaders. It is in
this moment that the mental maps of the followers change. The hero they elected or once
admired is now rejected as a fraud and is demonised. The followers then seek a new hero yet
hold on to the old mental map.
Echoing the work of Newberg and Waldman, Klein (2003, p. 147) calls worldviews
‘mental maps’:
If you make one mistake in building your mental map of where you are, it can quickly
compound as you explain away other anomalies to make them consistent with your
original erroneous belief.
As an example, Perrow (Normal Accidents, 1999) shows how people actively explain away
inconvenient data. Klein refers to ‘pattern recognition’ as a way of describing decision-
making without deliberative analysis; this he says is the basis of ‘intuition’. In other words,
humans create heuristics through experience and discourse over time, so that they can
recognise patterns arationally, and these prime decision-making. Human mental models
and values are the foundation of arational decision-making and when these are developed
in groups the collective coherence between members reinforces the decision-making of
individuals.
When leadership discourse is exposed as being opposed to the coherence of the collective
community, it is rejected by followers. Antisocial values cannot create a pro-social collec-
tive. This is why hero discourse that lacks the values of learning, compassion and justice will
always unravel. Without the language of trust, empathy and compassion the hero leader
will eventually be deposed by followers. Nothing is more destructive to leadership than the
projection of the ego-self over the well-being of the community. The intrinsic values that
followers desire in leadership are happiness, fulfilment, learning, care and kindness. A social
psychology of leadership understands that the creation of social-psychological arrangements
that foster these values is the key to meaningful relationship and the management of risk.
All ethics are social and relational; something is unethical because it offends the nature
of human mutuality and respect for others. When people focus on ‘codes’ and ‘principles’
of ethics, they tend to try to turn ethics into a mechanical, forensic activity. This legalistic
approach to ethics may appeal to some, but in reality ethics are contextual, situational
and relational. The notion of ‘absolute’ ethics seeks a formula for relationships that fits all
occasions, and denies the idea of ethics as communal rather than individualistic. We learn to
be ethical because of mutuality and togetherness. The violation of an ‘other’ is fundamentally
a violation of self, of what it is to be human. This is the foundation of a social psychology
of ethical leadership. Unless one is connected to followers and understands the experience
of following, one will be content to ‘lord’ it over others rather than see leading as a mutual
activity. Just as there is no individual, only I-thou (Buber), so there is no individual leader-
ship, but only leading-following. Perhaps the model for the I-Thou rubric is ‘do unto others
as you would have them do unto you’ (The Bible, Luke 6:21). The principle ethic for a social
psychology of risk is reciprocation and mutuality. This is why communication, listening, col-
laboration, observation and ‘everything has significance’ matters in leadership and the social
psychology of risk.
When someone exploits another, abuses another or violates another, they demonstrate a
lack of connection with themselves in the image of an ‘other’. This is when the absence of
mutuality and reciprocation are evident, when the leading is out of touch with following.
This is when unethical conduct most often results.

Waiting in the Transit Lounge (Rob)
On two occasions when I served in the Public Service I witnessed the extreme
psychological torment of two people. Despite all manner of Codes of Ethics, Public
Service values and language espousing protection for whistleblowers, these two people
each were nearly destroyed by the psychological victimisation, ‘game playing’ and
tactics of secret destruction by senior managers. One could certainly not attribute the
word ‘leader’ to those who undertook these savage tactics.
The first public servant we shall call Bruce. I had known Bruce for five years during
my time working at Galilee, a school for disadvantaged youth. Bruce had served as
a liaison officer to Galilee and had demonstrated his impeccable support for the
students in the program. Although not said explicitly, I could tell that Bruce was
a person of significant Christian conviction, with a profound personal moral sense
of compassion and empathy for at-risk young people. On many occasions Bruce
‘educated’ me about the Public Service system (before I entered it myself ), helping
me navigate the maze of obstacles and processes in order to access funding and obtain
registration. Bruce had worked in the Education Department for thirty years and was
highly experienced in Public Service values, procedures, policy and protocols. In many
respects the clandestine strategies of management to persecute him was made worse
by this knowledge.
After thirty years Bruce made the mistake of contesting an unethical practice by man-
agement. Rather than discipline Bruce the strategy was to place him in the ‘transit
lounge’. The ‘transit lounge’ is a place in the public service where you are robbed of
meaning by having no work to do, no purpose to achieve, and no relationships to
engage with. The transit lounge need not be physical, but is a place of nothingness,
isolation and purposelessness. In Bruce’s case he was promoted to a cubicle in the
basement to undertake research. When I visited Bruce on one occasion he was close
to a breakdown, heavily medicated and acutely depressed. The power of isolation,
loneliness and purposelessness is far more destructive than a straightforward sacking.
It is often prolonged, invisible and deeply soul-destroying. Not long after my visit,
Bruce cut his losses and resigned, the outcome the Department was looking for. In
the end the personal cost was not worth the moral principle. Since leaving, and after a
prolonged battle with paranoia, Bruce began to recover and is now back to normal.
The second public servant I will call ‘Edward’. Edward was relatively new to the public
service but had over thirty years in the private sector and had run a number of his
own businesses very successfully. Edward had had a number of life changes, including
a divorce, and decided to accept a position in the public service in the Department
of Corrections. Things went well for a few years until Edward witnessed first hand
corrupt behaviour of superiors (trading off favours with people in custody). Edward
became a whistleblower, believing in good faith that if he presented the truth he
would be respected. He experienced the opposite.
The response began with delay and secrecy, with executive meetings held behind
closed doors (a lack of transparency in management is a sure-fire signal of non-lead-
ership). Then Edward found himself transported to the ‘transit lounge’, this time not
a physical place, but more a psychological isolation. Next came trumped-up ‘concerns’
about Edward, and meetings during which he faced accusations and incriminations
of not being a ‘team player’. Edward became paranoid, depressed and deeply disil-
lusioned with the lack of justice. This is the common story for people who become
leaders as whistleblowers.
The strategic destruction of a person by executives has no paper trail, no procedures or
definitive process, but it always seems to result in the creation of a transit lounge, where the
invisible dynamics of human destruction take place. Despite espoused values, new values
are substituted in an ethic of ‘club protection’, ‘look after your mates’ and ‘demonise the
whistleblower’.
Through my experience in the Public Service, I learned that ‘House of Cards’, ‘Yes Minister’
and ‘The Hollow Men’ were pretty accurate when it came to depicting a paradigm of non-
leadership. Looking at the experiences of whistleblowers, be it in the HSUE, the ADF or
the Australian Public Service, it also becomes clear that whistleblowing is not perceived as
leadership. And yet, whistleblowing only begins when those who should be leading cease to
do so. No wonder there is so little in the market on ethics in leading.
The Secret Transit Lounge (Craig)

The secret meeting did not remain secret for long. One of the deputies had inadvert-
ently left the strategy for the meeting on the school’s main photocopier. When an
administrative staffer found it there, she was so shocked by its contents that she
put a copy in each staff member’s pigeon hole. This created a new problem for the
executive leadership. In the past they had successfully silenced dissent from other staff
members by the same tactics of threats behind closed doors that they were now using
on me, managing to keep the whole affair secret (as I was now discovering through
approaches by a number of people on staff ). Now that their actions had been publicly
exposed, would they change their approach?
Not even slightly. They increased their efforts to clamp down on any perceived
rebellion or disobedience on my part to the extent that I was forced to threaten legal
action and bring in the union. At one meeting the union’s lawyer identified various
breaches of the law, but the principal responded that the school’s executive were ‘above
the law’ and had the right to respond as they had. The lawyer later told me that he had
never met a group so out of touch with reality, and that it was like talking to someone
from the middle ages. Here was another example of parallel worlds operating within
the one organisation.
So how did the leadership deal with the ongoing problem of my rebellion? They
couldn’t sack me, but they could try to setup a situation which would be unlivable. I
was made an ongoing relief teacher. This did not seem so bad, but they would then
wait until I arrived on any given morning and suddenly change my designated classes.
Any request to immediately withdraw to prepare material for the new classes was
denied, and I was forced to remain at the daily before-school staff meeting.

Any questions I raised about this process were deemed inappropriate as they related
to the confidential decisions of the executive and were none of my concern. I was
told to remain silent. Thus I was forced to live in a perpetual transit lounge. My only
means of expressing my frustration was to whistle the theme from ‘The Odd Couple’,
reminding me that my world and the world of the executive could never live easily
together. One deputy realised this was some form of protest, but never did figure
it out.
So, why does this sort of thing continue to happen what is the leadership thinking behind
creating transit lounge situations?
Violence: A Test of Ethical Method

How violence is treated in organisations provides a useful case study on ethics and leadership
A guide on work-related violence from the South Australian regulator (<http://www.
safework.sa.gov.au/uploaded_files/WorkRelatedViolence.pdf>) makes for interesting
reading. Unfortunately, the guide doesn’t really get to the heart of what violence is about.
This is so often the case when regulators view the world of risk through a binary prism
or paradigm. Information is presented, masquerading as helpful guidance, but so laced
with concerns about legalities that it results merely in more policies and systems. Then in
attempting to map out the minutia of possibilities, the regulator floods the sector with a
more mechanistic, rather than humanistic, strategy to manage something. This is not to say
that some parts of the guide are not helpful, but rather that we must become more holistic in
how we address risk and or we will continue to get bogged down in a ‘regulator-only’ vision
of the world.
SafetyCulture OHS News (<http://content.safetyculture.com.au/news/>) promotes the
guide, stating, ‘there are two types of work-related violence’. The assumption in this binary
statement totally removes any chance of a sophisticated, holistic discussion on the issue.
The guide adopts a narrow definition of violence (which is never actually made explicit)
and provides no sense of a holistic understanding of the fundamental ethical problem that
violence poses to leadership ‘A Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking’ (PCBU). In
the end a forensic worldview enables the delusion of objectivity, but it disables leadership.
It doesn’t take long in using this guide before the focus is taken off subjects and placed
completely on objects, perpetuating further the mythology around hazards and controls.
With the guide’s narrow definition of violence, such serious issues as bullying, abuse, dis-
crimination and sociopathy get no mention. This is how binary and forensic definitions let
poor thinking off the hook. Rather than focus on personhood, we now focus on activity
and regulation. The trouble is, when one gets to court, violence is defined subjectively rather
than objectively; it is always expressed socially and contextually. The guide has checklists,
an assessment tool and recommendations for developing workplace policy. In this way the
attention of the reader is focused on end points, not starting points (such as dispositions and
orientation, belief, attitudes and values). Perhaps policy development should begin with the
fundamental values of the organisation and people. The real driver of violence is cultural,
not mechanical.
Violence is not just about activity. It is fundamentally about the ‘violation’ of what it means
to be human and a person (‘violate’ and ‘violence’ share a common derivative); where the
ethical principles of mutuality and reciprocation are breached. When one violates what it
means to live in community, humanising others and practising empathy and compassion,
then violent acts can easily follow. For instance, one can focus on abusive behaviour to
women, or examine the essential misogyny that drives it. The social psychology of leading in
risk doesn’t just focus on actions, but focuses first on sources, dispositions, trajectories and
orientations. Therefore, when developing a policy on dealing with violence, it would make
sense to discuss who or what is being violated, rather than leaping straight to particular
actions. If we start with some core values, then when they are violated we can better judge
what violence is. As long as we omit discussion of underlying dispositions (culture) and
focus only on acts and hazards we won’t shift the real cultural discourse on violence. The
mechanistic worldview may make for easier prosecution, but it disables ownership, adapt-
ability in judgement, leading and contextual decision-making.
Workshop Questions
1. Investigate media coverage of a current scandal or corruption. What are the indicators
of a lack of leadership? What are the fundamental ethical tensions in the story?
2. What do the ideas of reciprocation and mutuality mean to you? How might this
change the way you lead others?
3. Find an example of leadership in the hero model. What does this model offer? How
are followers and social arrangements excluded?
4. Consider the social psychology model of the discerning self. How might this be
applied to the leading-following discourse in your workplace?
5. There are a range of topics that ‘test’ ethical methods and models of the self. How does
your model of leading and ethics bring into focus such things as compassion, suffering
and identity with others?
Transition
As we move into the next section of the book we shift attention from traditional leader-
ship to following. In many ways focusing on following draws attention to the everyday
and community. Leading in risk requires an understanding of the idea of the catching
community, as was discussed in book three, Real Risk: Human Discerning and Risk. The leader
in risk understands the dilemma and stress of uncertainty, the need for scaffolding and the
fulcrum of learning in the human journey. Leading that is disconnected from ethics, learning
and imagination has no vision, and is not leadership. Leading that is risk averse and preoc-
cupied with absolutes (e.g. zero goals) cannot develop empathy with following. Leading that
does not understand the dynamic of reciprocation and mutuality can neither follow nor lead.

SECTION
TWO
The Power of Following in
Following - Leading
CHAPTER 3
A Focus on Following 3
Followers manifest leadership the way the dancers manifest the dance - Riggio.
The ways in which followers and leaders relate depend on the contexts within
which they are embedded - Kellerman
Football Following (Rob)

Joy is a great friend and a one-eyed supporter of Carlton Aussie Rules Football Club.
I worked with Joy at Hezekiah where for many years she had been an administrative
assistant. When you visit Joy’s house, you push the doorbell and it plays the club tune,
‘We are the navy blues, We are the old dark navy blues, We’re the team that never lets
you down, We’re the only team old Carlton knows.’ Walking into Joy’s lounge, dining
and family rooms, you are overwhelmed by tributes to Carlton: the walls are adorned
with framed pictures of Carlton Premiership teams and other memorabilia. If you
share a meal with the family, the dinner might be served on Carlton plates, and drinks
in Carlton mugs. Joy can tell you anything about Carlton history, her head a virtual
Wikipedia of facts, players and memories.
No one coerced Joy into following Carlton, and her enthusiasm is infectious. When
Joy meets new people, one of the first things they learn about her is that she supports
Carlton. This immediately endears her to other Carlton followers, and she doesn’t
care what this identity means to others (a good illustration of classic in-group and
out-group identification).
I have supported the Adelaide Crows since their inception into the League in 1990.
In comparison, Carlton entered the League in 1897 and is equal highest winner of
Premierships in the League. Joy’s husband, Dave, follows Collingwood, a team with
an equally long history. The rivalry between these two clubs is legendary (<http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton%E2%80%93Collingwood_AFL_rivalry> gives
more detail).
Some of my greatest experiences with Joy are going around to her place to watch a
football game together. When watching football with Joy, you can barrack for another
team (but not too loudly and perhaps not at all if Carlton are not doing well). Joy
Chapter 3: A Focus On Following 35

will talk and shout at the television, abuse umpires and encourage players, while Dave
carefully measures his words and allow silence to express his thoughts.
One of the interesting things about football following is that there is no visible
leader. The leader is not the coach, the owners, the sponsors or the board, but rather
‘the team’. As for the team, they in turn are inspired by the followers. Games can be
won and lost on the power of the followers. Sport is a wonderful reflection about the
psyche of following.
Following
In order to understand following we need to consider the relationship between the roots of
self-categorisation, social influence and social power. Kellerman (2008, p. xix) in Follower-
ship defines followers in terms of rank:
Followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their
superiors and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line.
However, followers can also be defined by their behaviour; they ‘go along’ with what
someone else espouses and expects. Unfortunately, as Kellerman demonstrates, the ‘leader-
ship industry’ has perpetuated two myths: that leaders are more important than followers,
and that leadership can be ‘taught’. Kellerman makes clear that focusing primarily on leaders
has distorted our perceptions of power, identity, authority and influence. Kellerman discusses
several examples where superiors follow and subordinates lead: instances of dissenters,
whistleblowers, and middle managers.
The concept of ‘dissent’ is most aligned with the history of religious disagreement. Through-
out history those who dared to challenge religious orthodoxy have been known as ‘dissent-
ers’. Dissenters have also been known as ‘non-conformists’, and both terms convey political
meaning as well as an imbalance in power. A study of dissent, like a study of cults, provides a
unique perspective on the nature of following.
Utopia and Dissent in South Australia (1829-1857)

Historian Douglas Pike (1967), in Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829-1857 tells
the fascinating story of the foundation of the state of South Australia. The idea of South
Australia was born at the height of religious reform in Europe in the early 1800s. A growing
number of dissenting religious groups had emerged, and were struggling to fit into the
dominant religious and political tradition of the European culture. These religious dissenters
longed for a ‘utopia’ where they would be free to live out their own beliefs without oppres-
sion from the state. The very early founding of South Australia provided the ideal opportu-
nity to create such a utopia.
Driven largely by the energy
and entrepreneurialism of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, but fed also by the ideas of a number
of other visionaries (including Torrens, Gouger, Whitmore, Hutt, Bacon and Angas), in
many ways the foundation of South Australia was a social, economic and political experi-
ment. Wakefield’s vision included the concept of a ‘perfect pattern of society laid up in the
heavens’. He was keen to attract the middle classes to the idea of colonisation, prophesying
‘no adoration of wealth, no oppression of the poor, no reason for political dissent’. In the end,
Wakefield did little more than equate prudence with naked self-interest.
South Australian land sales and emigration were managed in England through what was
known as systematic colonisation. Young emigrants between the ages of fifteen and thirty
were carefully selected, and a fixed price was placed on land.
Of course, when they landed and settled, despite all design and legislative intent back in
England, there was no paradise for dissenters. In less than three years a police force was
needed. This seems to be the historical pattern: every endeavour to create utopia on Earth
has failed.
In its early years South Australia had the most sects and sectarian religions of any colony in
the world. The period following the establishment of a ruling Council in 1836 was char-
acterised by factionalism and conflicting political and economic interests both in Adelaide
and back in England. However, in spite of this there was a sense of cooperation between the
clergy, particularly in the areas of temperance and education.
The first Legislative Council was opened on 10 August 1851 and boasted every elected
member as a religious dissenter. However, it didn’t take long before gold was discovered in
the eastern states and, with the influx of convict descendants and an exodus of dissenters,
life in South Australia changed rapidly and the dream of a paradise of dissent and utopia
dissipated completely.
The purpose of this brief recount of early South Australian history is to present two key
concepts: utopia and dissent. Dissenters are a threat to the vested interests and orthodoxy
of those in power. They tend to be tolerated, legislated against or victimised. Through an
understanding of the social psychology of leadership in risk, we see that those who disagree
with risk orthodoxy are viewed as such dissenters.
Whistleblowers
It is our experience (personally and through observing others) that whistleblowers are
always worse off for the experience, at least in the short term. But while the initial anguish
is hard to bear, sometimes the punishing organisation is doing the whistleblower a favour,
by making clear their disconnect and the need to leave a toxic environment. Also, often the
organisation benefits, the whistleblowing ushering in a new stage in organisational maturity
and development. Later comes recovery, as resilience develops and people move on.
Although the whistleblower has the rank of a follower, he does not behave like one. In
whistleblowing, an individual or faction is acting against the group, manager or organisa-
tion. On most occasions this action is directed against unethical, corrupt and authoritarian
behaviour or ‘bad leadership’. Whistleblowers demonstrate that, as opposed to conventional
wisdom on leadership, followers are just as important as leaders.

Essential to the role of the whistleblower-as-leader is an understanding of the politics of
subversion. To understand this further, the reader will find the works of Negri, Ellul, Yoder,
Postman and Weingartner, Beilenson and post-structuralist feminist writers helpful.
Visionary Middle Managers

One of the first things we learn from studies in complexity (Axelrod, Byrne) and wicked
problems (Ashhurst 2012; Conklin 2006; Brown 2010; Reali 2010) is that human decision-
making is often messy. This realisation is one of the signs of maturity in leadership. When it
comes to human dimensions of organising, it is often the people ‘in the middle’ who enact
decisions. The sheer disconnect between people at different levels due to issues in communi-
cation, articulation, translation and organisational size, often ensures that decision-making
flow is disjointed, messy and complex. Those who are in the middle, who have to manage
and lead both up and down, get caught in various roles as followers and leaders. It is the
middle manager who best understands that team accomplishments cannot be solely attrib-
uted to the team leader. Hackman (2002) has written about this and labelled the tendency to
misattribute leadership success to the hero myth as ‘fundamental leader attribution error’.
Managing the In-between (dissolving the line of opacity)

One of the great challenges for leaders is to be able to relinquish power to, and receive power
from, another. This is not helped when the most dominant model of leadership discourse
is the hero myth with its strong ‘line of opacity’ between the leader and the followers; that
is, the followers see only a limited amount of what goes on in the realm of the leader. The
capacity to relinquish and receive power is one of the key messages from Max De Pree in his
books Leadership Jazz, Leadership is an Art and Leading Without Power. Previously CEO of
Herman Miller, one of the most successful companies in the USA, De Pree is also founder
of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership. The giving and receiving of power is critical if
a leader wishes to lead through engagement with followers. The leading-following dynamic
understands that sometimes followers lead. This doesn’t mean the manager or CEO has lost
their job. Rather, as Weick suggests, the leader knows how to defer to expertise, focus on the
front line (where all the risk is), and ‘enact’ leadership into being.
What De Pree and Weick show is that the ‘hoarding’ of power and ‘lording’ of power are
critical for the traditional leadership model. Resistance of whistleblowers, denial of dissenters
and choking of middle managers simply reinforces the nature of such power and makes the
manager look less transparent, more threatened and more insecure. In contrast, as De Pree
suggests in Leadership Jazz, in orchestras occasionally different instruments take the lead.
Shared leadership makes great music.
Stuarte Kerdel - Standing Back and Leading (Rob)

In the various educational environments in which I have worked, I have always
enjoyed creativity in teaching and the facilitation of learning. In previous books I
have discussed writing musicals for the teaching of history, and a range of innovative
and creative ways of engaging, motivating and stimulating enthusiasm in learning. I
still enjoy doing creative, imaginative and innovative things in learning. For example,
I have developed a range of experiential learning activities to assist the teaching of
‘communicating to the unconscious’ in the Post Graduate Program at the Australian
Catholic University.
Throughout my working life, I have worked under a range of managers. Some were
insecure in managing and threatened by a creative staff member, where others were
empowered by my creativity and allowed it to flourish. One person who stands out in
memory as a real leader (and who has become a life-long friend) is Stuarte Kerdel.
From day one of working with Stuarte, I knew I had met a real leader. Stuarte knew
that one can lead from behind as much as in front. It wasn’t long after meeting him
that he began calling me ‘the rascal’ or ‘the scoundrel’, affectionate terms to express
his perception of my ability to create dissonance in others. Stuarte understands that
competing and fighting with others is not leading. In comparison, his style is to get
alongside others, counselling and creating warmth. Most people who have worked
with Stuarte remember him fondly years later.
I remember how Stuarte disciplined people. He was the master of creating ownership.
He would listen, understand and connect, and people would leave his office thankful
that they had decided on their own course of disciplinary action. I remember often
approaching Stuarte with some bright imaginative idea and later, through his reflec-
tion, walking out with a refined idea that I owned, but which was somehow his. I
think on many occasions Stuarte saved me from myself. These days when we work in
business together he often likes to call ‘the scoundrel’ for some challenging questions
and debate.
In addition to Stuarte, I could list a dozen people I have worked with who under-
stood servant leading, and the power of engaging others, motivating thinking and
ownership. In contrast, there have been many others in managerial positions whom I
remember clearly as non-leaders. Their embodiment of the hero leader, self-centred
and power hungry, never achieved anything through me. They did not inspire me to
serve them, follow them or do anything for them. In the end I became indifferent to
them and often left the organisation because of them.
Understanding Power
Another key to understanding the following-leading dynamic is to appreciate the nature
of power relations. Like any parent of a teenager, those who understand following-leading
know that overpowering others rarely results in ownership. People may do things for
you because they have to, but such heartless following is of little value. It is those who
do things for the leader because ‘they want to’, that empower the leader and enable him
or her to flourish. Thus, it is often in the giving away of power that the leader becomes
truly empowered.
The following list shows various forms of power available to managers. The list is not
intended to present a preferential ranking, as many of these styles may have legitimacy at
times depending on the specific social psychological situation.

Table 2. Understanding Power
Types of Power Examples

Reward Recognition, promotion, pay-off
Coercive Punishment, criticism, fear
Legitimate Hierarchy of control, formal authority, occupational
Referent Common purpose, respect, obligation
Expert Knowledge, technical skill, capabilities
Relational Intimacy, bonding, trust, conferring power to others
Charismatic Personal presence, passion, confidence
Indifference Disaffection
Irrational Tantrum
Transactional Economic exchange as parent-adult-child
The Secret Sermon (Rob)

To help understand the list let’s revisit our story of parallel worlds at Hezekiah School.
As was discussed in The Secret Meeting (p. ‘X’), Hezekiah is a fundamentalist
Christian school run by a parent-controlled council. Getting onto the council was
akin to getting a nomination for a political party; the council was stacked. One could
only be appointed on the recommendation and majority support of the council itself.
It was a self-perpetuating body, moderated and manipulated by itself. The Chair was
usually someone with a prominent position in another organisation, and the body
of the membership comprised people who might be useful to the school, such as a
builder, lawyer or businessman.
Some might wonder why Craig and I would want to work in a school such as
Hezekiah, but the politics of the school are not transparent. On the surface it can
seem like a small school with a caring population and a preparedness to be innovative
in learning, but the deeper strategies are kept confidential (secret) and only revealed to
those in privileged positions.
Like most religious schools, Hezekiah had a form of ongoing religious cultural devel-
opment for staff, a weekly ‘devotional’ session. Staff would meet early in the morning,
there would be a thought shared by a staff member, as well as singing and prayer.
Following the crisis of the exposure of the Secret Meeting, the Chair of the council,
whom I shall call Phipps, a scientist with an Australian Government science agency,
decided to ‘share’ his view on authority, at one of the devotional sessions. It was
unusual for the council Chair to speak at the session, but the perceived crisis of
disobedience was playing out in the school’s culture, and the council had little idea of
how to deal with it. The reason for this sermon was not made public, but its content
clearly came from traditional leadership authority.
The passage Phipps decided to talk to the staff group about was from a letter written
by the Apostle Paul, a segment known as ‘The Triumphal Procession’ (2 Corinthians 2:
12-17). Unfortunately, neither the executive nor Phipps had any training, knowledge
or expertise in theology. Like most Christian fundamentalists they attribute a sim-
plistic, superficial meaning to the text of the Bible, and understand very little about
hermeneutics (the study of interpreting texts) or ancient languages (in this case,
Greek). Not a wise choice by Phipps, as I do have extensive theological experience and
expertise.
Phipps used the opportunity to preach authoritarianism from the text (sadly for
Phipps, this is not the meaning of the passage, indeed, it is the opposite). Phipps
would often naively claim that Christians ‘stood under the teaching of scripture’ as
if the Bible was some objective instrument. On this occasion he ranted on about
obedience and authority for forty minutes, finishing by demanding that the disobedi-
ence in the school cease. He later issued a letter stating that those who were unhappy
at the school should leave.
The following week it was my turn to lead a devotional session, and I decided to
conduct a brief historical account of the same passage showing how the context
supported the opposite view to that espoused by Phipps. So here we were in a
Christian School espousing values of love, community and commitment to the truth
of the Bible, and my session was followed by further victimisation, discipline and
scapegoating. There was no discussion that Phipps had misled others, no acknowl-
edgement that he had manipulated the Bible for his own ends; just punishment for
me because I couldn’t submit to his authority.
( Just for interest, the message of this Bible passage is that after a conquest, Caesar
would follow last in the triumphal procession of the vanquished, not first as Phipps
proposed. The stench of the rotting corpses preceding the entry of Caesar was used by
St Paul to juxtapose this stench with the message of life in Christian following. The
appeal of the Christian message is not in the crusading hero or authority, but in God
made perfect in weakness, incarnate as a child and crucified.)
The idea of being last doesn’t really match the hero myth, which is why many of the books
that advocate servant leadership are presented by people with religious backgrounds (e.g.
Covey, De Pree and Greenleaf ). The message of humility, service and engagement with
followers does not feature highly in the hero myth discourse of leadership literature.
Sinclair (2007, p.75), Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Business School makes the following
comment: ‘In most business analyses of leadership, power is barely discussed. Why has
power been left out of the story of leadership? ... The question of how one finds enough
power to act and do leadership differently seems to me to be at the core of leadership.’
Power in leadership is derived social-psychologically, that is, followers give power to leaders
rather than leaders seizing power. Most of the ‘how to’ books on leadership talk entirely

about what leaders need to do in order to win followers, instead of focusing on a dynamic
that includes both leaders and followers. A key message of this book is that people become
better at leading through reflecting on following as part of a relational dynamic. Wise
leading first understands why one follows others, and then moves to the point of leading
others for their sake, not one’s own.
Secrets, Transparency and Power

Well publicised trials such as the 2014 Australian Royal Commission into Institutional
Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the trial of celebrity Rolf Harris demonstrate the
problem of power, secrecy and a lack of transparency. The metaphor of darkness is also
aligned with secrecy, such that ‘shining a light’ on something carries the meaning of bringing
something into the open and making it visible. It seems that every other day the media
publishes yet another story of corporate corruption, unethical business, sexual exploitation
and abuse of power. Those without power tend to be the most astounded at the lengths to
which the powerful want to operate in secrecy. It is often the whistleblowers that lead, by
bringing corruption and abuse of power out into the open. Those who respect followers lead
through transparency, whereas those who hide in the darkness generally are self-serving and
not, in fact, leading.
Uncle Bob and Uncle Tom (Rob)

In my early twenties I helped with organising, facilitating and directing church
youth camps. I was a young school teacher with skills in music, creative play, games,
sports, arts and drama, and was able to use these skills to deliver active and engaging
programs for the church. Church camps were just endless fun. Getting away for a few
days with dozens of teenagers was a great adventure ground for honing relationships,
romancing and otherwise engaging with peers. It was the place to meet girls, compete
with mates and establish identity. The adults advocated camps for reasons of Christian
fellowship, evangelisation and conversion. There is no doubt about it - the clash of
two cultures was successful. Many young people were converted to Christianity and
walked away from the camp with great memories, some risky experiences and usually
a romantic partner.
In those years the church camp scene was dominated by a handful of people renowned
for their ability to teach and lead. These were highly trusted charismatic people with
substantial followers who endorsed their leader as ‘blessed’. Two such characters were
affectionately known as Uncle Bob and Uncle Tom. I remember running a camp for
Uncle Bob and being reprimanded for playing monopoly (the devil’s game of chance)
and love of money. Later Uncle Tom visited the country area where I was a teacher at
the time and conducted a ‘mission’.
It was in 1982 that I received a strange phone call from one of the senior executives of
my church denomination asking questions about Uncle Bob and Uncle Tom. It turns
out that Bob and Tom had been doing much more than evangelising young people for
thirty years. After a number of accusations of abuse and an internal investigation by
the church, including some confidential interviews conducted by my brother, Bob and
Ted were charged with many counts of sexual abuse, Bob of young boys and Tom of
young girls. Bob and Tom had used the trust and power of position to conduct a secret
‘special love’ of very young boys and girls as a ‘gift’ from God.
I was dumbfounded, even more so when I discovered one of the abused young people
was my closest mate. How could this be? Here these guys were preaching morality
and at the same time abusing others. Held up in positions of trust, they abused that
trust and indulged their evil pleasures in secret. Every good they had been known for,
every motive they presented, was exposed as crap. The trail of injury was extensive, and
the anger, hate and toxicity felt towards both them and God lingers still for many. All
that apparent good work, undone by transparency.
The Sociopath: An Extreme Example of Secrecy and Power

Sociopaths, along with psychopaths (the more extreme form), are able to disassociate
from others, lacking the capacity for empathy or remorse. The sociopath is able to seduce
and attract others, presenting a likeable persona so that they can get what they want. The
foundation of sociopathic behaviour is the ability to manipulate the perception of others
(consciously or unconsciously), build trust, groom and wait for opportunity. Sexual predators
employ this power to use another for their own gratification, while convincing the other that
it was their fault. This makes it unlikely that the victim will tell anyone, thus assuring secrecy.
Through their ability to make others like them, sociopaths gain promotion, often rising to
positions of power and authority. They are experts in being cool, calculated, charming and
versatile, able to manipulate, use and abuse others without remorse, guilt or any sense of
ethical caution. Indeed, the sociopath is skilled at reframing motives and projecting blame
onto others. This is how people like Uncle Bob, Uncle Ted, and Rolf Harris were able to
maintain decades of secret abuse. The constant media parade of abusers in military, religious
and community organisations is the story of gaining confidence, exploiting naivety and trust,
and misusing power.
This is an extreme example of the abuse of power that can occur in the traditional authori-
tarian leadership model. Next, let’s take a closer look at the following-leading dynamic, of
which power awareness is a key factor.
Workshop Questions
1. In what context are you a follower? Describe the characteristics of that experience.
2. In what context are you a leader? Describe the characteristics of that experience.
3. Name some of the tensions between control and ownership? How does the seduction
of measurement assist control?
4. Look at the six cultural qualities of due diligence and describe your personal and
professional development journey to be diligent in the engagement and management
of risk?
5. What are the essentials of ‘risk intelligence’?

Transition
The nature of risk, following-leading and human risk intelligence are thrown into sharp
relief when one looks at the way people follow and lead in cults. Cults show how the
intensity of belief and the intensity of risk clouds judgement and decision-making. The
moment we join cultic space or explore the nature of cults we see the subjectivity of experi-
ence, where rational argument and logical presentation lose their effect. Indeed, when
cognitive dissonance is at work, and a range of cognitive biases and unconscious experiences
drive ‘sunk cost’, rational strategies intensify and deepen commitment.
Whether we like it or not, we all seem to have some experience of cultic following and
addiction. We may be fortunate and not have such experiences in areas that have negative
physical or moral effect such as substance abuse or gambling, but we do know what it’s
like to be intense and blinkered in our following, whether it is for a car brand, a football
team or a relationship. It is a part of being fallible; we often can’t see ourselves as others do
and sometimes we see things that others don’t, all couched in a quest to be right, effective,
comfortable or to belong. In the next chapter we will explore the cult of the Mac (the Apple
Company). We will also revisit the nature of the unconscious in decision-making and the
way we develop false consciousness in belief.
Cultic following is very powerful and is always juxtaposed against ‘the other’. It is in some
ways a form of fundamentalism. The importance of self awareness is critical in the journey
on the edge of a cult. Knowing one is in a cult helps in holding the cult in perspective,
enabling criticism and a holistic sense of reality. Blind cultic following, as has been explored
in previous books, is simply dangerous and destructive. It’s okay to be a Holden fanatic as
long as you understand that other people don’t have to love Holdens. Blind conformity is
often dehumanising and disables dialogue.
CHAPTER 4
Cultic Followership 4
Since leaders are no longer equated with being superior, followers should no
longer be equated with being subordinate - Barbara Kellerman.
Let me pass, I have to follow them, I am their leader - Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre

Augustre 1848
In Chapter 1 we saw how a sole focus on leadership, the traditional leadership model,
can lead to the problems associated with the hero myth. In this chapter we will examine
what happens when following becomes so extreme that followers lose sight of the healthy
dynamic between leading and following. We will call this cultic followership, as a counter-
part to traditional leadership. Like traditional leadership, it is not that everything done in
cultic followership is bad, but the cult-like elements create a trajectory that is destructive of
people, relationships and the capacity to discern risk. To see how cultic followership plays
out, lets look at the rise of the cult of the ‘Mac’.
The ‘Mac’ Cult - A Case Study in Followership

To Apple Macintosh ‘true believers’, Steve Jobs was a demigod. To them, the history of
Jobs, his rise, fall and ‘resurrection’, are the stuff of legend. Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak,
invented Apple Computers out of Job’s parents’ garage in 1976. After success with the
Apple IIe computer, Jobs introduced the Macintosh to the world in 1984, with the help of
Jeff Raskin.
The Macintosh computer (Mac) was the first mass-produced personal computer with a
graphical user interface and a mouse. It entered the market in 1984, carving out a niche
characterised by usability, creativity and style, at a time when IBM’s Personal Computer
(PC) dominated the market because of price and limited alternatives. The Mac share of the
market steadily grew, especially in the areas of education and design. Then Microsoft fought
back by developing its own copy of the Mac user interface, Windows (which was placed
on top of their old DOS interface). In the years of rivalry that ensued, Mac users came to
see themselves as the righteous minority developing their own sense of a purist following,
juxtaposed in identity ‘against’ PCs. As an example, see the ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ advertising
Chapter 4: Cultic Followership 45

campaign (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZSBWbnmGrE>). This kind of identity
formation ‘against the other’ is a characteristic of fundamentalism.
Kahney’s (2004) book The Cult of Mac, captures the cultic characteristics of Job’s followers
(whom, for the purposes of this case study, we have termed the Mac cult). Foundational to
the Mac cult are these themes: struggling against orthodoxy, creativity, innovation, loyalty,
counterculture, changing the world, and in-groupness. Mac devotees understand themselves
as juxtaposed against PC users. In cult-like fashion, a recent advertisement demonstrates
that Apple don’t market a computer, so much as a way of being (<http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=jiyIcz7wUH0>).
The characteristics of the Mac cult were already evident in the 1984 launch of the
Macintosh. Announced to the press in October 1983, followed by an 18-page brochure
included with various magazines in December, the Macintosh was introduced by the now-
famous US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, ‘1984’. It most notably aired
during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on January 22, 1984, and is now considered
a ‘watershed event’ and a ‘masterpiece.’ ‘1984’ used an unnamed heroine to represent the
coming of the Macintosh (indicated by a Picasso-style picture of the computer on her
white tank top) as a means of saving humanity from the ‘conformity’ of IBM’s attempts
to dominate the computer industry. The advertisement alludes to George Orwell’s novel,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, which described a dystopian future ruled by a televised ‘Big Brother’.
By 1990 Apple sales were in a marked decline, partly due to the advent of Windows 3.0.
Despite this decline, Jobs himself maintained a following that was nothing short of amazing.
The annual Apple Macworld Conference became an evangelical event unparalleled in the
business world. Jobs would walk the stage in his black skivvy, mesmerising the fans, many
of whom paid a high price for a seat. Whatever Jobs turned his hand to or took a risk with,
there were adoring fans in trail.
The story of the ‘resurrection’ of Steve Jobs is legendary. Jobs had founded NeXT in 1985,
and eventually resigned from Apple in 1990. In 1997, after the disastrous failure of John
Sculley who had been brought into Apple from Pepsi in 1983, Apple bought NeXT, thus
bringing Jobs triumphantly back to the company he had founded. NeXT was to become the
backbone of the operating systems for the new Macintosh computers and handheld devices.
In 1986 Jobs had founded The Graphics Group, which later came to be known as Pixar.
Pixar is a story of creativity and right timing, making Jobs a fortune when he eventually
sold it to Disney for $7.4 billion in 2006. The story of Pixar resembles that of the Mac, Jobs
using, manipulating, inspiring and influencing creative people to follow him and generate
products and ideas that no one else had considered. As of 2014 Apple holds more than
12,000 patents.
The Think Different campaign (1997) that heralded the revival of the Macintosh is also an
indicator of the cult of Mac. Known as ‘the crazy ones’, the one-minute commercial featured
black-and-white footage of seventeen iconic 20th century personalities, including Albert
Einstein, Bob Dylan, Mahummad Ali and Thomas Edison. The commercial ends with an
image of a young girl opening her eyes, as if making a wish.
By 1998, with its innovative design and Internet focus, the iMac was bringing Apple
back from its near-demise. Jobs was back. In 2001 the first generation iPod was launched,
bringing Apple into the new century as the fastest growing computer company in the world
and, by 2007 with the development of the iPhone, it was the fastest growing telecommuni-
cations company in the world. By the end of Job’s life in October 2011, he had become an
icon in four industries: computing, telecommunications, music and movies.
Job’s charisma was infectious, labeled by Bud Tribble (a member of the original Apple
Macintosh design team) as Job’s ‘reality distortion field’ (RDF). Another Macintosh designer,
Andy Hertzfeld, described the RDF as Jobs ability to convince himself and others to believe
anything and that the impossible was possible.
The dark side of his temperament was also infamous. Siltanen (<http://www.forbes.com/
sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real-story-behind-apples-think-different-campaign/>),
writing about the ‘Think Different’ Campaign conducted in 1997, says:
But I have also read many critical statements about Steve, and I must say I saw and
experienced his tongue lashings and ballistic temper firsthand—directed to several
others and squarely at me. It wasn’t pretty. While I greatly respected Steve for his
remarkable accomplishments and extraordinary passion, I didn’t have much patience
for his often abrasive and condescending personality. It is here, in my opinion, that
Lee Clow deserves a great deal of credit. Lee is more than a creative genius. In
working with Jobs he had the patience of a saint.
Isaacson (2012) describes Jobs as a perfectionist, prone to extreme mood swings marked by
prolonged bouts of anger and depression.
The Mac cult displays all the key elements of a cult: subversion, anti-authoritarianism,
otherness attraction, in-groupness, identity against the ‘other’ (Microsoft and the world in
general) and charismatic leadership. Belk and Tumbat (2005, p.205), defining the nature of
Apple culture and the Cult of Mac, note the presence of
… several key sustaining myths, including a creation myth, a messianic myth, a satanic
myth, and a resurrection myth.
Macintosh followers certainly qualify as ‘true believers’ in the sense that Hoffer (2002)
defines them. Belk and Tumbat (p. 208) comment:
The Mac and its fans constitute the equivalent of a religion. This religion is based
on an origin myth for Apple Computer, heroic and savior legends surrounding its
co-founder and current CEO Steve Jobs, the devout faith of its follower congrega-
tion, their belief in the righteousness of the Macintosh, the existence of one or more
Satanic opponents, Mac believers proselytizing and converting non-believers, and the
hope among cult members that salvation can be achieved by transcending corporate
capitalism. The cult status of many Mac followers is evidenced in a Wired News
web site called “Cult of Mac.” The web site is run by Leander Kahney who has also
published a book, The Cult of Mac, (Kahney 2004, 254–56). There are cult magazines
like MacAddict. And there is a book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan

Deutschman (2000) about Steve Jobs co-founding of Apple. Related Apple products
like the iPod (Levy 2005) and the Newton (Muñiz and Schau 2005), have also been
found to have religious aspects in the eyes of their true believers.
Apple has nourished the corporate mythology that sustains this cult of loyal followers. The
rise and fall and rise again of Steve Jobs also corresponds well with the hero myth, as Belk
and Tumbat (p. 209) comment:
The history of Apple Computer has elements of classic hero myths, with both its
founders and its various computers as the heroes. Steve Jobs’ rise and fall within Apple
Computer is a classic example of the Heroic Adventure Myth as formulated by Joseph
Campbell (1991). According to Campbell (1991), a classic heroic adventure myth like
those of Odysseus, Jason, Christ, or Buddha, consists of these key elements:
1. The call to adventure
2. A helper
3. A wondrous journey
4. Trials
5. More helpers
6. Apotheosis
7. Flight
8. Resurrection, and
9. The boon that restores the world.
These elements seem to characterize Steve Jobs as he is construed in Apple’s corporate

mythology and in the minds of its true believers.
Experiencing Cultic Followership (Rob)

I have been in a few cults in my time, both religious and non-religious. At the time I
didn’t know I was in a cult. For instance, as a child my family’s religious fundamental-
ism was my reality: I was happy and felt very loved, with a huge sense of belonging
and acceptance. It was only as I matured and grew up, and with the help of the right
mentors and the right scaffolding, that I was able to escape from fundamentalism. So
by the time I was introduced to my first Macintosh (by Craig) I was fully aware of the
nature of both fundamentalism and cults.
I wrote my first thesis, for my Masters in Education at Sydney University, in 1985.
The thesis was put together the old way, hand-written and then typed by Robyn,
my sister-in-law. The ‘cut and paste’ was literal, cutting typed text and pasting onto
paper and the shuffling papers on the lounge room floor. My only experience with
computers to this stage was in my first degree in the late 1970s, with simple binary
code etched in pencil on to cards and fed into a huge machine. I had friends in the
early 1980s playing with Microbees, Amiga 1000’s (Commodore), but at that stage no
one was really thinking that these machines were for much more than fun and games.
Good for the tinkering of a few enthusiast nerds.
48 Following & Leading in Risk

In the late 1980s as a school teacher I bought my first computer, an IBM clone 286
running MS DOS. It was agony: all text, code and mathematical, and I never seemed
to get very far. I didn’t know at the time that this machine was invented to battle
the success of the Apple IIe. It wasn’t until I met Craig in 1990 that I heard of the
Macintosh. Like most people, I was sceptical, anchored as I was to my first sunk cost.
However, after seeing what Craig could do on a Mac, I was hooked and bought my
first Macintosh Classic. Once on the new platform I discovered that the thinking
behind this computer was radically different, so graphic in nature and ‘right brained’. I
quickly discovered that I could ‘think different’ on this machine.
Experiencing Cultic Followership (Craig)

I had no experience of computers at all before my first Mac, but I had worked in an
advertising agency producing finished art by physically cutting and pasting on an art
board. Starting University as a mature-aged student in 1986, my first essay contained
ninety footnotes and was laboriously produced on a typewriter. Knowing I couldn’t
continue like this, I quickly realised that I needed a decent word processor. The
problem was that the PCs I had seen seemed as user friendly as a rabid rottweiler.
Then a friend introduced me to the Mac and a small program called WriteNow,
which was designed with essay writing in mind. It was a pleasure to use and seemed
to magically rearrange and number footnotes as I cut and pasted them. That’s right,
I was cutting and pasting again, but this time metaphorically, using a system that
reflected my own physical experience. I was sold, and quickly became an avid user
and advocate of the Mac. I did not remain unfamiliar with PCs, going on to develop
software on both Macs and PCs and later teaching university students to use both
computer platforms. In 1995 I worked as a developer in residence at both the Austral-
ian National University and University of Canberra (UC), and then spent a couple of
years as technology advisor for the Education Faculty at UC. For a decade or so I was
seen as a bit of a Mac guru. Despite this, I could never quite understand the cult-like
following and anti-following that the Mac tended to create in people. The Mac is just
a computer. One that is wonderfully designed and in a class of its own, but still just a
computer. Yet I kept running into people who wanted me to take a stand and demon-
strate my faithfulness to the Mac, Jobs and Apple.
Over time I realised that I was missing the point of the Mac cult. Both those for and
against were not looking at the Mac in its function as a computer, but rather in what
it said about themselves as a group of die-hard followers. This ‘religious’ intolerance
provided meaning, strength and group coherence for the followers. For me this is
a problem, as the benefits of good design get lost behind all the mumbo jumbo of
group think.
Rather than focusing on working together to get the work done, people retreated to
their own worlds of computer purity. What is needed is a bridging of different worlds
through dialogue, not a reinforcement of them through rhetoric.

The Shoe is a Sign
The ‘Shoe is a Sign’ scene (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka9mfZbTFbk>) from
the Monty Python movie, Life of Brian, is a classic example of cultic following. Here
are the followers chasing after Brian whom they have decided is the messiah. In his
rush to escape, he loses his shoe. The followers pick up the shoe and interpret it as a
sign, their discussion soon degenerating into an argument about what the sign means
and its essential nature: shoe or sandal. They then take off one of their own shoes as a
sign of their following, and rush off again to find their messiah.
The seduction of cultic following is to diminish thinking, deify fixity and harness control.
The affirmation of fluidity, ‘nimblicity’ and adaptability is anathema to cultic following, yet it
is the key to the following-leading dynamic.
Coming Out of Cultic Followership

Another interesting thing we learn from the study of cults and fundamentalism is the nature
of perception blindness. The term ‘false consciousness’ describes oppressive beliefs of which
people are unaware, and beliefs that inhibit critical self-reflection. False consciousness
hinders the oppressed from perceiving their own oppression and encourages the distortion
of perception through ‘sunk cost effect’ and coercion. In 2014 Australia witnessed an embar-
rassing interview by a populist television commentator with Rosie Batty, a woman whose
husband had violently killed their son before being himself killed by police (<http://www.
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2594845/Rosie-Batty-blasts-Joe-Hildebrand-comments-
domestic-violence.html>). During the interview the presenter implied that the woman
was responsible for the tragedy because she had not reported her husband’s abuse. Rosie
Batty replied:
I am absolutely outraged. I was living in hope that because of Luke’s tragic death it
would bring a huge awareness to family violence. This is beyond my comprehension
how, again, the woman who is the victim is punished … And Joe, your comments are
so, so misguided.
The commentator later apologised (<http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/
joe-hildebrand-apologises-to-rosie-batty-over-family-violence-comments-20140403-35zvp.
html>) but clearly showed he had no understanding of the issue, as he then proceeded to
justify his ignorant view. This is a good example of false consciousness. To hold the naïve
idea that society should punish non-reporting of domestic violence displays a total lack of
understanding of this kind of violence, the pressure not to report, and the nature of punish-
ment and its by-products. The commentator’s own worldview and thirst for justice made him
blind to the plight of family violence.
The idea that punishment alone is sufficient to motivate and modify behaviour is naïve and
misguided. Punishment for under-reporting has a trajectory that punishes the victim and
actually decreases reporting, forcing problems underground. It is no coincidence that the

Australian state with the best performance on the issue of child abuse is Western Australia,
where there is no mandatory reporting but a diversion program.
While there is no comparison in gravity between the Rosie Batty story and under-reporting
in risk and safety, the same dynamic of false consciousness is at work. The idea of setting
absolutist and perfectionist goals followed by punitive measures to achieve those goals, is
a bankrupt model for motivation of risk and safety ownership. The model ignores hidden
pressures that drive under-reporting, totally misunderstands the nature of learning, and
believes that only the hedonic principle (carrot and stick) drives human relationships. It is
this kind of simplistic thinking that keeps the risk and safety industry bogged down in more
of the same – more punishment, more systems and more vigilance in policing systems. Yet
while the sector complains about the excesses of all these things, it proposes nothing new.
False consciousness, maintained by the fortress of the hedonic principle, maintains blindness
that, on the one hand complains about bureaucracy, but on the other does nothing about the
cultural values that drive it. Of course, the discourse of the hedonic principle is assisted by
language that normalises its own assumptions, binary opposition goals and naïve simplistic
ignorance about trade-offs in ideology. False consciousness allows the cult to flourish so that
it cannot reflect on its own assumptions and perpetuates its own beliefs through language
gymnastics as shown by the television commentator in the story above. Ultimately there is
no shift in belief, just a false apology.
One of the best ways to assist people out from under the oppression of a cult is to respect-
fully articulate the dissonance of their position. Though it may not often be successful, one
never knows when another is ready to shift from false consciousness to critical reflection.
The trouble with challenging false consciousness is that people feel threatened by the
challenge to their sunk cost and territorial belief, and this fuels resistance. The challenge
often begins with the risky action of protest, but protest is rarely welcomed. Those with a
strong authoritarian view of leadership don’t want dissenters, whistleblowers or protestors,
and they often hang on to false consciousness till the gavel falls. In the end they don’t realise
that, though they maintain their position of authority, they have lost their authority to lead.
It is often then that the dissenters begin to lead and the leaders to follow. This was certainly
the case with the Vietnam War Moratorium Movement.
Moratorium (Rob)
I will always associate the word ‘moratorium’ with the Vietnam War rather than with
its actual meaning: the suspension of judgement. Starting in April 1969, the Mora-
torium Movement led to massive demonstrations and marches in capital cities in the
USA and then in Australia. In November of that year, over 500,000 people marched
on Washington DC, calling for the end of the Vietnam War. In those days university
students were also activists, and in the November marches many were sprayed with
tear gas to disperse the march and many sought shelter in community facilities, such
as schools, churches and homes. It became a community movement not dissimilar
to the Occupy Wall Street movement which followed many years later. Resistance
meeting counter-resistance by the police and authorities tends to work this way.

President Nixon declared that the government would not be affected by such
protests and demonstrations calling for the end to the Vietnam War. In Australia,
the Premier of New South Wales, in a cavalcade with President Lyndon Johnson
(LBJ), is supposed to have declared, ‘Run the bastards [protestors] over’. However,
it was not long before the Moratorium began to have an effect. The protests and
demonstrations were massive and relentless. As a university student from 1971-73, I
didn’t think twice about joining the protests. I had escaped the conscription call up
and the idea of going to war for the American ‘Domino Theory’ didn’t make sense to
me. (Visiting Cambodia in 2013, it was hard to believe what the Americans had done
to those countries, including 10 million land mines, 5 million of which are still in
Cambodia today).
The Moratorium Movement attracted some of the most famous singers, movie stars,
politicians and famous personalities of the day. John Lennon and Pete Seeger sang
at the Washington gathering, calling out, ‘Are you listening Nixon?’ In Australia,
representatives from church groups, trade unions, radical and moderate student
organisations, pacifist groups and anti-war groups were represented on the Vietnam
Moratorium Campaign chaired by Jim Cairns (who was to become Deputy Prime
Minister in 1973). The Moratorium focused on May 8th to 10th each year to coincide
with the killing of four student protestors (and the wounding of nine) at Kent State
University by the Ohio Army National Guard.
In June 1971, hundreds of thousands protested in cities across Australia. In Adelaide,
where I was, our protest brought the city to a standstill, the police reduced to using
water cannon to try and disperse us. The protests were primetime television (as was
the war itself ), and the Moratorium logo and propaganda dominated university
walls and city streets. We believed that the times were a-changing, and that we could
change the times. If those in authority could not lead, we would. And we did.
Some good documentary evidence regarding the Moratorium Movement can be viewed at
<http://www.abc.net.au/archives/80days/stories/2012/01/19/3411534.htm>. It is interest-
ing that the language of the Movement was to ‘occupy’ the streets. If you supported the
Moratorium you sat down in the street and occupied it. Police then had the task of carting
thousands of people and students away, but they only arrested some. It is impossible to put
100,000 leaders in gaol.
Revisiting the discussion of One Brain, Three Minds (from Risk Makes Sense) may help
us see why some are limited in their perception of the ‘leading’ by others. Much of what
is dismissed as rebellion and anti-authority behaviour is in fact leading by non-rational
methods. While those in authority are committed to the logic of authority, those leading
from below often don’t recognise that authority and thus refuse to follow. This is why some
don’t see their own false consciousness, and why leading from below is viewed as a threat.
This is also because those imbued with the hero myth in leadership have lost connection and
reciprocation with those whom they seek to lead.

Technique, Reflexivity and Satisficing
Humans have very limited perceptive capability, as simple visual and spacial illusions dem-
onstrate. The rational, slow mind really runs quite slowly, taking in data through the senses
at about 16-40 bits per second. The unconscious mind, on the other hand, processes data at
approx 10 billion bits per second and does millions of things while the rational mind is still
‘thinking’ about it. Checklist thinking (Mind 1) is slow thinking, whereas intuitive or ‘gut’
thinking is, in Gigerenzer’s (2007) words, ‘fast and frugal’ (Mind 3). Then, there is the mind
that is between these two states, Mind 2. Mind 2 is developmentally both fast and slow,
constantly fluctuating between slow, rational reflection and accelerating, heuristic thinking.
So humans have one brain but three mind states. In Risk Makes Sense a model of One Brain,
Three Minds was discussed, and is presented here again in Figure 13.
Figure 7. One Brain, Three Minds
In the complexity of life and because of the limitations of rational (slow) thought, humans
manage by making many of their decisions in the unconscious. We develop fast and frugal
ways of decision-making (called heuristics) so we don’t have to ‘think’. It is often in this
state of ‘flow’ that we are at our most creative, innovative and imaginative. Rob is currently
working with a company that calls this state ‘nimblicity’.
Humans do many things ‘without thinking’; this is what it is to be human rather than gods.
We do many things by habit and repetition, and the by-product of this is desensitisation.
There is nothing wrong with making decisions by heuristics; it is very human. The crazy
thing about all the talk of error prevention or making people ‘think’, is that it moves people
from ‘fast and frugal’ thinking to slow thinking. Imagine all the slow things one would have
to do to manage the driving of a car in slow thinking. You wouldn’t get out of the driveway.
No, people just get on with life, and do activities like driving using heuristics. Most of the
time we don’t need to drive in an intense concentrated state and we do fine. And if we make
an error, it usually means that the heuristic we used for judgement at the time was a bad fit.

This doesn’t happen very often, considering the many thousands of hours we each spend on
this risky and dangerous task.
We sometimes refer to this state of ‘not thinking’, where fast and frugal decisions are made,
as being in ‘autopilot’. This is where complacency sits. Complacency is not some evil lack
of care but rather the human state of ‘not thinking’, and the only way to trade off the risk
of such ‘non-thinking’ is to move into slow Mind 1. Moving into Mind 1, we then try to
gather data to its optimum so as to make the best decision, but even then there are limits of
time and resources. Optimised decision-making is slow and impractical. In the end, humans
make the best decisions they can within the limits of what is available to them under the
constraints of being human. This is called ‘satisficing’, that is, humans make the best decision
possible under the constraints of time and resources. This is represented in Figure 14.
Figure 8 Optimising and Satisficing
So we see that humans live in a state of tension between the complexities of living (fast and
frugal decision-making) and the limitations of time and resources (optimising). The truth
is that most of the time humans are ‘complacent’ and ‘not thinking’ (fast and frugal). Even
after completing a slow Safe Work Method process, humans then go on the job and use
heuristics for most of their decisions. It’s only when something goes wrong that we turn
complacency into an evil, when in fact, we have been functioning well on complacency for
the last hundred days.
The idea that humans are only safe below the line in optimising, is a denial of the fact that
the majority of the time we function quite well and efficiently above the line in satisficing.
Then when something goes wrong, or an error (not a blunder) is made, everyone hits the
panic button and tries to draw everything back under the line. Those in authority seek this
control through measurement. Unfortunately, the emphasis in traditional leadership is not
on the importance of resilience and adaptability through reciprocation and mutuality, but on
authority-through-power in a mechanistic worldview.

Fixity in planning, strategy and ‘engineering’ control doesn’t bode well for a following-
leading dynamic. Indeed, the measurement-focused, control-focused model of leadership
understands neither the dynamics of risk nor the necessity of resilience rather than control.
Rather it is a natural consequence of the dehumanisation of risk that follows from a mecha-
nistic worldview.
The Mechanistic Worldview and the Dehumanisation

of Risk
It should be no great surprise to anyone that a huge number of trade-offs have been made
by accepting the mechanistic worldview of risk. The narrative in risk over recent history has
shifted away from humanising people to that of dehumanising them. The champions of
dehumanisation have been many: the regulator, the legal profession, risk and safety associa-
tions, political parties, the OFSC, engineering and the many technologically focused groups.
Unfortunately, the mechanised worldview remains the dominant one in risk, security and
safety. This worldview (individually and combined) tends to shift the focus from humans to
objects, maintaining that this is the only way to manage risk and uncertainty. We certainly
know this ourselves; we feel it in the way the system and its agents treat us. The mythology
associated with the mechanistic worldview (and its trade-offs) creates the delusion that
safety, security and risk are being managed. In reality, nothing is safer, and no risk is
mitigated. Rather, risk gets shifted, reframed and relocated. Often this shifting sends the
risk to an area where data is not counted. In other words, it goes underground. The following
table should assist in understanding the mechanisation process.
Mechanistic Trend Dehumanising Outcome and Trade-Off

Excessive systems The more systems are seen as solutions, the more powerless
humans become within those systems. Humans respond in
a desensitised way through ‘tick and flick’ and diminished
thinking. Then, when mistakes are made, the next solution is
developed by adding to the system.
Focus on data The accent on data creates the perception of risk as scientific
and objective, putting it into conflict with subjectivity of risk
and uncertainty. Data is elevated as objective when it is not,
but rather, meaning is attributed to the data.
Focus on engineering The heavy focus on engineering in safety leads to a loss of
adaptability, creativity, innovation and validation of imagina-
tion. Engineering cannot respond to the complete nature
of human decision-making; it is limited by engineering
thinking. Sorry to disappoint the engineers, but humans
cannot be understood as objects or machines.

Focus on technology As safety continues to be preoccupied with the love of
technique, and human labour is viewed as costly, the
trade-off increases the risk of people working alone. The
love of technique assists the view that human fallibility is a
problem.
Behaviourist focus The behaviourist worldview understands people as the sum
of inputs and outputs. Behaviour becomes confused with
culture, and policing with observation. Behaviourism itself
becomes confused with social psychology.
Cause-and-effect thinking The misattribution of cause and effect creates a focus on
black-and-white attribution rather than the diversity of
choice under a lack of optimal knowledge. This creates the
delusion that decisions are made on the basis of rationally
complete knowledge.
Focus on ‘damaging Under this focus, risk and safety are perceived as the release
energies’ of energy rather than a human decision-making. This
approach creates the delusion that decision-making has
been considered. Once a focus is made the vision filter, it
creates safety arrogance, in ignorance of any other view.
Focus on hazards This is the continued focus on objects-as-safety. This creates
the delusion that hazard hunts are effective, as though
imagination in human decision-making is not required.
Rather than thinking about the uncertain, the unknown and
the unexpected, this focus creates the delusion that named
hazards diminish risk.
Focus on zero and Safety is reduced to counting and injury data and is attrib-
numerics uted a cultural value where no such connection exists. The
continued focus on numerics shifts the attention from
people and reduces thinking to ‘people as the problem’ and
numbers as absolute. This creates a climate of intolerance
and blaming fostered by absurd dehumanising slogans such
as ‘all incidents are preventable’.
Excessive checklists and The dumbing down of thinking to lists creates a dependency
audits (against systems) on both the lists and their (uncreative) creator. The tool
then become the methodology. Thinking outside or beyond
the checklist is limited and discouraged. Conversation and
listening are disregarded as valuable tools for risk thinking
and the object (SWMS, JSEAs) becomes the outcome
rather than serving as a thinking tool.

Binary oppositionalism Safety is viewed as a black-and-white process, a fundamen-
talist exercise rather than a process requiring imagination,
adaptability and adjustment in judgement. The binary
worldview limits thinking so that one can’t think of the grey
between the black-and-white understandings of the world.
Emphasis on As safety pushes more to being dictated by a regulatory and
forensics, science and mechanistic focus, people become desensitised to thinking
disconnectedness within the safety space. This creates a culture where Safety
people become hated because they respond in such a dehu-
manised way to workers. Rather than disown the subjective
space, Safety people should reject the objectivity of safety as
attributed and not real.
So what can be done about this? Here are five steps as a starting point in reversing the trend:
1. Understand how the mechanistic worldview works and how acceptance of this
worldview feeds its appetite.
2. Keep its methods to a minimum. Minimalism gets rid of the mechanistic dynamic,
and then one’s focus and energies can be devoted to humanising the safety space.
3. Don’t accept the mechanistic view without question. Take, for example, the idea that
due diligence is a measured mechanistic process that one can demonstrate to others.
Even in the regulation it is clear that due diligence is a subjective process with as
many scientific, mechanistic properties as ALARP. Zero needs to be challenged, and
dissonance needs to be presented to those who have accepted the legitimacy of the
mechanistic worldview.
4. Shift the safety discourse to a proper understanding of culture rather than confusing
culture with systems and behaviour.
5. Name the dehumanising process as it raises its head in meetings and in espoused
‘safety speak’. Safety people should be always contesting the trajectory of initiatives
rather than contributing to the ongoing mythology created by the mechanistic
worldview.
This is only a beginning. There are many things Safety people can do to subvert the toxicity
of the mechanistic worldview and the way it dehumanises the safety space. Make a start
today and tackle this trend with some good open questions that challenge this trajectory and
what it is doing to us all.
Workshop Questions
1. When does following become cultic?
2. Why do dissent and non-conformity pose a challenge to leaders?

3. What skills are required to be able to challenge leaders without causing them to
become reactive and defensive?
4. What climate and organisational attributes are essential for a healthy
learning organisation?
5. If framing, pitching and priming of language communicate best to the unconscious,
what are the key messages about risk in your organisation? What are the visible
messages? What are the unconscious messages?
Transition
This chapter has focussed on what happens when following moves to a cultic follower-
ship, and offered a few techniques to help come out from under it. Identifying dissonance,
being reflective and acknowledging satisficing all help us to keep the dominant mechanistic
worldview at bay and develop a more healthy approach to following.
We now turn to the final section of the book, where we explore the following-leading
dynamic in some depth. We will also address how discerning real risk and understanding that
risk makes sense require following-leading that is not only reciprocal and mutual, but also in
relationship that is adaptable and resilient. In order to be adaptable and resilient, one must
be in tune with what happens in the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship.
The final chapter provides practical tips and tools to enhance the following-leading in the
Zone. We will be introducing the concept of an ‘adaptive toolbox’. In being ‘adaptive’, this
‘toolbox’ pushes us away from mechanistic and formularistic paradigms and take us back to
humanising the following-leading and risk relationship. Knowing risk is a contextual and
environmental process, where in the end it is about people in the moment with options and
relationships and often no time to ‘think’.
SECTION
THREE
Wisdom & The Following-Leading
Adaptive Toolbox
CHAPTER 5
A Model for the Following-Leading
Dynamic
5
Weick (1979, p.25) is most critical of using military and mechanistic metaphors in describ-
ing human organising, particularly leading. He says, ‘People often treat organisations as if
they were clocks that can be read, counted, measured. If organisations are clocks, they are
certainly unusual ones’. Metaphors draw together things that are different and suggest they
are alike. In poetry metaphors and similes are used to suggest that human emotions and
inanimate objects inform each other, for example, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats
on high o’er vale and hills’. Like art and music, the use of metaphor seeks to communicate
something beyond itself. Weick states, ‘There is one metaphor that dominates the business
world. That metaphor is the military: ‘… whatever its origins, the military metaphor is a bad
choice when used alone because it forces people to entertain a very limited set of solutions to
solve any problem and a very limited set of ways to organize themselves’ (p. 30).
Historically most metaphors associated with leadership denote singular rather than collec-
tive activity. The notion of organising and leading has been mechanistic rather than organic.
The focus has been on the technique of the one in authority rather than the relationship and
exchange between following and leading. This chapter seeks to address this imbalance.
It is interesting to note in the history of the church that the notion of a ‘bishop’ was origi-
nally about the one who ‘serves from behind’, not someone who leads from in front. The idea
of the shepherd was about one who was lowly in status, poor and alienated from those high
in rank and status. How things changed since the first century. The vestments and authori-
tarian ‘trappings’ of power associated with the word ‘bishop’ now indicate ‘rulership’ rather
than ‘servanthood’, political position rather than ‘shepherding’ and, ‘pomp and circumstance’
rather than humility and service.
Recent activities by Pope Francis have sought to shift this worldview. Pope Francis
recently rented out the Sistine Chapel for a private corporate event, with the proceeds to
go to charities working with the poor and homeless (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/the-pope/11168027/Pope-Francis-allows-Sistine-Chapel-to-be-rented-out-for-
Chapter 5: A Model For The Following-Leading Dynamic 61

private-corporate-event.html Oct 17 2014). Some are even calling this new radicalization
by the Pope as ‘the Francis Effect’. Perhaps the Jesuit (militaristic) model of leadership
is shifting to a following-leading model of reciprocal relationship? Francis has certainly
reminded the Bishops of their original ‘shepherding’ role (http://www.catholic.org/news/
international/europe/story.php?id=56954 21 September 2014).
Figure 9 shows the key elements of a model for the following-leading dynamic. The model is
made up of three main elements. At the top left is ‘leading’, at the lower right is ‘following’,
and they are joined through a ‘Zone of Reciprocal Relationship’. The nature of leading is
dependent on anthropological assumptions about what it is to be human. All anthropologi-
cal assumptions or worldviews take on a trajectory (that is, one’s starting assumptions lead to
certain inevitable conclusions). For example, if one assumes that humans are merely organic
machines with programmed behaviours, the trajectory will be mechanistic. That is, we will
tend to treat people in organisations like cogs in a machine. Or, if one assumes that humans
are merely components in a complex system, then the trajectory will be to focus on the
system as a whole, neglecting the needs of the parts (who are actually humans). If one thinks
that human minds are empty vessels waiting to be filled, then the trajectory will be a project
of knowledge dumping. If humans are understood as puppets, then the trajectory will be one
of manipulation and control.
In contrast, as shown previously, social psychology assumes that humans are beings in
community, and therefore the fundamental starting point is that humans are relational
beings, who find meaning and purpose in social engagement. The trajectory from this
starting point therefore leads to a focus on both individuals and the nature of the relation-
ships between them.
Figure 9. A Model for the Following-Leading Dynamic
LEADING
ZONE OF RECIPROCAL
RELATIONSHIP
FOLLOWING
DISCERNING RISK
Leading in the Following-Leading Dynamic
In contrast to the traditional leadership model, that can result in extreme examples such as
the one in our story of the secret meeting, a following-leading dynamic considers leading
within relationships and the broader context.
It seems strange that in most versions of history large-scale social movements are explained
solely in terms of the activities and personalities of a few key players. It wasn’t until the work
of Zimbardo, Adorno and others that phenomena like the Nazis and the Holocaust were
explained situationally rather than as merely the hellish acts of a few individuals. Similarly,
the almost messianic emphasis on Churchill and Roosevelt by historians shows an individu-
alistic rather than a social interpretation of World War II events. These leaders would have
been totally ineffective had they not enjoyed the positive attributions and perceptions of
their followers. Leadership is conferred by followers.
Leadership is about not only followers and leaders, but also all the elements of their relation-
ship, their context and social arrangements. This is what Haslam (2011, p. 45) calls ‘we-ness’
and Buber (????) ‘I-Thou’. Leaders and followers are bound together by being part of the
common ‘we’. Leaders often gain their status by emphasising this ‘we-ness’. The enemy of
leadership is not a lack of power but a lack of ‘connectedness’. A shared sense of ‘us’ lies at
the heart of influence. We observe this sense of ‘us’ in the behaviour of football followers.
In teams and groups people often subjugate their individual motivations to the needs of the
team as a whole.
People follow teams and become ‘fans’ for a whole range of collective and social reasons that
may or may not be directly tied to individual need. People rarely give up loyalty to a team,
even when that team fails, loses consistently or is caught up in unethical behaviour. Indeed,
sometimes failure heightens loyalty, cohesion and resolve, as seen for example in the recent
drugs crisis involving the Essendon Australian Rules football club (<http://www.theroar.
com.au/2013/07/19/essendon-fans-have-no-idea-whats-ahead-of-them/>). At such times
the ‘sunk cost’ of years of following the team, tends to result in an increase of enthusiastic
loyalty, due to the human need to resolve cognitive dissonance.
It is clear in the article above that social identity formation is championed against ‘the
other’, an essential in any system of fundamentalist belief. This same drive for social identity
is present when people volunteer for the army or to fight in a war in a foreign land. How
can we make rational sense of such choices? In such ambitions there is presumably some
personal attraction, but there is certainly a most powerful group-level identity formation.
One can observe this motivation and dynamic in the interactions between ex-military people
when they first meet. The invisible bond is so powerful that it ‘opens doors’, creating favours
and instant loyalties. Personal interest is not the prime motivation for people to join teams
and organisations such as churches and armies (Haslam, p.48ff ).
Haslam states (p. 54),
Without a shared sense of ‘us’, neither leadership nor followership is possible. Indeed,
this is the foundational premise of our new psychology of leadership.

A Foundation for an Ethic of Self
As we have seen, social psychology understands a person not as an isolated individual, but
as a part of an inter-related social whole. Consequently, it views leading as being about
mutuality and reciprocation with following. Therefore, when we bring this understanding to
the area of discerning risk, we must likewise give up the focus on the self as an individual,
and view the self rather as relational, as a ‘self in relationship’.
All discerning in risk should be undertaken under the magnification of social arrangements.
Figure 7 illustrates five views of the ‘self in relation’. The intersection of these five views is the
key to ethical leading, discerning, and the provision of clarity in risk.
Figure 10. Discerning the Relational Self.
Each view, or magnification, brings to a holistic sense of self a different but integrated focus:
the inner self, the social self, the cultural self, the environmental self and the transcendental
self. A holistic sense of following develops by focusing on the intersection of these five
understandings of ‘self in relation’.
The inner self is about being ‘in tune with ’ and reflecting on one’s own thoughts, emotions,
thinking, beliefs and identity, knowing that these things are socially contingent. One’s own
history is best understood as a history of mentalities. History of mentalities is history under
the magnification of social psychology.
The social self is about all social understandings, relationships and engagement that interact
with the inner self. As Buber states,
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him,
then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or
She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and
described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou
and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives
in his light.
The fundamental acknowledgement of ‘the other’ should condition acceptance and reject the
demonisation and objectification of others. When one understands self in relation then we
don’t ‘use’ others but rather ‘meet’ others.
The cultural self understands self in relation to culture, that is, in engagement with all
aspects of culture as represented in the cultural cloud. In previous books a model of culture
was presented as a puzzle with arrows attached to definitional aspects of culture so as to
demonstrate trajectory. While no model is perfect, there is very little in the leadership
and risk space that seeks either to define or model an understanding of culture. Many just
assume that culture is behaviour, or systems of leadership, and forget the importance of other
critical aspects. This is also why there is so little discussion in the leadership literature on
semiotics, semiology and discourse.
This model of culture (Figure 8) utilises exactly the same aspects of culture as previously
introduced but this time employs the metaphor of a cloud to represent the mysterious
way culture fills the airspace. The culture cloud can be seen but is hard to touch; we can be
present in it but at the same time it is difficult to hold. The important distinction between
the social and cultural self is in relation to cultural complexity and identity.
Figure 11. The Culture Cloud

The environmental self puts the focus on the world, not just people in the world. Being ‘in
tune’ with the environment is critical for self identity, and the pollution of the world is the
pollution of humanity and constitutes environmental self-harm. For this reason everything
from climate change to sustainability matters for understanding the self as well as ethics in
leading-following.
The transcendent self refers to everything outside of oneself that is in the non-material
world. This includes religious and faith-based knowledge. Understanding the importance
of spiritual identity and non-material sources of meaning are foundational to tackling the
challenges of risk and death.
Such a holistic understanding of the self indicates the scope required for a social psychology
of leading in risk. In contrast, the individualistic model of hero leadership promotes a narcis-
sistic kind of leading that doesn’t need followers, it simply commands and controls.
Leading as Being Prophetic

To finish off our focus on the leading element of the following-leading dynamic, we need to
consider what provides clarity in leading in risk.
In some ways providing clarity is about translation, it is about the process of making things
plain and clear to others either in word, deed - or through creating dissonance. This last
point may sound strange, but it is through recognising that we are not meaning the same
thing as another, though we may be using the same words, that we come to understand what
another is actually saying.
In regard to the provision of clarity, leading in risk shares some attributes with the notion
of being ‘prophetic’. Most people confuse the meaning of prophetic with ‘telling the future’.
However, being prophetic is not really about ‘foretelling’, but rather, ‘forthtelling’. Leading
in risk is not about being Nostradamus or a fortune teller, although the outcome of forthtel-
ling can often be the provision of insight and imagination. When someone ‘tells forth’ they
provide the opportunity for others to learn, decide and own their own decisions. Forthtelling
is not about actual ‘telling’ but is more about strategies to help others learn, and be inspired
and informed about following. Forthtelling is about making things clear and plain, making
context and purpose meaningful, and so attracting following. Forthtelling shares much in
common with a proper understanding of teaching and facilitation.
A Tale of Conversion (Rob)

The most difficult aspect of being fundamentalist is not knowing that you are funda-
mentalist. I was brought up in a fundamentalist home that was fun, deeply loving and
caring. The home was not oppressive; on the contrary, it was wonderfully happy and
busy. My father brought us up in a strong reverence for the Bible as the literal word
of God. Every night we would conclude our family meal by praying and reading the
Bible, and being taught how to think, question and engage in conversation. It was a
great place to learn and become educated. The idea of questioning the Bible was not
considered. No one told me not to; the thought just never came to mind.
The worldview I grew up with simply made sense. The fundamentalist mindset is not
a stupid one; its logic and belief structure are sensible and powerful. It was not until
I was in my twenties that I began to question some of my tightly-held beliefs, and it
was my brother Graham who was able to lead by making some things plain for me.
He did this not by argument but in his own gentle way of questioning, listening and
creating dissonance. When the time came for me to explore beyond the boundaries of
fundamentalism and to deal with some contradictions, there he was as the supportive
community to catch me. For this I am deeply grateful. Without this liberation from
fundamentalism, I doubt that I would have discovered more liberating things and
more loving trajectories in freedom.
Graham’s leading in this story is descriptive of what it means to be prophetic, not foretelling
but forthtelling. In his care for the follower, I was able to be ‘scaffolded’ on a new path to
greater maturity.
The Zone of Reciprocal Relationship

Now we move onto a closer look at the centre of our model. It is because risk is a social
activity that following and leading in tackling risk must focus on mutuality and togetherness.
The idea that an individual ought to set the parameters of risk for another person simply
doesn’t make sense. It is absurd to think that a person in an office on the other side of the
world can set a mantra for tackling risk, or that a trader on the stockmarket could dictate
how people deal with risk in their workplace. The reality is that decision-making requires
acceptance and ownership rather than dictatorship. Decision-making is socially shared
rather than individually negotiated. We call this space of mutual following and leading ‘The
Zone of Reciprocal Relationship’. The greater the strength, vitality, flexibility, acceptance and
reciprocation in the space between following and leading, the better the decision-making
in risk. Our model demonstrates this by enclosing the leader and followers in a zone with
arrows showing the reciprocal nature of their relationship.
The Following-Leading Dynamic Model endeavours to graphically capture and emphasise
what happens between followers and leaders, and the factors that condition the effectiveness
of the following-leading relationship. In this way effective leading includes following, and
the skills of leading are focused on the facilitation of the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship.
The health of this zone, and an awareness of the factors that condition it, are critical for the
effective tackling of risk. Risk is then socially shared and owned by followers and leaders.
Figure 10b shows the details of this zone. The parameters of the zone are set by discourse
(distribution of power) as evidenced in the language and vocabulary used in the organisation.
The parameters along the bottom part of the zone are set by the framing and priming used
which reflect core values and drivers. Within the zone, the factors essential for the effective-
ness of the following-leading relationship include paradigm, will, unconscious, ethics, social
contract, power, learning and resilience. These factors stir the space between leading and
following and determine the quality and nature of the following-leading dynamic. It is out
of this space that one’s style of leading is determined and that risk is engaged.

Leading in risk is therefore demonstrated in participating with followers through discourse,
language, vision, trajectory, judgement and the provision of clarity in purpose and meaning
in risk. Let’s now take a closer look at these factors within the zone.
Figure 12. Within the ‘zone’
DISCO
URSE
&
LEADING VOC
AB
UL
Unconscious AR
Y
Ethics
Paradigm
ZONE OF RECIPROCAL
RELATIONSHIP Power
Learning
Social Resilience
Contract
Will
FR
AM
ING
& PRIM FOLLOWING
ING
DISCERNING RISK
Getting Into the Zone

We have used the concept of a zone for a number of reasons. A ‘zone’ suggests a ‘space’
(physical, psychological and cultural) where ‘meeting’ (i-thou) and mutuality takes place.
The nature of the zone can be one of conflict, engagement, understanding, competition or
empathy. Implicit in the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship is that it is a place of mutuality,
empathy, understanding and reciprocity. Here is a very short story to illustrate.
Rob played basketball for many years, as was mentioned in previous books. This
included playing internationally with a representative team and playing at first grade
level in Adelaide. In basketball the standard defence is known as a ‘zone’ defence. A
zone defence (or offence) has as a primary focus the key (the painted lines in front
of the goal). The way the five players form this ‘zone’ forces the other team to play a
certain way and weakens some forms of attack. In Figure 11, a 2-3 defence weakens a
base-line attack and forces the opposition to play higher on the court.
So strategy, focus and activity in a zone change the relationship with others in that zone. The
purpose of focusing on the zone is to heighten the importance of the relationship between
groups rather than focus on individuals outside of the zone. The key to reciprocal relation-
ship is understanding movement dynamics within the zone.
So what factors should be the focus of the following-leading dynamic within the ‘Zone of
Reciprocal Relationship’? Each grey label in the centre of Figure 10b is a critical factor, and
what follows is a brief description of each.
Figure 13. ‘Zone Defence’
The Unconscious
The first thing that leaders and followers need to be aware of is the way that non-rational
forces shape relationship. The nature of human decision-making and the ‘one brain, three
minds’ (as discussed earlier), highlights the way humans make judgments ‘without thinking’.
This is called ‘automaticity’. While this is a normal human way of function, following-
leading should not be left to the daily vagaries of automaticity. Rather, it requires collabora-
tive and consultative strategies for success. In his excellent book The Strategy Paradox, Raynor
highlights the problems that surface when strategy (and its by-products) are ignored in
organisational relationships.
If ‘everything has significance’ as Jung asserted, then followers and leaders need to commit
to consciously fostering reciprocity and mutuality in relationships. This includes the need
for inclusivity in language and discourse, commitment to transparency, understanding the
dynamic of community (as explained in Real Risk), and an awareness that an ethic of ‘service’
fosters mutuality.
Ethics
Leading-following is a social activity and those leading and following bear responsibility one
to the other. While we each hold a moral position, with beliefs and values, ethics denotes a
systemic approach to collective moral engagement. When we focus on the Zone of Recipro-
cal Relationship we emphasise the togetherness of activity in that zone. In the dynamic of
leading-following I am ‘my brother’s keeper’.

A search of books on leadership reveals over 20,000 books in publication over the last twenty
years. Of those books very few deal with the subject of ethics in leadership. Only a handful
of texts tackle the specific topic of Ethical Leadership.
While many debate the definition of leadership, and some even promote dictators and
tyrants as ‘great leaders’, we propose that unethical enactment towards followers forfeits the
right to be considered as ‘leading’. Many have coerced, cajoled, seduced and tricked people
to followership but these are not ethical leading activities. Unethical practice in leading has
a short shelf life. It is sooner or later exposed as exploitative, manipulative, imperialistic and
oppressive, and followers disappear as they discover that there was never any real leading. We
perceive this in any leadership scandal that receives prominence in the media.
Paradigm
Many words are used interchangeably for the idea of a ‘worldview’, ‘methodology’, ‘ideology’
or ‘personal philosophy’. It was Thomas Kuhn (1962) in The Logic of Scientific Revolutions
who first used the term ‘paradigm’ to mean ‘patterns of meaning’. Kuhn demonstrated that
science itself is not objective but rather tends to be biased towards its own assumptions so
that it disqualifies evidence that might undermine it. Once a string of constant contradic-
tions and anomalies has built enough momentum there then follows a ‘paradigm shift’ where
old views are exchanged for new; but this takes a ‘revolutionary’ overthrow.
Organisations have a tendency to put in concrete those policies and values that are endorsed
by the majority. Through the ‘dynamic of institutionalisation of the charisma’ change is
resisted and mavericks are quashed. Mechanisms are created naturally to protect egos, power,
paradigms and defences. The following-leading dynamic must be a conscious and consulta-
tive process of acknowledgement and articulation of paradigms. If reciprocal, this relation-
ship will identify ‘tipping points’, better manage the unexpected’ and countenance turbulence
in organising with greater resilience.
Learning
It is not possible to overstate the importance of learning in the leading-following dynamic.
Learning is not propaganda, spin or training, and must not be confused with the dynamic
of ‘schooling’. Schooling is best defined by Goodman (Compulsory Miseducation), Friere
(Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and Gardner (1991, The Unschooled Mind) who, respectively, state:
Programmed teaching adapted for machine use goes a further step than conforming
students to the consensus which is a principal effect of schooling interlocked with the
mass media. In this pedagogic method it is only the programmer - the administrative
decision maker - who is to do any ‘thinking’ at all; the students are systematically
conditioned to follow the train of other’s thoughts. ‘Learning’ means to give some
final response that the programmer considers advantageous (to the students). There is
no criterion of knowing it, of having learned it, of Gestalt-forming or simplification.
That is, the student has no active self at all; his self, at least as student, is a construct of
the programmer. (Goodman)
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the deposi-
tories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues
communiques and ‘makes deposits’ which the students patiently receive, memorise and
repeat. (Friere)
The problem is fundamental. Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in
a little room, confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is
as if a secret committee, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having
figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of
them should do it. (Gardner)
The problem with ‘schooling’ as pointed out by Friere is that content is considered learning.
This is exemplified by the current fixation on training in Australia’s vocational education
sector. Rather than helping people to think, this training focus adopts a ‘banking’ approach,
that regards regurgitation as knowledge. If ever there was a crisis in industry it is in the
increasing dumbing down of workers in risk aversion and the delusion that content creates
thinking.
In the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship a focus on learning is essential for the development
of resilience and discerning risk. Risk aversion, driven by the ideology of absolutes in cal-
culative attribution is anti-learning, anti-discerning and anti-resilience. There is no learning
without risk.
Social Contract
Reciprocation, social meaning, ethics and learning all demand a contact between those
leading and those following. This contract can be informal, formal or both.
The idea of the social contract dates back to the Age of Enlightenment and most often
denotes the natural and legal rights of a society. The antecedents of the social contract are
found in Greco-Roman law and the biblical idea of a ‘covenant’. This is also the meaning of
the ‘zone of reciprocation’.
Power
A full discussion about the nature of power was presented in Chapter 3. By now you will
realise the inter-connectedness of all these factors in the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship.
Each one of these factors affects and is connected to the others. The ‘zone’ is a relational
space, between those leading and following and between factors in the zone. Nothing is
more destructive to relationships than a distortion or misuse of power.
Will
Will is about more than just energy and commitment. When one says, in effect, ‘your will be
done’, one accepts responsibility for obedient following and the ethic of action. The recipro-
cation of will in relationship is very different from a ‘clash’ of wills. The will driven by ego is
very different from the will driven by mutuality and service.

We also know ‘will’ as a last testament. In a sense this conveys the idea of legacy, that which
one will leave behind; the meaning and purpose in living. A will often says much more
about how a person lived before death than what they left behind as a legacy. When ‘will’ is
communal and practical (i.e. within a community-of-practice) then organisations deal more
effectively with uncertainty, decision-making and risk.
Resilience
We will look more deeply into resilience later in this chapter. For now, suffice it to say that
in the risk-averse discourse on risk, resilience is never mentioned. The discourse of zero and
goals-as-absolutes is not interested in by-products and adaptability in the face of turbulence,
but rather seeks to eliminate turbulence as an evil. The ideology of perfectionism promotes
the denial of fallibility, rather than learning from failure. One doesn’t report fallibility but
suppresses it, and one certainly never exposes oneself to discussion of trade-offs in risk. A
commitment to risk aversion is a commitment to movement away from learning, fear of
mistakes and rejection of resilience.
Resilience develops when leaders and followers acknowledge mutual mistakes, act in
tolerance and forgiveness for unforeseen events (fallibility), and seek the best for the other.
When punishment is disproportionate and favours the elite, then a culture of scepticism,
cynicism and pessimism drives toxicity in organisations.
Framing, Priming and Anchoring

Much has been written in this series of books on framing, priming and anchoring. The
acknowledgement of these forces on human decision-making is vital if one is to understand
sensemaking and risk. Leaders must be conscious of both discourse and language in com-
munication and consultation about risk. Leaders need to know that their talk matters and
that all things have significance. Followers need to know that their responses to leading also
‘frame’ and ‘prime’ the dominant discourse of the organisation.
The degree to which those leading and those following are able to work together and recip-
rocate in this space will determine the organisation’s effectiveness in tackling risk.
From Adolescent to Adult

For a young parent with young children it is easy to control and negotiate decisions. The
simple power imbalance and the nature of childhood fosters a benevolent dictatorship.
However, as childhood matures into adolescence and adulthood everything changes.
Challenges to the benevolent dictatorship model start to arise with wants and desires about
fashion, clothes and awareness of others’ perceptions. Then comes the first sleep-over, the
reciprocal sleep-over, excursions away and a host of other activities that help the separation
process between parent and child. By the time the traumas of adolescent misdemeanours,
alcohol and other substances, sex and life choices come along, the child has successfully
weaned the parent from their anxieties, albeit sometimes with some kicking and screaming.
This process of separation is critical for maturation; there is no learning without risk and
trust. Years down the track, with adult children and many anxieties past, the Zone of Recip-
rocal Relationship matures to where ownership, advice, mutuality, respect, love and trust
hold sway.
What is true for the parent and child relationship is also true for following and leading.
When a leader matures and facilitates the quality of ownership and mutuality in the
relationship, then the followers’ decision-making can become owned, effective and respect-
ful. Factors such as social contract, power, heroics and goals are acknowledged, discussed
and shared. The temptation to coercion, the sharing of unconscious perceptions, ethical
enactment and learning, all qualify the nature of the relationship and how it matures. The
ideas of ‘transactional analysis’ are helpful in this regard, particularly its focus on the vocabu-
lary of maturation and the discourse of separation in risk and learning.
What happens in the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship? It is the social space where human
judgement and decision-making in risk is shared. The capability to operate effectively in this
space requires skills in humanising others: conversation, listening, observing, humble enquiry
and people skills that enable others to tackle risk within the bounds of a community of
practice. The following questions can be useful to help facilitate engagement in the zone:
1. How will people meet?
2. What cultural values compete in the zone?
3. What is the fundamental discourse of the organisation?
4. Is there discussion of a social contract?
5. How is power discussed and distributed?
6. Is the model of leadership heroic and/or messianic?
7. Has the psychology of goals been considered in the following/leading discourse?
8. What is the language of leading? Are by-products and trade-offs acknowledged and
discussed?
9. Is following voluntary, free and non-coerced? Is there a ‘will’ to follow?
10. Is the organisation self-aware of enactment and the collective unconscious,
organisational sensemaking and collective mindfulness?
11. Are ethics and moral imperatives discussed and negotiated?
12. What is the organisational priority on learning?
13. Is vision shared or dictated?
14. Does the organisation imagine the unexpected?
15. What gives the organisation internal and external meaning and purpose?

The Secret Thinking
The reason whistleblowers, visionary middle managers and dissenters are not accepted as
leaders is because one or more of the determinants of discourse are discordant with the
functional anthropological assumption and trajectory. The Secret Meeting was a consequence
of the secret thinking engaged in by the leadership at the school. The fundamental assump-
tions of Christianity (love, community, forgiveness and justice) were disconnected from any
congruence in ethic, power, social contract and trajectory. Therefore the real model of leader-
ship at Hezekiah was not based in a Christian anthropology, but instead was conditioned by
ego, fundamentalism, binary logic and control. Hence, any threat to territory, ego or binary
logic was perceived as a threat to the Hezekiah community and posed too great a risk to
the ruling worldview of the principal and council. In a fundamentalist culture the ‘other’
is demonised and action is justified by the perceived evil of the enemy. In some religious
groups and cults it justifies war against infidels and punishment by ingroupness/outgroup-
ness factors.
The purpose of this discussion is not to focus on fundamentalist culture but rather to
highlight the alterative nature of the following-leading model. The anthropological assump-
tions and trajectory in clarity and risk are evident in any sphere where followers and leaders
interact. Nowhere is this more true than in politics, as the next story illustrates.
Temporary Alliances (Rob)

When I was a manager in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Public Service
I was fascinated by the machinations of self interest in the name of policy and
power. The first lesson one learns in the public service is that your job is to ‘serve the
Minister’. If one is unable to serve the minister and the ideology of government,
regardless of conflict with personal values, one will soon find oneself sitting in the
‘transit lounge’.
It was a tense time in ACT politics with several independent members of the Legisla-
tive Assembly holding the balance of power. One such member at the time was a
fundamentalist Catholic, called Petros (not his real name). My Minister (Community
Services and Education), from the Labor Party, held a basic anthropological assump-
tion that was pragmatic and utilitarian. Petros on the other hand was very focused on
family, schools, youth and community as influenced by his Catholic worldview. My
portfolio responsibilities were for youth and community services.
At one stage of pre-budget deliberations it was important that my Minister obtain
the vote of Petros for the budget and important projects. It was known that Petros
wanted a fundamentalist ‘family values’ program that was being run in churches, to be
rolled out into schools. The school sector was dominated by a left-wing union and the
Minister wanted to broker a deal with Petros, but needed a mechanism to secure one.
As it eventuated, it became clear in a meeting that my understanding of fundamental-
ism would be a valuable asset in convincing the church group to operate in schools
with the support of the government. I became a broker for the government to the
fundamentalist group, met with them, gained their support, and found the funding
for the program. The Minister was subsequently able to take this prize to Petros and
secure his support for the budget and key projects.
What is clear from this story is that the Minister and Petros didn’t share the same anthro-
pological assumptions, but were able to do a deal in line with each other’s primary goals.
The political climate is like this; dissenters are valued for their utility, and then demonised
and placed on the trash heap. Later, if their vote is needed, or if they might serve some other
useful purpose, they will be rescued. There is no leading and following, only utility. There are
no real values, only pragmatic purpose. Pragmatism sees no fundamental difference between
practical and theoretical reason, nor any ontological difference between facts and values.
It holds no particular ideal as of prime importance. Its trajectory is determined by current
values alone; if something seems to work at the time then it is considered to be of value.
The pragmatic discourse holds onto followers insofar as the current outcome suits mutual
goals. Without any real anthropological assumption about followers, and with various
pressures through pragmatic ethics, along with a sense of power and heroics, the pragmatic
leader goes with the flow of what is expedient at the time. This stands in contrast to the
social psychological worldview that sees humans as fallible and humanised in community.
In this view policy is not dictated by expediency but rather through community
and relationships.
Dialogue in Following-Leading
So if we don’t want to fall into the trap of overemphasising either following or leading in
relationship to risk, we need to build up our capacity for dialogue in the zone of reciprocal
relationship. What do we mean by dialogue? Dialogue is genuine two-way conversation that
places as much importance on listening as on speaking. And it is not easy.
Newberg and Waldman (2012, p.3) describe why dialogue can be difficult for many people:
Although we are born with the gift of language, research shows that we are surpris-
ingly unskilled when it comes to communicating with others. We often choose our
words without thought, oblivious of the emotional effect they can have on others. We
talk more than we need to. We listen poorly, without realising it, and we often fail to
pay attention to the subtle meanings conveyed by facial expressions, body language
gestures, and the tone and cadence of our voice – elements of communication that are
often more important than the words we actually say.
Newberg and Waldman argue that the very words we use shape the neuroplasticity and
wiring of our brain. They argue that empathy and ‘deep listening’ rewire the social-awareness
centres of our brain, thereby creating a higher and more complete understanding of others
(2012, pp.9ff ). According to their research, brain-scans (functional magnetic resonance
imaging) show that as we more deeply listen to others, our brain rewires and begins to
mirror the activity of the other person’s brain. They argue that many leaders are so carried by
their own agenda and stressors that they don’t really listen to others.
Deep listening interrupts the inner speech that is constantly produced by the language
of the brain … When we learn how to step back and observe the chattering mind,

a new type of silence is created. This allows us to give greater attention to what the
other person is saying and bolsters our capacity to intuit what the other person is
feeling, including subtle forms of honesty and deceptiveness that are reflected in the
micro-expressions of the face.
From this we can see that, if everyone involved in managing risk in an organisation put
effort into actively listening and engaging in dialogue, we would learn to make better choices
and build more productive relationships. Instead, the model of the hero-as-leader consists of
making the most noise and telling others what they need to hear. The hero-as-leader doesn’t
listen deeply; rather, they make authoritarian decisions because of the lesser value placed on
the follower’s thinking. This is exacerbated by cognitive overload and the busyness of the
modern manager. There is no time for reflection. Indeed, reflection is not prized as a value by
the modern manager. The emphasis on ‘telling’ by the hero-as-leader is all about the projec-
tion of ego and the devaluing of listening and dialogue in discourse.
The work of Tannen (1998; 2005) emphasises the importance of a conversational style
in leadership discourse. She argues that western culture is more focused on debate than
dialogue, more consumed with ‘telling’ than listening.
Conversational style, then, results from the goal of serving basic human needs in
interaction. Similarly, the linguistic strategies that make up conversational style do
not exist in a vacuum but arise in response to the strategies used by the others in the
interaction. (2005, p.26)
Fleming (2013, p.xv) supports Tannen’s view:
As you communicate with people, they come to know you both as an individual and as
a professional. The only way that people can sense your intelligence and professional-
ism is through the effectiveness of your communication: what they hear you say, the
attitude they perceive, and the very sound of your voice.
So becoming skilled in the area of communication, language, words, dialogue and discourse
is one of the most important factors in both leading and following. Conversations based in
empathy, learning, community and trust, are a strong counter to the hero-as-leader.
Cultivating Resilience in Following-Leading

If risk is to make sense, then a degree of resilience elevates the probability of a positive
outcome in the face of uncertainty. Resilience (and the ability to learn from events) is the
flip-side of risk. The concept of resilience has two basic definitions. The first is the ability to
bounce back, and the second is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties. In the social
psychology of risk, resilience is perceived as the capability for learning and adjustment. With
regard to risk then, it is probably best defined as ‘the capability to adapt positively’.
The formal study of resilience is fairly new, although psychology has been interested in
human resilience since the days of Freud. He noted the remarkable capacity of humans
to triumph over adversity, even on the way to their own execution. He witnessed ‘gallows
humour’, describing it as the ‘victorious assertion of human vulnerability’.
In the 1970s, pioneering researchers in developmental psychology began to study positive
outcomes in children in the face of high risk, stress, failure and trauma. The focus of these
early publications on resilience was on adaptation in the process of development particularly
when children were exposed to shock, distress and vulnerability, especially those from war
zones and refugees.
Control - a Mechanistic View of Resilience

When discussing resilience in risk, an engineering metaphor is usually employed. In the
engineering mindset, resilience is perceived as a form of control. The problem with this is
that the idea of control maintains the delusion that one knows what’s coming next. People
who are truly resilient are aware that they don’t know what is coming next - but they do
know how to adapt to it.
If safety engineering and safety systems thinking continue to impose a mechanistic assump-
tion on the safety industry, then risk will continue to focus on ‘resilience as control’ rather
than ‘resilience as positive adaptation’. The outcome will be the continuation of paperwork
and the expansion of systems in search of rationalist control.
It seems odd that the safety industry so often speaks about how humans serve systems.
Humans create systems to manage change, uncertainty, equivocality and ambiguity. When
turbulence comes, it’s not the system that adapts, but rather the humans that adapt the
system. The idea that resilience is about systems or engineering is simply strange. Machines
can be replaced and systems can be changed, but when humans and communities fall apart,
recovery can be slow and painful, and often leaves scars.
The key to understanding resilience is to look at how people adapt in the face of adversity,
and, in particular, how social arrangements assist the adaptation process.
Models of Resilience
Let’s look at some models of resilience:
The additive model of resilience understands that ‘more is good, less is bad’. It looks at
boosting positive contributing factors to resilience, and reducing negative risk factors, in
order to manipulate a more positive outcome.
The interactive model understands resilience as moderated through ‘protective and vulner-
ability factors’. This model focuses on the capacity for endurance of both the individual and
the community in which they are situated. A healthy loving community is the moderating
factor, despite the volume of turbulence the individual has to face. Interventions that attempt
to improve how communities respond to threat are based on this model.
The indirect model tends to operate more on faith, understanding that adjustment and
‘bricolage’ (Weick) in itself ‘enacts’ (Weick) new environments that cannot predict outcomes.
That is, the environment itself creates unforeseen dynamics that foster resilience.
These three models tend to foster three different approaches to increasing resilience: risk
aversion, asset increase and process facilitation. Weick shows that human anxiety associated

with uncertainty, risk and ambiguity (equivocality) leads some to attempt the ‘manufacture’
of resilience by ‘engineering’. Others manage risk and uncertainty by the amplification of
resources, cultivation of networks and capacity building of organisations. Still others accept
the nature of turbulence and allow the process of risk itself to cultivate resilience; rather than
attempting to ‘manufacture’ resilience as a mechanistic exercise, instead allowing resilience to
develop as an organic (organising) process.
The Canberra bushfires in 2003 provide a case study of human resilience. At their peak,
when most communications were down and it was clear that police and fire services were
woefully under-resourced, people just came together. It was a remarkable experience for
a city often seen as cold, overly designed and politically-focused. In the face of common
adversity, complete strangers mobilised to care for one another. In the evacuation centres,
nobody had done this before; it had not been anticipated and there had been no drills.
The people of Canberra didn’t become resilient by measurement, mechanisation or predictive
risk assessment exercises. We saw each other suffering, and offered comfort, care and under-
standing. This kind of thing isn’t ‘engineered’ or ‘manufactured’; it grows organically in spite
of the normal drivers towards individualism, indifference and insular asset-focused living.
When your assets are destroyed, your perspective tends to shift: the fortress doesn’t look so
strong anymore and the reality of our human vulnerability and frailty becomes clearer.
Weick comments that people in organising should be far more focused on resilience than
controls in safety. Commitment to resilience is one of Weick’s five factors of collective
mindfulness. This is why a fixation on zero, perfectionism and absolutes is so dangerous,
creating a mindset focused on control, counting and infallibility, rather than improvisation
and imagination. Consequently, when a surprise comes along things fall apart. The capability
for adaptation is weak in the authoritarian disposition, because the zero mindset looks in the
wrong place for learning and has little regard for resilience.
A commitment to resilience is based on the assumption that the unexpected is unpredict-
able and random, both in risk and in the actions of followers. Anything that drives learning
underground, like the demand for zero, limits the cultivation of resilience. How much does
your organisation talk about adaptability, imagination and learning?
The Nature of Risk in The Leading-Following Dynamic

All risk involves a degree of uncertainty and subjective attribution. According to Standards
Australia (2009), risk is ‘the effect of uncertainty on objectives’. Risk has always been a
concern of humans. The idea of predicting risk is as old as gambling and drawing lots, and
is documented in texts as ancient as the Old Testament, Code of Hammurabi and Asipu of
Mesopotamia. In early times risk was most associated with understanding and predicting
the weather, navigation and primitive notions of insurance. The idea of insurance in ancient
times was simply about negotiating the possibilities of loss. Primarily, risk was associated
with ‘the gods’, and control most related to what we would describe as superstition. Modern
understandings of risk and risk management are associated with developments in scientific
and mathematical understandings of probability and uncertainty.
However, risk is not objective. Rather, the perception and attribution of risk are constrained
by human nature and social psychological engagement. Slovic (2000; 2010) has shown that
perception of risk varies according to life experience, cognitive bias, heuristics, memory,
visual and spacial literacy, expertise, attribution and anchoring. In other words, risk is a
human-constructed sense of meaning associated with uncertainty, probability and context.
One person’s risk is another person’s opportunity.
Reading through the vast array of resources and programs about risk, one could be forgiven
for thinking that compliance would be much easier to attain if it didn’t involve people. Many
approaches to risk spend most of the time focusing on objects, as if judgement around those
objects is irrelevant. It is as if the object itself is value-laden and dangerous.
Rob recently did some work for an organisation who asked for help in developing a more
mature approach to observations and conversations about risk at work. Looking through the
tools they were using to think about risk, he noted that everything on the checklist involved
the observation of objects. Looking out for ‘things’ is of limited value if one can’t imagine or
focus on how humans respond to each other and those objects in that environment. There
is so little talk in the risk management world about imagination. Imagination is the core
attribute required to become ‘risk intelligent’.
Many objects can be made high risk by human decision-making, just as many objects
that appear hazardous can actually be of low risk depending on the judgement applied in
engaging that object. Remember, when it comes to understanding risk, an understanding of
social psychology is essential. Social psychology looks at the way in which social arrange-
ments influence our decisions and judgements.
Our social arrangements give us meaning, purpose and fulfilment. Social arrangements
also determine the way we make decisions and judgements. While it is worthwhile and
fascinating to explore the engineering associated with objects, it is only through a social
psychological analysis that we can understand why an object poses a risk. Viewed in this way,
it becomes clear that risk is really not an engineering problem, but a social psychological one.
An engineering approach to risk tends to focus its attention and training on objects. It is not
the core focus of engineering to understand human organisation and collective mindfulness,
and how they relate to objects.
The social psychology of risk helps understand the following questions:
• Why don’t humans obey procedures?
• Why are people noncompliant?
• How is human perception limited?
• Why do people make poor judgements about risk?
• How is risk attributed?
• Why are people not motivated to better attribute risk?
• How is perception limited by collective mindlessness?

Without an understanding of the social psychology of risk, it becomes easy just to view
people who take, and fail at, risk as being ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’. Once we have dismissed people
in this way, we no longer have to understand the problem or its drivers; the pejorative label
has taken away any need for further understanding. Without a better understanding of
human judgement and decision-making in social psychological context, leaders will simply
go on advocating greater vigilance and ‘more of the same’, rather than creating something
new. Managing risk results in more ‘management’ and less leadership (vision) when the focus
is on law, bureaucracy and policing systems.
The challenge for leading is to understand risk as a trade-off governed by the psychology
of goals. Another key to leading in risk is not only having vision around human judgement
and decision-making, but also understanding the nature of motivation and why people do
what they do. Leading in risk must understand how goals compete and create meaning
for humans, and thereby learn how to engender vision, influence others and create wise
following in risk. So it is worth having a brief look at human fallibility at this point.
The Fallibility Factor and What to Do About It

Being fallible doesn’t mean one is inevitably stupid, lazy, greedy or weak. Fallibility confers
as many advantages as it does limitations. No one should want humans to be robotic - this
would make us non-human. No one should want to control others - independence, choice
and freedom are essential to being human. The idea that emotions, unconscious, spirit, soul,
entropy, the non-rational and non-material aspects of the human condition are somehow
‘wrong’ would take from humans the very things that make living living.
The idea that sterile, non-messy, non-problematic, non-complex environments are somehow
‘better’ than environments that contain uncertainty and less control, removes from humans
all opportunity to learn, develop and become resilient.
The idea that life is somehow better with more regulation, and that the solution to every
limitation due to fallibility is more legislation, is an absurd positional denial of humanness.
In response to the absurdity that seeks to deny fallibility, humans, in their quest for freedom,
creativity and innovation (the very quest to be human), simply seek more alternatives, trade-
offs and bypasses. Why is it that some refer to humans as irrational ‘slaves’ to our emotions,
as if emotions are wrong?
When humans develop heuristics, habits and biases to live with the complexities of life so
that they can do things in automatic, why does the trade of risk and safety interpret these
as problematic? Why is it that so much of what we see in the ideology of orthodox risk and
safety is the denial of humanness and fallibility? Why is it that the trade-offs made in risk
and safety don’t know how to live with fallibility? Why is the trade of risk and safety so
fearful and anxious about being human that it adopts a discourse of non-human language
and talk in absolutes as if this is good? Why is it that the trade of risk and safety has to
protect, ‘tell’ and control everyone, when this is not the way to develop ownership?
This is Living
Rob has a friend, James Kell, who loves to engage in risky activities, and every time he’s
found in the ‘high’ of an activity, his favourite saying is, ‘This is Living!’ If you want to
see someone who knows ‘This is Living’ then check out James’s website (<http://www.
jameskell com>).
A Standards Australia Media Release for Playgrounds in 2014 demonstrated the absurdity
of the risk-averse mindset to control and manufacture fun (<http://www.standards.org.au/
AnalyticsReports/140416%20Playground%20Standards%20AS%204685%20MR%20final.
pdf>). It has finally dawned upon the regulatory mindset that kids are not getting outdoors,
and that it is the quest for risk aversion that has ruined the attraction for kids to take risk
outside. A lack of insight a few years ago by the regulation mindset (the inability to perceive
trajectory) meant that the trade-off for fear of harm led to a new and insidious form of
harm: obesity. Then what do we see in response? A standard to manufacture and create fun!
Goodness! Even in seeking solutions, the regulatory mindset doesn’t get it. The idea that one
can orchestrate and manufacture fun misses the point. My grandkids have more fun down at
the creek and playing with pots and pans in the kitchen than the sterile monuments to fear
regulators have erected as public non-playgrounds.
The nonsense trajectory of the absolutist zero mindset doesn’t understand that risk doesn’t
disappear when one fiddles with physical hazards, it simply goes somewhere else less visible.
If we can’t see psychological or social harm then we assume it has gone away. Those who
delight in this delusion are blind to the new harm they have created. We see this with
the growing dilemma of antibiotics. The delusion of control of harm has now shifted to
a much more insidious predicament, even though the medical profession has believed in
hormesis since its inception (<http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/pdf/
ar-threats-2013-508.pdf>). Soon, people will be dying of common illnesses that haven’t
been deadly to humans for eighty years. The very thing that was invented to prevent harm
has now gone full circle, such that more and more super-antibiotics are less and less able to
prevent that harm.
So what can the risk and safety people do about this preoccupation with the fear
of fallibility?
1. The first thing to do is to get rid of absolutist language from discourse. Perfection
talk has no place in any human activity. It is non-motivational and drives
dysfunctional mindsets. Perfectionism is a mental health disorder.
2. Learn to live with and own fallibility as a good thing. Being human is not a
problem. The goal for the human being should not be becoming infallible,
omnipotent and omniscient, but to be fully human. This does not mean we have to
accept harm as good; this kind of binary opposition thinking simply drives thinking
back to a fundamentalist view of risk. The key to the unlocking the entrapment of
binary opposition is strategic silence and revealing the dissonance of black-and-
white thinking.
3. Focus on what motivates humans beyond the nonsense idea that human action is
motivated simply by pleasure and pain.

4. Take the focus off the negative, such as counting of injury data as a demonstration
of managing risk. Is zero risk a human goal?
5. Shift from bureaucratic to human approaches to managing risk. This means
becoming more skilled in engaging and communicating with (not over) the people
you work with.
6. Stop ‘lording it over others’ and ‘telling’ others about risk. They aren’t listening
anyway, and neither are you.
7. Develop a better consciousness of human unconsciousness, and the real things that
drive human judgement and decision-making.
8. Start to see that risk aversion makes people risk-illiterate, and instead focus on what
makes people risk-intelligent, or what Gigerenzer calls in his latest book, ‘risk savvy’.
9. Prioritise language of ‘learning’, ‘resilience’ and ‘imagination’ in the risk space. Shift
the talk away from objects, systems and things, and back to subjects and people.
10. Appreciate the power of conversations and consultation, including the time and
demand to reflect and create organisational sensemaking and collective mindfulness
(Weick) at work.
With not that many years to live and the reality of entropy (death), surely it’s better to have
more years in which we can say, ‘this is living’, than collected moments in which we were
made to apologise for being human.
Part of the problem with managing fallibility and the following-leading dynamic is the focus
by many in the risk industry on measurement, particularly measurement of low-order goals
while neglecting a focus on higher order goals. The psychology of goals was discussed in For
the Love of Zero. The problem with focusing on lower order goals in leadership and the whole
KPI circus is the seduction of measurement as a leadership activity. Most of the important
qualities, values and capabilities in leadership, and indeed leadership itself, are not measur-
able. Just consider the word map in Figure’X’.
None of these concepts are measurable, yet all are essential qualities in the following-leading
dynamic. Interestingly, the more one endeavours to try and measure such things, the more
one ruins the quality of the relationship to which they are attached.
Figure 14. The Non-Measurable Qualities of Leading

Persistence
Forgivness
Love
Ethics
thinking
Critical
Courage
Self-awareness
Sensemaking
Imagination
Humility
Empathy
Creativity
Reliability
Compassion
Resilience
Humour
Motivation
Aesthetics
Tolerance
The Seduction of Measurement in Management
Rather than measure what we value, we tend to value what we can measure
Organisations have many mottos and mantras. We recently saw one declaring ‘safety
beyond measure’. The strange thing about the presentation of this mantra was that it was
all about measurement, things like TIFR, MTIs, LTIs and LTIFRs. Rather than going
beyond measure, the organisation was clearly stuck fast in measurement, a clear indicator of
a calculative organisation (Hudson). The website argued that injury and near-miss data are
safety culture measures. The WHS policy of the company is also wrapped up in the discourse
of zero harm and claims that both measurement and the zero goal have changed the culture.
At no time in all the reporting or discussion on safety culture in the measurement discourse,
is culture actually defined. The discourse on the website essentially equates it with systems
and mindsets - mindsets about data and data reduction. Interestingly, this company was
implicated in three fatalities in 2013.
Drucker is partially right in saying, ‘what gets measured gets managed’, but the opposite
is certainly not true, that ‘if it can’t be measured it’s not worth managing’. Much of what
comprises culture is difficult to measure, especially when most organisations define it
simplistically or not at all. The trouble is, the more one fixates on measurement, the more
the dynamics of measurement dictate practice. Many organisations speak about going to
the ‘next level’ in managing risk, but really mean greater vigilance in marking time on the
one spot.
All assessment contains an embedded methodology that invisibly drives goal-setting, work
validation, anthropocentric value, understanding of learning, discipline, risk perception,
cultural norms and self-confirming assumptions. Measurement discourse tends to create
its own trends, dependencies and blindness to the validity of qualitative data (most data
associated with culture is qualitative rather than quantitative). For example, measurement
associated with the zero ideology drives under-reporting (although reporting is necessary
for learning), fixation on low level risk, punitive response and exhausting investment of time
and energy into reporting and interpreting data. We now have people in the risk industries
spending most of their time in unthinking processes such as checking checklists, making
graphs, counting backwards and giving excessive bureaucratic attention to minor events.
The idea that an LTI or LTIFR number in some way represents or is connected to any
cultural indicators is at best fanciful and at worst dangerous. The idea of measuring LTIs
as a predictor of safety culture is a delusion of the calculative mindset. For example, BP
Deepwater Horizon One claimed to have millions of LTI-free hours before it killed 11
people and poured billions of tonnes of oil into the Mexico Gulf. The rig owner, Transo-
cean, was said to have had a strong safety record with no major incidents for 7 years. The
reality was that a culture of denial, hubris and a fixation on measurement blinded leaders
to warning signs of an explosion (<https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdf_final/DEEPWATER_
ReporttothePresident_FINAL.pdf>). What the fixation on measurement at Deepwater
Horizon One did was create the delusion that they were measuring culture while all the
time leaving most cultural indicators untouched. The seduction of measurement, particularly

measurement of injury rates, attributes a fictional connection to culture and creates blindness
to qualitative indicators of culture.
In contrast to the preoccupation with measurement, Wagner comments on his research
(SIA, 2010):
Most CEOs no longer relied on the Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate (LTIFR)
and OHS audits as primary performance measures. All reported some difficulty in
measuring the effectiveness of their programs and most were exploring lead measures.
This is indeed encouraging but to truly move beyond an injury data (calculative) focus
requires courage and the humanisation of systems. If organisations want to go to the
‘next level’ in safety, they must let go of the anchor of measurement of injury data and
mathematical security blankets.
The idea that lag indicators are a measure of performance is based upon the ideas of Herbert
Heinrich (1931) and similar mechanistic approaches to incident prediction and causation.
Heinrich was an insurance salesman and sought to impose a ‘scientific’ approach onto the
understanding of risk. Heinrich’s Safety Pyramid, though popular
in the safety industry, has no validity either as a predictive or explanatory tool for how
humans
and organisations manage, or make decisions about, risk. Heinrich’s approach is Tayloristic
and in the genre of ‘scientific management’. There is no evidence to show that his ideas or
the later Behavioural-Based Safety (BBS) discipline, equate to reality or explain social-
psychological or neuropsychological evidence about human judgement and decision-making.
Heinrich’s Pyramid is present in the discourse of most calculative organisations and remains
in Certificate IV and Diploma studies in WHS qualifications (Stoll, McGill and Ritchie,
2014).
The seduction of measurement promotes the idea of predictability and certainty, and appeals
strongly to those with a binary opposition mindset. Binary opposition uses the classic
language of entrapment: ‘How many people do you want killed at work today?’ Binary
opposition thinking neither critiques its own assumptions or logic, nor applies it to any other
part of life and living. The mathematical thinking embedded in binary opposition often fails
to understand that its own mindset makes it blind to the priming of its own language. It
fails to see that language primes culture and that binary language creates blindness to issues
outside of mathematical logic, especially those relating to culture. Measurement helps those
fixated in binary opposition to prove their own assumptions (<http://www.safetyrisk.net/
binary-opposites-and-safety-goal-strategy/>). There is nothing more appealing to the binary
opposition mindset than the promise of having ‘everything in control’. There is nothing so
cosy as having the solution to every threat ‘in hand’, to have black-and-white answers. The
attribution of cultural meaning to mathematical data appears to promise certainty about the
uncertain (risk), but unfortunately allows hubris to flourish. Mathematical thinking enables
binary language gymnastics about zero to appear to make sense, creates selectivity about data
(e.g. FIFO, DIDO harm, mental health harm) and ignores a host of cultural indicators that
fly under the radar. Then, when a severe event occurs while the LTIFR rate is low, zero-
dominated organisations don’t understand the miscorrelations or attributions with their data,
so they create more vigilance and systems compliance as a solution.
Mechanistic, systems and mathematical thinking require balance if issues of culture are to be
understood and influenced. Qualitative knowledge is knowable, but not in the same way as
mathematics. This is the challenge for the engineering and science mindsets that dominate
the risk and safety industry. The social and psychological understandings and methodolo-
gies required to understand and influence culture are not foundational to the disciplines
of science, engineering or safety. To step to the ‘next level’ in risk maturity requires some
un-learning in mathematical dependence, and some new learning in knowledge validation
and thinking.
Measuring Timeliness (Craig)

To illustrate how pervasive and ridiculous dependence on mathematics has become,
let me outline a discussion I had with a senior government department manager. He
had been sent a spreadsheet by another agency that was being used as an audit tool to
assess the efficiencies of all government agencies and departments. It was a classic case
of a mechanistic, mathematically-driven process that sought to reduce all responses
to a simple number. Each entry required putting in a number between one and five.
His first impression was this would be an easy task, but on a closer look he wondered
if it was actually possible to fill in this form honestly. I was called in to help him work
through his dilemma. He explained the form and then showed me the specific entry
that made him question the whole process.
It was listed simply as ‘Timeliness’, against which, remember, he could only enter a
number from one to five.
At first glance this does seem simple. But how do you measure timeliness? He asked
me to discuss it with various other senior managers, and they all reacted similarly.
You cannot give a constant generalisable number for timeliness. It is actually a totally
subjective and contextually determined concept. For some people, in some situations
a response of one hour is timely, but change the priorities and the required response
time changes and timeliness becomes a week or more. An added problem is that this
spreadsheet assumed that timeliness was determined by the person requesting the
response, but what if their expectation was unrealistic? In the end we could get no
agreement on how to respond to the spreadsheet, and I left it to this manager to seek
further explanation from the people who gave it to him.

Following-Leading as Due Diligence
People who work in risk and safety are expected to be committed to managing risk. The level
of commitment in this task is understood as ‘due diligence’. The problem is that commitment
is difficult to quantify. Indeed, even in the Australian Government WHS Safety Act 2011,
the nature of the language is extraordinarily subjective. Officers under the Act are expected
to take ‘reasonable’ and ‘appropriate’ steps to manage risk. The Act stipulates six areas where
due diligence must be demonstrated in relation to risk (we will refer to these again when we
come to Figure 15):
1. Knowledge
2. Understanding
3. Risk Intelligence
4. Information Processing
5. Enactment
6. Validation
The difficulty is in trying to reach a satisfactory measure of such things when diligence
and commitment are comparative, subjective and relative. This doesn’t mean one should
not be motivated to discern and manage risk appropriately (that is, apply diligence), but
rather when risk is not managed well, it will be a simple matter to demonstrate a lack of
diligence. No amount of paperwork, files or bureaucracy can demonstrate diligence. The
same paperwork can indeed be used just as easily to demonstrate a lack of cultural diligence.
An over-reliance on systems and bureaucracy to manage risk creates by-products that limit
human perception of cultural risks. This has been demonstrated by Hopkin’s (2005) analysis
of the Glenbrook, Longford and RAAF Disasters.
It is interesting to note that when lawyers and engineers approach event investigation they
look for systemic and physical causes. They ask questions about what systems and regulations
were broken, and about what physical things went wrong, but they rarely ask what kind of
culture and climate sustains an environment for dysfunctional attitudes, beliefs, values and
processes. This approach can be observed in the Royal Commission into the Pike River
Tragedy in New Zealand. The commission states:
The mine was new and the owner, Pike River Coal Ltd (Pike), had not completed
the systems and infrastructure necessary to safely produce coal. Its health and safety
systems were inadequate. Pike’s ventilation and methane drainage systems could not
cope with everything the company was trying to do: driving roadways through coal,
drilling ahead into the coal seam and extracting coal by hydro mining, a method
known to produce large quantities of methane.
There were numerous warnings of a potential catastrophe at Pike River. One source
of these was the reports made by the underground deputies and workers. For months
they had reported incidents of excess methane (and many other health and safety
problems). In the last 48 days before the explosion there were 21 reports of methane
levels reaching explosive volumes, and 27 reports of lesser, but potentially dangerous,
volumes. The reports of excess methane continued up to the very morning of the
tragedy. The warnings were not heeded.
The drive for coal production before the mine was ready created the circumstances
within which the tragedy occurred.
A drive for production is a normal feature of coal mining but Pike was in a particu-
larly difficult situation. It had only one mine, which was its sole source of revenue. The
company was continuing to borrow to keep operations going. Development of the
mine had been difficult from the start and the company’s original prediction that it
would produce more than a million tonnes of coal a year by 2008 had proved illusory.
The company had shipped only 42,000 tonnes of coal in total. It was having some
success in extracting coal as it drove roadways but it was pinning its hopes on hydro
mining as the main production method and revenue earner. Hydro mining started in
September 2010 but was proving difficult to manage and output was poor.
It is the commission’s view that even though the company was operating in a known
high-hazard industry, the board of directors did not ensure that health and safety was
being properly managed and the executive managers did not properly assess the health
and safety risks that the workers were facing. In the drive towards coal production the
directors and executive managers paid insufficient attention to health and safety and
exposed the company’s workers to unacceptable risks. Mining should have stopped
until the risks could be properly managed.
The Department of Labour did not have the focus, capacity or strategies to ensure
that Pike was meeting its legal responsibilities under health and safety laws. The
department assumed that Pike was complying with the law, even though there was
ample evidence to the contrary. The department should have prohibited Pike from
operating the mine until its health and safety systems were adequate.
So it is clear that neither the mine operators nor the Department of Labour were diligent
in their obligations. More importantly, neither had a culture that attended to the cultural
signals that excessive risk was being accepted. Indeed, both cultures were so consumed with
orthodox safety thinking that they lacked the capability (risk intelligence) to recognise key
cues in risk. In reality, many organisations meet all obligations under legislation while still
maintaining a toxic culture.
Figure 15 depicts a rainbow (comprising the six elements of due diligence mentioned earlier
in this section) joining two culture clouds. This metaphor, or tool, helps make clear the way
due diligence works. Just as the culture cloud can been seen but is difficult to touch, so too
the due diligence rainbow can be seen but remains elusive. This visual metaphor represents
the difficulty in both demonstrating and attempting to quantify and qualitatively validate
due diligence. Indeed, the more one tries to quantify the concept, the more one becomes
deluded into thinking that due diligence has been achieved. This doesn’t mean that one
should stop trying and give up on due diligence, or on any other qualitative measure for that
matter. But it does mean an individual or organisation with a more realistic understanding
of the qualitative concept will be less likely to slip into hubris, thinking that volumes of
paperwork demonstrate risk intelligence.

Figure 15. Due Diligence and Culture
Trying to measure due diligence, even according to the legislation, is fraught with difficulty.
The safety regulation (Work Health and Safety Act 2011 Part 2 Duty of officers, workers
and other persons Division 2.4 Section 27) states:
due diligence includes taking reasonable steps
(a) to acquire and keep up-to-date knowledge of work health and safety matters; and
(b) to gain an understanding of the nature of the operations of the business or
undertaking of the person conducting the business or undertaking and generally
of the hazards and risks associated with those operations; and
(c) to ensure that the person conducting the business or undertaking has available for
use, and uses, appropriate resources and processes to eliminate or minimise risks
to health and safety from work carried out as part of the conduct of the business or
undertaking; and
(d) to ensure that the person conducting the business or undertaking has appropriate
processes for receiving and considering information regarding incidents, hazards
and risks and responding in a timely way to that information; and
(e) to ensure that the person conducting the business or undertaking has, and imple-
ments, processes for complying with any duty or obligation of the person conduct-
ing the business or undertaking under this Act; and to
(f ) verify the provision and use of the resources and processes referred to in para-
graphs (c) to (e).
The subjective aspects of the legislation have been highlighted in bold. For example, what
does it mean to take ‘reasonable steps’ (especially in light of financing ‘appropriate’ resources
to eliminate risks)? Just how much needs to be spent in minimising risk to the satisfaction
of the organisation and regulator? Regardless of how much someone has allocated to the
management of risk, it will never be enough in hindsight when investigating an event, nor
will the work on risk ever be timely enough. Processes will never be appropriate enough
when investigating an event.
The whole demand of the regulation totally misunderstands the nature of human judgement
and decision-making. Yes, decisions are made based on understanding, knowledge, risk intel-
ligence, information, enactment and validation, but they are not made purely in conscious
and rational ways. The regulation presumes that decisions are rational, systemic and an
accounting process. No amount of systemic attention to due diligence (defined by the regu-
lation) can eliminate or diminish the probability of an incident. Randomness, cultural drivers
and unconscious decision-making are out of the control of this kind of thinking. Unless the
notion of due diligence is rooted in a cultural understanding of risk, more and more collec-
tion of data will delude people into thinking that they are diligent in managing risk. More
likely, they will be deemed diligent in maintaining more systems.
The model of due diligence proposed in this discussion suggests a need to move away from a
systems view of diligence to a cultural and social psychological approach.

The Following-Leading
Adaptive Toolbox
6
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a
fruit salad. - Anon
The art of life is a constant readjustment to our surroundings. --

Kakuzo Okakaura
A Wise Trades-Person (Craig)

I started my trade at the age of fifteen at a company called AWA. They had a good
system of rotating their apprentices through different sections so that we were exposed
to a wide range of work and people. Each of us were supplied with a toolbox and a set
of basic tools, and I remember feeling pleased with myself that I was looking like a
real tradesman. However, I soon became aware that although I might have the same
tools as the experienced men, I knew very little about how and when to use them. This
was made very clear when I was moved to the metalwork shop and met an older guy
who seemed to me a mix between Sherlock Holmes and a fine artist. Nothing phased
him. Whatever challenge cropped up he would find a way to deal with, often pulling
out a particular work tool I had never even seen before, let alone knew how to use.
He reminded me of a phrase I had learnt growing up; this man was ‘worthy of
respect’. It became clear to me that what set him apart was not the quality of his
work tools but the wisdom he displayed in the mastery of his trade. In addition to his
physical tools, he had a mental ‘toolbox’ of useful heuristics that he could draw on to
tackle the problems he faced.
Our definition of wisdom here is ‘the ability to respond adaptively to situations with the best
use of knowledge, experience, understanding, and insight’. Or, in other words, the mature
intuition of mastery. So in this chapter, although we will be looking at tools that can used
for following-leading, the tools themselves are not the central factor, but rather the ability to
think and relate wisely.
Chapter 6: The Following-Leading Adaptive Toolbox 91

The Wisdom of Adaptability
There is a growing need for people to be adaptable. Modern life is fragile and complex.
We produce more with less, use more complex tools and systems, make massive demands
on science, and in doing so generate new and greater risks. The linkages between systems,
tools and disciplines is increasing, and with this new inter-connectivity comes a new kind
of ‘fragility’ (Taleb 2007). Tomorrow’s accident is most likely going to be rare but disastrous,
where all possible regulations and systems were in place to prevent and minimise risk. In
spite of this, the safety and risk industries continue to focus on the reassurance of proce-
dures and systems. The desire to increase systems and regulations comes at a cost, there is
always a by-product: rigidity. The desire to standardise everything, including people and
technologies, inevitably leads to humans and systems that are less able to adapt to surprise,
to manage the unexpected. What is needed is not new systems but an ability to think wisely
and adaptively. We are using the word ‘adapt’ in its common meaning: the ability to make
something suitable for a new use or purpose, to modify. It can also mean to become adjusted
to new conditions.
In this new world of complexity and wicked problems, there is not much conversation about
resilience and the wisdom of adaptability. The wisdom of adaptability means knowing that
all decisions have trade-offs and by-products, and that an awareness of these enables better
longitudinal thinking. All decisions, words and ideas have a trajectory. Perfectionism leads
to oppression and domination. Adaptability knows the value of compromise and accom-
modates both competing values and competing risks. Humans don’t make optimal decisions
but satisfactory (satisficing) decisions given all the constraints on knowledge, resources, skills
and capabilities.
The capability to discern risk is linked to the notion of wisely adapting. This is not a new
idea, as the following story from over three thousand years ago demonstrates.
The Wisdom of Solomon

The name of Solomon is most associated with wisdom. A story is told in the Bible
(1 Kings 3:16-28) of two prostitutes who approach Solomon for a ruling in a dispute
over a child. The two women live in the same house and have both given birth within
days of each other. One lies on her child in the night, accidentally suffocating him.
She subsequently swaps her dead child for the other woman’s, claiming it as her own.
The women seek a ruling from the king, Solomon.
Solomon decides to resolve the dispute by ordering the child be cut in two, with one
half given to each woman. One woman accepts the decision, but the other pleads that
the child be spared and given to the first woman. Solomon, perceiving the compassion
of the real mother, orders the child returned to her. The story concludes by indicat-
ing that many in the kingdom considered that this demonstrated great wisdom on
Solomon’s part.
Wisdom is much more than a cognitive process. It begins by acknowledging that knowledge
is limited. The quest to optimise all rational data is in fact the opposite of wisdom. Wisdom
knows that uncertainty is certain. Wisdom knows that most decision-making is conditioned
by many variables and that knowledge and humans are fallible. It knows that reflective
judgement is better than reactive judgement. It knows that all decision-making creates
by-products in risk and that risk is traded off for competing values such as learning, ethics
and community.
Wisdom is demonstrated in at least six ways:
1. Rich knowledge about life and living
2. Deep procedural experience of complex problems
3. Awareness of context and circumstance
4. Understanding of relationships and linkages between matters
5. Insight into the impact of values, ethics and priorities
6. Knowledge about uncertainty and the unpredictability of life
Wisdom, Discerning and Learning

No one is born wise. Wisdom, and the discernment that flows from it, need to be developed.
So the first thing we need to observe and learn in order to become discerning in using an
adaptive toolbox, is learning itself.
There is a strange mythology out there that ‘telling’ is the best method for learning, and yet
we know that this is not true. People sit through endless ‘telling’ processes like inductions
and ‘white cards’ and yet learn so little about risk. People have a huge amount of safety infor-
mation preached at them, but soon observe that the preaching doesn’t match the modelling,
and so they learn that the telling is meaningless. This saying of one thing while modelling
another is called ‘double speak’, and is far more powerful than mere telling. An example of
double speak would be hitting people so that they won’t hit others, or a parent swearing at
a child to stop them from swearing. You get the idea. Educators know that the congruence
or incongruence of the method of telling (the ‘hidden curriculum’) overrides the content of
the telling.
The mythology of telling-as-learning seems to have people convinced that a data dump is
how people learn about risk. Then, when people show that they haven’t learned, those in
authority don’t question the validity of the telling model. Instead, they seem to presume
people didn’t learn because they have a hearing problem. So they will learn about risk next
time if someone yells at them. Then when lessons remain unlearned it must be because
the person is stupid. It couldn’t possibly be because the telling method doesn’t work. So
we end up with regulators constantly telling people about the mundane, so that people no
longer listen.
In order for learning to begin, we need to become aware of what we don’t know. This then
motivates us to explore, to look for answers and new ways to do things. Humans learn in
many ways. A study of early childhood is a good place to start in learning about learning.
One of the most powerful ways to learn is by experience. From the moment we emerge from
the womb, without any form of language or being ‘told’, we begin to discover by exploring

things in our environment with our hands and mouths. We hear and listen, see and observe,
and our brain and mind process these as we experiment through trial and error, imitation
and copy. It is through these observations that we create attributions, attachment and heu-
ristics. We learn who loves us because we feel it, yet we have no comprehension of language
for at least a few years. We observe modelling around us and copy the modelling rather than
what the model intends to tell us. It is not until mid-childhood that we learn how abstract
ideas carry meaning.
Many of these abilities to learn are carried genetically, but it is through both nature and
nurture that we learn. As we engage in relationships with others we learn through those
relationships and by community belonging, without being ‘told’ anything. As the old saying
goes, most things we learn are ‘caught not taught’. This means that we learn mostly though
the hidden curriculum not the overt curriculum. The power of the hidden curriculum in
learning is strongly demonstrated by authors such as Freire, Holt, Dewey, R. S. Peters,
Goodman, Postman and McLaren. Sadly, these are not on the reading list for many people
in risk and safety.
We learn best throughout our lives (not just in childhood) by discovery, observation, experi-
ence, creation, modelling, imitation, feeling, relationships, community and play (trial and
error). These are the best methods to help people learn about risk. A quick look at Bloom’s
Taxonomy (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy>) demonstrates that
humans mostly learn without being told. For example, you can give a receptacle to a Kalahari
bushman and he will quickly look at it and discover he can fill it, hit with it and learn its
properties. It doesn’t matter what he calls it; it doesn’t matter what it’s actually called. You
can tell a Kalahari bushman ‘about’ a bottle, but this is not learning. The bushman will
quickly learn the value of the bottle, or indeed whether the bottle poses a threat to the
fundamentals of his people’s culture. We learn about culture through belonging, feeling and
social absorption.
The idea that humans are something like a computer is not a helpful way of understanding
educational anthropology. The fallibility that goes along with being human, and the power
of unconscious learning, are fundamental to understanding how people learn and make
decisions. The behaviourist mindset that dominates the risk and safety industries is partly
responsible for people’s inability to learn, particularly those from technocratic, engineering
and mechanistic paradigms. The idea that a human is the sum of inputs and outputs is the
absurd assumption of a behaviourist worldview. Training is not learning, data is not learning,
information is not learning.
Machines can’t learn unconsciously through feeling, but humans do. Humans are not
machines, and to treat them as machines is to dehumanise them. Imagine attempting to help
someone with a mental health condition as though they were a machine. Give a person with
depression the right information, and Bingo! they will become well. Tell someone with an
anxiety disorder not to worry, and Bingo! they will become well. And just tell someone who
has not learned safe work practices to ‘be safe’, and Bingo! they will be safe. It’s absurd.
So, next time you despair about inductions that waste time or the lack of ownership and
learning on site, maybe its time to ditch the old mythology and learn something about
learning. Let’s now apply this understanding of learning more directly to risk.
Discerning Through Learning in Risk

When it comes to discerning risk, humans are in something of a conundrum, an unsolvable
riddle. The idea that human fallibility can be ‘fixed’ is nonsense. And, why would you want to
fix fallibility, as if fallibility is a problem? The very things that make us human, uncertainty,
vulnerability and finiteness, also deliver excitement, interest and enjoyment. The things in
life that animate living, the learning that comes from hope and faith, and the limit of not
knowing the future are the very things that enliven us. The idea that automatons and robot-
like control and certainty are life-giving runs counter to the very experience of life.
Engaging in Risk for Risk Intelligence (Rob)

I have a friend called Garry, who has decided to kayak from Sydney, NSW, to Mal-
lacoota in Victoria, a distance of about 500km. No big announcement, no funding
drive, no fanfare, he just wants to do it for himself. Whilst I don’t understand the
drive behind such a quest, I do understand the idea of exhilaration in conquering
something, of having achieved something against the odds, of taking a risk and
coming out the other side. The idea of getting in a kayak and paddling for 500km is
not quite what I would do to experience a trade-off against risk. I’m afraid I’m a bit
more pedestrian these days. When I was younger, I did canoe a similar distance and
was upturned in rapids and lost an expensive camera; but that’s as far as the empathy
goes. Asking Garry not to take this journey and risk would be like asking a motorcy-
cling enthusiast to not hop on a motorbike. These passions and drives are what make
life worth living. And so in the middle of the journey, when things get tough and
doubts creep in, the will diminishes and the mind wanders into giving up, Garry will
know that he is fully alive.
The conundrum of risk is cyclic: the very way we ‘work’ as humans creates risk and uncer-
tainty. We live in a complex world and simply cannot hold in our brain all the information
available to us. We cannot tap into all the knowledge available to us at any one time. We step
out in faith most moments of the day, not really knowing what will happen. We proceed,
not with the ability to predict the unexpected, but with a sense of resilience that we may be
able to survive if indeed a hiccup occurs. We develop heuristics (mental short-cuts) to help
us make multiple decisions quickly under pressure. These heuristics are learned biases which
are accumulated and nurtured over time, through experience and learning. Heuristics (of
which there are hundreds) allow humans to make reflex decisions in situations we assume
are predictable, when circumstances conform with past experiences. This state of mind is
known as automaticity or ‘autopilot’. When an activity becomes habitual or routine, we tend
to function on autopilot, where we can do things more quickly ‘without thinking’. This is the
purpose of developing heuristics, to do things faster and more automatically. The flip-side
of doing things by habit, on automatic, is that repetition becomes boring and turns into
drudgery, and we become desensitised to the very thing we learnt to do on automatic.

Rob remembers how exciting it was to learn how to drive, but now after forty years of
driving he finds the process tedious and annoying; he would rather let someone else drive.
We have hundreds of similar habits and activities to which we become desensitised over
time as we develop heuristics and become able to do them on autopilot. The unconscious in
particular helps us to do things in autopilot ‘without thinking’. In fact, we are thinking, just
not with our rational conscious mind. We can drive through traffic in an apparent daze, later
not remembering one thing about the trip because our unconscious was on the job, driving
on automatic.
However, when we undertake complex activities in autopilot, we can only manage risk while
things remain predictable. When the unexpected occurs and we need our rational mind to
kick into ‘thinking’ mode, we can get caught out by the speed of events have an accident.
In such circumstances, others who are critical and self-righteous brand us as idiots for
undertaking a task ‘without thinking’. Of course, they would not do things in autopilot. They
wouldn’t be human.
This is the conundrum of discerning risk. The very heuristics and automaticity that enable
us to live the way we do, also make us vulnerable to change and unpredictable events.
The very fallibility of needing to cope with complexity, drives the creation of heuristics
so we can manage that complexity with greater speed and confidence. By the time we
learn to undertake a task in autopilot we are already on the pathway to desensitisation
and overconfidence.
Meanwhile in the risk and safety world, everything seems to focus on humans as if risk is
controlled by a rational ‘lock step’ process. The risk and safety world seems to think that
decision-making is a rational ‘thinking’ process, when in fact most decision-making in daily
life is taken in autopilot. It is more the exception than the rule that we slow down and
‘think’ rationally about the complexity of choices that face us. We might do this in a group
undertaking a SWMS or a toolbox talk, but when we are out on the job and things need to
be done quickly, we are pretty soon back into autopilot. Then when something happens and
the authorities are called in, we retrospectively seek out rational causes, find blame for people
‘not thinking’ and look for rational solutions (usually more systems and regulation complex-
ity). This in turn drives the need for more heuristics and automaticity in order to manage the
new complexities introduced to make the complex task more controllable. Once all the noise
has died down and the new complexities have kicked in and the regulator leaves content
with having ‘fixed’ the problem, the workers slide into the heuristic of ‘tick and flick’ and
again drop into autopilot until the next unexpected moment and the cycle is repeated.
So when Garry is pumping hard on the high seas after three days and begins to slide into
an autopilot daze, it is the unexpected variance that will jolt his autopilot and bring him
back into rational consciousness. This is what makes the trade-off in risk so enlivening, the
constant journeying between our conscious and unconscious experience. I just hope that
Garry’s autopilot keeps him safe when the paddling and ocean are routine, and that when
things change he has time to enact his rational mind and make a good decision. One thing I
do know: after this experience Garry will have a whole new learned set of heuristics though
his engagement with risk. And if something unfortunate were to happen, he is certainly no
‘idiot’ and the wisdom in discernment learned through his trade-offs with risk he will count
as being worth it.
The Adaptive Toolbox
The motif of an ‘adaptive toolbox’ rests on the foundation of being wise in adaptively
responding to new situations and developing useful, adaptable heuristics. It brings together
the need for effective conversations, listening, observing and decision-making. This is
why following-leading needs to focus on the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship. It is here
where mutual decisions in risk are best made that will foster ownership and trust, and
facilitate learning.
Throughout this book we have compared the dominant traditional leadership approach
(the controlling funnel, from Figure 1b) to our alternative following-leading approach
(the Zone, Figure 11). These two approaches lead to different ways of thinking, and each
approach includes an unspoken ‘toolbox’ full of heuristic-like tools that we can pull out to
use in the various situations we face. The differences between each approach mean that these
mental toolboxes are quite different. Each contains a finite set of tools available for selection,
suitable for particular purposes. Let us unpack this a bit more by going back to Craig’s story
about being an apprentice at AWA, and looking at the first piece of equipment he had to buy
out of his own money.
Tools are biased (Craig)

Although everybody at AWA was given a basic set of tools, some specific work instru-
ments had to be bought by each apprentice. Though we were given a special price, we
were expected to purchase a top quality version of these work tools. So what was so
special about these particular bits of equipment? They related to work we specialised
in. Not everyone in the company owned one of these tools because they didn’t need
one. As they were also highly technical and reasonably expensive, you only bought one
if you needed it.
Figure ‘X’ is a photo of a part of this first bit of equipment I purchased (I was fifteen
when I bought it, which makes it over thirty-five years old and it still works perfectly).
Figure 16. My first purchased work tool

Every work tool is special. Each one is designed to perform a certain task (or tasks)
and is therefore created with certain characteristics suitable for that task. The size,
shape, material, strength, flexibility and even colour all constrain its function and use.
A well-designed tool is ‘biased’ towards the work for which it is designed. It is possible
therefore by considering the tool to discover a great deal about both its function and
the person who uses it. So what does this tool tell you about my trade and the work I
was doing?
This is a measuring tool. That is what it is designed to do and it does so with an
amazing level of accuracy - as long as that which it is measuring is no bigger than
15cm. So if I have a need to measure something small this will fit my purpose very
well. As a hammer or screwdriver it is hopeless, nor is it much use even as a measuring
tape. It excels at checking the width and length of small pieces of metal that need to
be made with a tolerance of 100th of one millimetre.
The point of the story and photo is that we need to think more deeply about the tools
and toolbox we use for risk and not assume that one tool can be used for everything.
We need to do more than own a toolbox. We need to be wise in when and how we
open it, and in which tools we choose. We need to be aware of the inbuilt bias of each
of the tools available to us.
So while this tool was essential for my time in the metal workshop, one rotation in
my basic electronics apprenticeship, it was clearly insufficient for all the other tasks
involved in the trade. In contrast, there often seems to be an assumption in risk that
one tool will address the needs of every situation.
So what risk tools are in use in your organisation? Some people assume that the mere
ownership of an expensive piece of risk management software guarantees that they have
mastered the risk issues in their organisation. But again this is merely one tool and guar-
antees nothing. It may not be the right tool for the risk problems being faced. People may
not have been properly trained in its use. In fact in many cases the risk tools provided are
designed to restrict thinking and control the user.
What is the adaptive toolbox?

Why is following-leading in risk best served by an adaptive toolbox? Understanding the
Zone of Reciprocal Relationship is foundational to effective leading and following and it is
through being wise in this Zone that the capability for adaptability and resilience grows and
maturity develops in making sense of risk.
So what is this adaptive toolbox?
The adaptive toolbox is the suite of skills we dip into each day to make decisions; the tools in
it are used for relating to others and thinking strategically. They include heuristics, dialogue
and learning-community focused tools. Karl Weick (2001a, 2001b) uses the word ‘bricolage’
in the same way that we understand the idea of the ‘adaptive toolbox’. He acknowledges that
adaptive thinking (using our abilities to create, imagine, improvise and innovate) is key to
effective decision-making about risk.
Because, as shown earlier, most of this decision-making is made on the run, using ‘fast,
frugal and effective’ (Gigerenzer) ways of making decisions, we need to be wise and not
foolish in the use of these tools. The adaptive toolbox for risk has a range of tools that are
used subjectively by those in the zone of reciprocal relationship, according to the context
(and environment). Decisions are not made through optimising, but through satisficing,
as introduced in the discussion of One Brain, Three Minds in the previous chapter. The
adaptive approach to leading and following does not need all the controls in place; absolutes
like ‘zero’ are a fiction. Instead, the adaptive mindset works with what is ‘sufficient’ and this
allows less tightly coupled systems and offers greater opportunity for apology, resilience,
change, learning and reciprocal relationships.
The reality is that most of our decisions are not made with maximised information. There is
neither time to collect all the data, nor resources sufficient to wait for a complete decision.
These decisions may not be perfect but they are satisfactory. If we were to wait for maximum
information for decisions, we wouldn’t make one. This is why ‘due diligence’ is so limited; we
do not have endless resources or time to make
many of our decisions. We exercise diligence
within the constraints of human fallibility and a
changing environment.
People know that their work changes constantly,
unpredictable things happen, the environment
is constantly changing. The best way to manage
risk when things change is not by running back
to a slow rational process or a system sitting in a
filing cabinet drawer, but by using our adaptive
toolbox. The adaptive toolbox is used by both
followers and leaders. The choice of tools and cues depends on experience, expertise, person-
ality, organisational sensemaking and collective mindfulness. The adaptive toolbox allows the
following-leading process to be resilient rather than controlling, adaptive rather than fixed.
The way our adaptive toolbox works is by what Gigerenzer calls ‘the stopping rule’. That
is, we can’t go on and on collecting data and information for a decision; we have to stop
and make the best (wisest) decision we can with the limited information and resources we
have. We can’t remain forever in Mind 1, slowly collecting data. We make decisions within
the constraints that beset us, including our fallibility. To take an earlier example, one of the
most dangerous things we do most days, with few systems and usually in a complete state
of autopilot, is drive a vehicle. When we first learn to drive we spend a lot of time learning
specific skills that become intuitive as we gain mastery of the requirements of driving.
Except for the few number of incidents (per capita on the road) we undertake this highly
risky task quite well each day. The news reports only when the adaptive toolbox doesn’t work,
not the millions of times it does work.
Of course, the idea of something like an adaptive toolbox is not spoken about by regulators
and lovers of systems who maintain the delusion that decision-making is undertaken by

rational optimisation. When people make mistakes or events occur, the regulator attributes a
failure of systems and failure of rationalisation to the decision-making process. The last thing
the regulator wants to hear is about an adaptive toolbox and the billions of times people
remain safe and get work done without a rationalist optimising mindset.
Following-leading that understands resilience knows the dilemma of fixity, planning and
prediction. Instead, by focusing on the zone of reciprocal relationship, following-leading
doesn’t enter into a discourse of superiority, absolutes and entrapment, but rather trust,
mutuality and dialogue.
Before Opening The Adaptive Toolbox

At the start of this chapter Craig told a story about a wise trades-person, someone who knew
when to open his toolbox and which tools to select. So the first thing we need in order to
wisely use follow-leading tools is to understand the nature of the toolbox and what might be
in it. This toolbox is imaginary, a metaphor and a mental construction created to direct our
thinking (although it would be possible to put written examples of tools in a folder or box
and this would become our toolbox). Yet the use of this metaphor, like all good metaphors,
makes it easier to get our heads around how we might use it. So don’t push the metaphor too
far, just let it serve to remind you of the things we have presented here in this book.
Purpose
Our toolbox is a container that has any number
of different types of tools, all of which have been
designed with a particular purpose in mind. What
we keep in our toolbox depends on what we want
to do and what tools we know how to use. In the
physical world, I have three different toolboxes
at home, one for electrical work, one for general
building and a final one with strange tools that I rarely use but want to know where they
are if I need them. Each toolbox contains a group of tools that have a similar purpose or are
designed to deal with a similar type of job. So before we open our adaptive toolbox we have
to be clear on why we are going to it. What is our purpose? What types of tools will we find
in our toolbox?
We could group our types of tools together in many different ways, under all sorts of
headings, but here we will use the three icons introduced at the beginning of the book.
Relationships Reflective Discourse

& Community Thinking & Dialogue

So our tools are grouped under three main headings, but each individual tool may be useful
for more than one purpose, or it may be more specific, designed for use in only a subset of
one of our headings.
We are now ready to have a closer look at some examples of adaptive tools.
The Opened Adaptive Toolbox

The exchange in following-leading in risk requires skill, capability and expertise in relation-
ships, reflective thinking and dialogue. The rest of this chapter introduces a few examples of
tools under each of our three main headings. The set of tools presented is not intended to be
an exhaustive list, but rather an example of the kinds of tools that are available in an adaptive
toolbox to facilitate following-leading in risk.
Many of the tools are used in programs delivered by Human Dymensions (Rob) and Niche
Thinking (Craig). All of those tools and concepts are the intellectual property (IP) of Rob
and/or Craig. Some examples of other people’s tools are described briefly, but in order to
acknowledge their intellectual property, we will primarily refer you to the original source.
While the tools appear to be simple and straightforward, many of them demand consider-
able learning, coaching and mentoring to become effective in their use.
LEADING
ZONE OF RECIPROCAL
RELATIONSHIP
FOLLOWING
DISCERNING RISK
Relationships & Community Tools

We begin to learn how to relate to others in our immediate families, but our organisations
often bring us into relationship with people who are often very different from what we are
used to. When we start work we soon discover that there are multiple sub-groups in every
organisation that tend to create boundaries to keep out the uninitiated. Or as more than one
manager has noted, even our silos have silos. In essence people can be in the one organisa-
tion but, in effect, live in different worlds. So the tools in this group are designed to help us
understand each other better.
Even though we are focused here on risk, managers often learn to use these sorts of
tools to help in building work teams. Tools in this group include things like personal-
ity profiles, methods of awareness raising and how to observe and influence people
without manipulation.

Reflective Thinking Tools
There are many possible tools in this group but most can be put into one of three subsets.
Some are searching and exploration tools. In our work we search consciously and uncon-
sciously for alternatives, options and cues (to evaluate alternatives). This is why one of the
most successful training programs of Human Dymensions is the iCue™ program and the
use of the iCue™ tool for setting the agenda for conversations about risk.
There are also stopping tools. The best way to recognise the time to stop searching is by
collaborative decision-making. When the cues are sufficient and ownership of the decision is
agreed, then the quest for optimisation ends and a decision can be made.
Finally there are decision tools. Humans make decisions that are ‘plausible’ based on
the limitations of evidence. Decision-making is not some engineering project. We make
decisions that are the most robust at the time. Therefore our decision-making tools have to
be able to deal with the fuzziness of real-life situations.
Discourse & Dialogue Tools

All of the tools above may include individual thought and reflection but they all include
a collaborative aspect and that requires constructive dialogue. The tools in this group are
primarily focused on the communication aspect of relationships. They include methods for
improving our listening and observing skills, as well as how to ask constructive questions.
They can include ways of mapping conversations and ideas that build a common under-
standing of a problem.

List of Adaptive Tools
The following is a list of all the tools presented in this chapter. Each one has been placed
under the most relevant heading but many also relate to the other headings. It is important
to understand here that these are merely examples of what might be placed in an adaptive
toolbox. The reader could add their own tools to those we have suggested.
Relationships Reflective Discourse

& Community Thinking & Dialogue
Workspace, Headspace,
Surfacing Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts
Groupspace
Boundary Crossing Memory iCue Conversation iCue
Organisational Open Questions, observing
Personality Types
Sensemaking and listening
Risk & Safety Maturity
Temperament Listening Collective Mindfulness
Matrix
Influence Mapping
The presentation of each tool will include

Name: The key identifier, language and naming.
Source: The origins of the tool. Often the version presented here is an adaptation of
earlier ideas.
Purpose: Outlines what this tool is used for
Description: An brief overview of the elements of the tool
Conventions for use: What is involved in using the tool, as well as a simple explana-
tion of how to use it.
Example: A simple example of the tool in use.

Surfacing
Source: Niche Thinking (adapted from various ‘systems thinking’ people including
Chris Argyris and Peter Senge).
Purpose: A visual model that can be used to highlight important unseen assumptions
below the surface of a discussion and to make them visible for a whole group.
Description: A particular risk event is usually just a surface presentation of deeper
factors. This tool uses the metaphor of an iceberg to draw attention to the deeper
layers of ideas and issues that lie beneath the surface of particular activities and events.
It can be used to help all the members of a group bring to the surface their different
individual assumptions about a particular issue.
Conventions for use: There is no set way to use this tool but most people find it easier
to begin at the top and work down as in the example below.
Example: In pairs or small groups. A particular event is chosen by the group and each
person considers what they know, think and feel about the event, referring to each
layer of the model as they reflect. After taking notes, each person in turn talks about
what they have come up with. The others in the group seek to draw out the speaker’s
thinking, so that a collection of perspectives will gradually emerge that can then be
discussed in detail.
With a focus on incident ‘X’, we can ask
questions such as:
• Has this sort of event happened before? Events and Issues
• Why do we think it keeps happening?
• Are there any rhythms or patterns to the Patterns and Trends
timing of these events?
Systems and Structure
• How are our systems contributing to
these patterns?
People and Culture
• How does our culture impact on
these trends?
Paradigms
• Can we identify any underlying belief
systems that contribute to these events?

Boundary Crossing / Bridging
Source: Multiple. Susan Star (1989), Akkerman (2011) provides and excellent
review of the literature.
Purpose: To increase shared understanding between people separated by bounda-
ries of difference in collective coherence or forms of social division.
Description: There are two similar elements to this tool.
1. To cross a boundary into someone else’s space. This can be done physically,
usually by visiting their work place and spending time with them in their
environment. You can also cross virtually by entering onto a territory of expertise
in which you are unfamiliar and to some significant extent therefore unqualified.
2. A boundary can be bridged with a ‘boundary object’, which are ‘things’ that
enhance the capacity of an idea, theory or practice to translate across culturally
defined boundaries. “They have different meanings in different social worlds
but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them
recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary
objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social
worlds” (Star 1989, p. 393)
Conventions for use: Boundary crossing should be done with an open mind and
respect for the other person’s ‘space’. Boundary objects
Example: A risk register can act as a boundary object when all those involved are
allowed to question everything about the register.

Personality Types
Source: Multiple. Try putting ‘personality test’ into a search engine, just remember that
there will be quite a range of quality on what comes up from the search.
Purpose: Personality tests and inventories evaluate the thoughts, emotions, attitudes,
and behavioural traits that comprise personality. The results of these tests can help
determine a person’s personality strengths and weaknesses.
Description: There are many different personality profiles or tests. Most involve
making choices on a form, with the results used to tell the individual what personality
type their answers place them in.
Conventions for use: Each type of profile will have its own conventions but they are all
designed to help improve understanding between people.
Example: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) personality inventory is one
of the most popular, and many organisations will conduct the MBTI on all their staff
to develop teamwork.
I often use this tool to help people become more aware that we are not all the same
and to help individuals better understand their work colleagues. To help I get those
involved to use a collection of cards that can be arranged to help each person under-
stand their own four letter personality type.
N
E F P

Temperament Listening
Source: Niche Thinking (based on Kiersian Temperaments)

Purpose: The tool assists training in reflective listening and targeting conversations to
temperament type.
Description: Following training in the MBTI Inventory participants are taught to
identify the four fundamental types of temperament. The tool helps sharpen listening
skills and in watching for temperament indicators (words and style).
Conventions for use: The tool is used in reflection in ‘site walk’ conversation training.
People engage in conversations and through listening try to mirror conversation (and
anchor language) to match temperament type.
Example: The tool helps to suspend agenda, give focus for listening, foster listening
for indicative language, create unconditional positive regard and shift agenda off self.

Influence Mapping
Source: Malcolm Craig (2000 p. 56-65) but originates in the 1970s

Purpose: An exploratory tool designed to stimulate thinking about influences between
people and things. Best done using pencil or on a whiteboard where the group can
comment and discuss the map as it is created.
Description: A subjective map, where the author shows their perception of who or
what is influencing who by placing arrowed links between named objects on the map.
Conventions for use: Objects are placed first, they can be either people or things.
Arrows are placed to show the direction of influence. Arrow thickness shows com-
parative strength of influence.
Example: The simple influence map below shows a possible view of how a risk
management system influences those in the organisation and who the system is most
influenced by. As a subjective map, there is no definitive right or wrong but discussion
may result in greater consensus of elements of the map.
Risk Safety
Officer
CEO Management
System
Frontline
Worker
CFO
Contractor
Contract
Manager

Workspace, Headspace, Groupspace
Source: Human Dymensions

Purpose: The Workspace, Headspace, Groupspace Engagement Tool is designed as a
searching tool. That is, the tool helps in the searching process for cues. As one can see
the action arrows on the questioning cues, all the focus is on observing and listening
rather than telling and directing.
Description: The concept of workspace (physical-primary), headspace (psychological-
secondary) and groupspace (cultural-tertiary) was first introduced in book one in the
series, Risk Makes Sense. This tool builds on the three level framework to assist people
to embrace open questioning and listening in these three spaces.
Conventions for use: Generally used as a framework for observation and conversation
about risk. The grid enables a way of seeing the world and conversing with others.
Example: When conducting a site walk or when observing a work process or flow, the
tool helps remind the observer to explore thinking in three dimensions, to interrogate
thinking at three levels.

Memory iCue™
Source: Human Dymensions®

Purpose: This is a thinking tool that complements the iCue Conversation Tool. The
idea is to remind the user about the dynamics underneath a successful conversation.
In the busyness of work and living we tend to succumb to the pressures of just ‘get the
job done’. Consulting this tool helps enable a person-focused and humanising focus in
engagement.
Description: It is easy to forget how to engage with others in a conversation about
risk. The card serves memory with simple prompts for thinking, not necessarily things
to talk about.
Conventions for use: The Memory iCue tool is intended to complement the Conversa-
tions iCue Tool to help condition the nature of conversations about risk. The card
makes most sense as a result of training in the PROACT Program.
Example: The tool is best used as a pre-dialogue or conversation prompt and can be
kept in a hard hat or top pocket.

Organisational Sensemaking
Source: Human Dymensions. The tool is directly related to the sensemaking concept
as developed by Prof. Karl E. Weick.
Purpose: The Organisational Sensemaking tool is a stopping rule tool that helps focus
and limit the temptation to optimising in searching.
Description: The tool stands in contra-distinction to the myth of ‘common sense’ and
provides a framework for making sense-able judgements about risk. The framework
for this tool was discussed in detail in book one Risk Makes Sense.
Conventions for use: The seven properties are a framework for making sense of risk
and understanding how others make sense of risk. The WorkSpace, HeadSpace and
GroupSpace construct serves as a reminder to think of these seven concepts across
three levels.
Example: As a tool for analysis this framework is exceptional for investiga-
tions of events and incidents, for project analysis and for ‘making sense’ of
organisational discussions.

Collective Mindfulness
Source: Human Dymensions®. Based on the work of Karl E. Weick.

Purpose: The collective mindfulness tool is a decision-making tool.
Description: The framework for this tool was discussed in detail in book one Risk
Makes Sense. The five concepts are accentuated against a background of others. This is
intended to convey the reciprocal and mutual nature of collective mindfulness.
Conventions for use: Weick argues that these five dispositions are foundational in
High Reliability Organisations (HROs). The tool serves as a framework for engaging
in the zone of reciprocal relationship.
Example: The tool is used in training to draw out the nature of risk and safety
maturity and is used in conjunction with The Risk and Safety Maturity Matrix. When
an organisation fosters these collective dispositions then they increase resilience and
discerning in risk.

Theory - Practice Tapestry
Source: Niche Thinking.

Purpose: This model can be used to help people work through the collection of
theoretical and practical issues they are facing.
Description: Each blue vertical column stands for a specific theoretical issue a group
may be facing in a particular problem. Each green row represents a practical issue
being faced in the same problem
Conventions for use: There are many different ways of using this model and we shall
present at least one in detail in our next book.
Example: One way for a group to use this is to ask each person to write on the
model as many theoretical and practical issues as they can think of. The collection of
responses becomes a basis for discussion.

Dialogue Do’s & Don’ts
Source: Human Dymensions.

Purpose: The Dialogue Do’s and Don’ts tool provides a framework for effective
engagement of others in the Zone of Reciprocal Relationship.
Description: One of the primary tools in leading-following in risk is the ability to
dialogue. Following-leading in risk needs to not only know how to dialogue but what
to dialogue about. The tool makes connection to the One Brain Three Minds concept,
the iCue searching tool and the Workspace, Headspace, Groupspace tools.
Conventions for use: This tool serves as a training and coaching tool to help remember
the fundamentals of dialogue and the blocks to effective engagement. It is used as an
outcome of the MiRISC Program in conjunction with a variety of other tools.
Example: It is always helpful to consult this tool prior to meetings, written and verbal
communications and consultation.

Conversation iCue™
Source: Human Dymensions®

Purpose: The risk iCue™ tool is another searching tool that helps in knowing what to
look for in risk.
Description: The focus of the tool is on developing risk intelligence, in knowing what
information and exformation provides cues for decision-making.
Conventions for use: The ten core concepts in the tool are the things that require
observation and conversation in order to heighten risk intelligence on site. The
concepts are not in priority order but serve as reminders for a site walk or discussion
about risk.
Example: The tool is intended to become obsolete as people become able to focus on
its concepts without prompting. The tool can be used in pre-walk discussion so that
observers look for cues and identifiers to prompt conversation.

Open Questions, Observing
& Listening
Purpose: The Organisational Sensemaking tool is a stopping rule tool that helps focus
and limit the temptation to optimising in searching.
Description: The tool stands in contra-distinction to the myth of ‘common sense’ and
provides a framework for making sense-able judgements about risk. The framework
for this tool was discussed in detail in book one Risk Makes Sense.
Conventions for use: This tool serves as a complement to the WorkSpace, HeadSpace
and GroupSpace Tool. It prompts users to remember to focus on open questions and
listening much more than ‘spying’ and ‘telling’.
Example: The tool is best used in practice in temperament listening exercises.

Risk & Safety Maturity Matrix

Purpose: The tool shows the development of risk and safety maturity over complex-
ity and time. The red steps show foundational steps in managing risk and the two
sets of steps above that are required to become more ‘proactive’ and ‘generative’ in
addressing risk.
Description: The tool helps understand the pathway to wisdom, discerning and
decision-making in risk. The matrix is superimposed on the five safety culture
maturity stages as proposed by Prof. Patrick Hudson. The names in the steps represent
Human Dymensions programs that help organisations develop to the next level in
engaging in risk.
Conventions for use: The tool is often used in promotion and training to map what
is required in organisations if they want to go to ‘the next level’ in risk and safety
maturity, or who aspire to be a HRO.
Example: The tool helps position an organisation especially if they engage in the
Human Dymensions MiProfile survey. The tool then serves to identify stages for
growth and the next steps in maturing an organisation in discerning in risk.

Conclusion
The adaptive toolbox seeks to foster a learning, discerning and wisdom-focused approach to
dealing with risk. The tools in the toolbox serve as guides for engagement in dialogue rather
than ‘rules of engagement’. The focus is on subjects rather than objects, relationships rather
than mechanics, and engagement rather than engineering.
As stated in the introduction to this book, leading and following need to be understood
interchangeably and reciprocally as social activities. If these are social activities then the
fundamental ethic of reciprocation is critical for understanding the ethics of leading and
following. If leading is an active, social, relational and ethical activity, how can unethical
forms of relationship, influence and dominance be deemed ‘leadership’? How can one be in
a zone of reciprocal relationship and yet behave unethically towards another? How can one
lead others yet be socially disconnected from them? How can someone be in a process of
following without some mutual level of ‘skin in the game’?
The next step is to use some of these tools or develop your own tools for maturing people
and your organisation in wisdom, learning and discerning in risk. If one wants to become
more ‘proactive’ and ‘generative’ in risk maturity then the focus must be on the social psycho-
logical dimensions of risk. Perhaps you might be the one in your organisation to begin the
discussion. Perhaps your open questions will prompt your organisation to want to step up to
a new level in risk maturity. Perhaps sharing this book or one of the tools might start your
organisation’s journey to resilience and risk maturity. We trust this book and its resources
will help you embark on a new journey in risk.

The Close - But It’s Not The Close
The mystery of metamorphoses, the chrysalis looks dead

It doesn’t move, there is no life,
Webbed sticks and silk ‘n thread.
We picked it up, fixed to a tree, the tree it doesn’t move
A hole at the base, there’s nothing there
Just air and grass and groove.
Every sign a cue of nothing, throw the thing away,
Just look at it, seems rotten, a bundle of decay.
But wait and look, I saw a twinge
It shakes and quivers, it rocks and twists,
It splits and ooh, something is inside.
Ahhh such resilience.
To adapt, to change, to struggle, to suffer,
To seek to save, to battle and buffer.
Look
A life it emerges, it wasn’t dead at all,
and look how beautiful,
an adaptation,
I’ll call him ‘Paul’
(Rob Long)

Fifty Questions for Leading-Following Discussion
The following questions draw together many of the challenges of this book and can be used
for group discussion or presentation of ideas.
1. What is the ‘hero myth’? How is this evident in modern management and
leadership discourse?
2. Discuss recent trends in leadership discourse.
3. In what way are ‘mavericks’ (Riggio) and ‘mavens’ (Neville) subversive?
4. Discuss and differentiate a selection of various schools of management (Mintzberg).
5. Map and explain the development of ‘managerialism’.
6. What makes an leader effective?
7. What is the difference between management and leadership?
8. Discuss the characteristics of transformational leading.
9. Examine the discourse of leadership found in courses offered by prominent
universities and management schools.
10. What is the ‘art’ of following?
11. Why is leading an ‘art’ rather than a ‘skill’? (De Pree)
12. Choose a leader and explain how they attracted followers.
13. Choose an element of social psychology and discuss its relevance to the nature of
leadership.
14. How is social media creating ‘the cult of the amateur’ and what should leaders know
about it?
15. What part does social media play in the modern development of followers?
16. Can an effective leader be authoritarian?
17. Discuss the development of the hero narrative in reference to a modern leader.
18. What attributes are presented in the popular leadership literature as essential for
effective leadership?
19. Is risk essential for a leader to be effective?
20. What place does ‘brand’ and ‘spin’ play in hero mythology in leadership?
21. How does followership become a cult?
22. Why was Jim Jones so effective at attracting followers? Does the attraction of
followers make a good leader?
23. What part do ethics play in the demonstration of leadership?
24. What is The Authoritarian Personality? Why should managers know about TAP?

25. Is there a relationship between personality type and management type?
26. Show how dissent can be interpreted as leadership?
27. What makes a follower valuable?
28. Why is the nature of compliance, risk and safety at odds with the development of
intelligence followership?
29. What part does learning play in the development of followers?
30. Why do managers fear dissent?
31. Discuss the nature of the whistleblower and the problem with whistleblower
legislation and regulation?
32. Can a good leader also be a bully?
33. What part do creativity, imagination and innovation play in leadership success?
34. The key to leadership is motivation. What motivates people to become followers?
Discuss. (Higgins)
35. Why is leadership a ‘wicked problem’?
36. Discuss the nature of power and the attraction of leadership.
37. What are the challenges of middle management? Why is it hard to lead from the
middle?
38. Many described Steve Jobs as an ‘arsehole’ (Kahney) yet he was greatly admired by
the faithful as a most extraordinary leader. Discuss.
39. Why are sociopathy and psychopathy so prevalent at ‘the top’? (Clarke)
40. Can successful people also be good leaders?
41. What part do altruism, giving and sharing play in successful leadership?
42. What part does cognitive dissonance play in developing loyal followers?
43. Explain the cycle of institutionalisation of the charisma. Does this explain why
people ‘go off the boil’, and leadership fads?
44. Explain the importance of language and framing in effective leadership
communication.
45. How much of leadership is an act of faith?
46. Discuss feminist, post-structuralist and post-modernist critique of leadership
discourse.
47. Why are women so under-represented in management when conversational style is
considered so important in leadership success?
48. Why is perfectionism and the discourse of zero destructive for effective leadership?
49. Can leaders also be followers?
50. How can leaders help develop ownership of risk in others?

Thanks to...
Rob & Craig
When I think about models of leading and following, I think of Jesus Christ, some of whose
teachings have lingered in my memory all my life.
‘ You know that the rulers of the Gentiles ‘lord’ it over them, and their high officials exercise
authority ‘over’ them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to be great among you must be your
servant and whoever wants to be first must be your slave. Matthew 20:25,26
... who being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing, taking on the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
Philippians 2: 7

Glossary
Arational: not based on or governed by reason. Neither rational nor irrational but
non-rational.
Attribution: The giving of meaning to something that may not in fact have such meaning.
‘Fundamental Attribution Error’ is common in humans, for example, giving credence to
injury data or superstitious meaning to events.
Availability: The availability of evidence conditions what the human attributes to that
evidence. Leads to overestimation or underestimation of probability and risk.
Bounded Rationality: Put forward by Herbert Simon; that human rationality is highly
limited. Humans are fallible and not omnipotent (all powerful) or omniscient (all knowing).
The association of absolutes and perfectionism (zero) with humans is therefore ridiculous.
Zero and infinity are the same. Humans make decisions by ‘satisficing’, that is, coming
to a point where they stop collecting data and make a satisfactory decision, sometimes
imperfectly.
Cognitive Bias: There are more than 250 biases that humans use as a part of the way they
make judgements and decisions. Most of these biases are unconscious but greatly affect
decision-making. The idea that human thinking, judgement and assessment can be neutral
and objective is nonsense despite what one may have been told in incident investigation
training (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases>).
Cognitive Dissonance: developed by Leon Festinger. Refers to the mental gymnastics
required to maintain consistency in the light of contradicting evidence.
Collective Mindfulness: developed by Karl Weick; indicates the preoccupation with failure,
reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience,
and deference to expertise. This is not to be confused with the term ‘mindfulness’ as used in
Buddhism.
Discourse: Developed by Michael Foucault, the use of the term ‘discourse’ in this book is
intended to convey the power transmitted in text; all texts. Whether it be the spoken word,
symbols or words/language as symbols (semiotics), the question, ‘where is the power?’ is
critical. Weick calls this the ‘grammar’ of risk. Others discuss the power in texts as ‘framing’
and ‘priming’ (Bargh). Discourse refers to much more than linguistics. The very structure of
how we communicate holds embedded power. Discourse analysis searches for this power
in the sometimes hidden ‘discourse’ embedded in language, semiotics and text. Discourse is
just as interested in the ‘function’ of the text (spoken, symbol, language and action) as the
‘structure’ of the text. This is because language reveals ways of structuring ideas, knowledge,
symbols and social practice.
Discernment: used to explain arational sensemaking with a particular focus on attributed
value given to an activity or choice in sensemaking. Used in this book to mean perception
that goes beyond the physical and material in sensemaking.
Glossary 123
Heuristics: refer to experience-based techniques for problem-solving, learning, and
discovery. Heuristics are like mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, used to speed up the
process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive rational search is impractical.
Heuristics tend to become internal micro-rules.
Hubris: indicates a loss of contact with reality, resulting in extreme overconfidence and
complacency.
Mentalities: comes from the French Annales School of History and refers to the history of
attitudes, mindsets and dispositions. It denotes the social-psychological and cultural nature
of history.
Myth: a fictional half-truth that forms part of an ideology that is embedded in culturally
accepted practices.
Priming: an implicit memory effect which influences response. Priming is received in the
unconscious and transfers to enactment in the conscious. The way language and discourse is
‘framed’, ‘anchored’ and ‘pitched’ primes thinking and judgements. For example, the repeated
use of absolutes and ‘zero’ primes cynicism and scepticism in humans.
Psychology of Goals: All goals have psychological effect, they are not neutral or objective
and have by-products and trade-offs associated with their trajectory. Higher order goals (e.g.
diligence, leadership, love), are non-measurable, while lower order goals (such as injury) are
measurable.
Regression to the Mean: The mis-attribution of meaning to statistics often results in giving
meaning to an aberration in data (e.g. fluctuations in injury data). For example, attributing
value to the coach yelling at the team at half-time when the team goes on to win the game.
Or attributing meaning to the presence or absence of a safety initiative for a lower injury
score. The mean score can only be known over time. For more on this: <http://www.social-
researchmethods.net/kb/regrmean.php>
Representativeness: A heuristic judgement based on perception of representational value of
some evidence. Often leads to overestimation or underestimation of risk, attributing value to
a random event. Also leads to ‘the conjunction fallacy’, that is, making connections between
events when there is none. For example, where lower injury score is equated with ‘safety’.
Risk Homeostasis: Identified by Gerald Wilde, this describes how humans compensate
or over-compensate for social psychological arrangements. For example, driving slower in
changed circumstances, taking greater risks through desensitisation (being less sensitive to
risk through habit and repetition).
Sensemaking: is about paying attention to ambiguity and uncertainty. Developed by Karl
Weick to represent the seven ways we ‘make sense’ of uncertainty and contradiction.
Social Psychology: A branch of psychology focused on the way social arrangements affect
decision-making and judgements. Not to be confused with organisational (psychology of
organisations) or clinical psychology (psychology of individuals) (<http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Social_psychology>).

Unconscious: processes of the mind which are not immediately known or made aware to
the conscious mind. The term subconscious is also used interchangeably and denotes a state
‘below’ the conscious state. The subconscious is more associated with psychoanalytics and
Freud, and is used pejoratively (negatively), while the notion of the unconscious is used
positively and more associated with Jung.
Wicked Problems: A wicked problem is an intractable problem. Wicked problems are
multi-layered, highly complex, multi-dimensional, unsolvable and require transdisciplinary
collaboration just to ‘tackle’ them.
Glossary 125
126 Leading in Risk
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Further Directions
This may be the end of this book but it need not be the end of the conversation in making
sense of risk. There is much more to think about and discuss on the Human Dymensions
blog, the link for which can be found on the Human Dymensions website: <www.humandy-
mensions.com>.
Post Graduate Program

Australian Catholic University
Psychology of Risk
Graduate Certificate Units
Unit 1. The Social Psychology of Risk Introduction (Face to face)
Unit 2. Leadership and the Social Psychology of Risk (On Line)
Unit 3. Communicating and Consulting About Risk (Face to face)
Unit 4. The Social Psychology of High Reliability Organisations (On Line)
Graduate Diploma Units

Unit 5. Implicit Knowledge, Culture and the MiProfile Diagnostic
Unit 6. Holistic Ergonomics, the Unconscious and Resilience
Unit 7. Learning in Communities of Practice
Unit 8. The Social Amplification of Risk
Masters by Thesis or Coursework

Unit 9. MiProfile Masterclass, Understanding Methodology and Writing a Social Psycho-
logical Critique.
Unit 10. Mentalities and Discourse Analysis, the Social Psychology of Culture Change
Unit 11. The Psychology of Conversion
Unit 12. A Field Guide to the Social Psychology of Risk

Training Programs Offered by Human Dymensions
Due Diligence Program
A three-day program on understanding and influencing organisational culture and responses
to risk. The program structure explores the culturally subjective nature of due diligence and
how organisations ought to influence the diligence of the workforce through ownership and
consultation.
iThink Program
A three-day workshop on critical thinking, understanding complexity, understanding the
unconscious, priming, framing and communications.
Leadership in Risk Program

The Leadership in Risk Program is an extended and longitudinal program that builds on
relationships with an organisation and extends over a number of years through monthly
visits, observations, training modules and coaching.
MiRISC Program
The Motivating and Influencing Risk Intelligence and Safety Capability Program is a
10-unit program that develops capability in the social psychology of risk.
MiProfile Learning Events

Human Dymensions are able to design a survey experience for you, including gap analysis,
benchmarking, focus group and ‘world cafe’ group learning.
PROACT Program - Psychology Risk Observations and Culture, Conversation

and Competency Training
A four-day program in perception, motivation, observation, coaching, unconscious priming,
framing, pitching and conversation skills development. This program targets the psychology
of risk in security and safety.
SEEK Program
This two-day program introduces participants to a new way of engaging in incident inves-
tigation. The program approaches the nature of investigation from an understanding of the
biases in observation and investigation itself.
Risk as a Wicked Problem

The Wicked Problems Program is a 4-day program that helps participants understand the
nature of problem solving and complexity. Participants learn a range of tools to both under-
stand, manage and ‘tackle’ problem-solving in organisations.
Tailor a Program to Suit You

The Human Dymensions team are able to facilitate the development of a unique program to
suit your needs.
137
The Authors
Craig Ashhurst
MPhil. (ACU), Grad. Dip. (UC), BA (Maq)
Director - Niche Thinking Pty Ltd (www.nichethinking.net.au)
Craig has a comprehensive mix of skills and experience. He has been involved in education
and training since 1980. His interpersonal skills were honed with a three year stint as a
youth-worker and counsellor. Forming his own company in 1995, Craig has worked in both
the private and public sectors, mostly with large organisations or departments. His company,
Niche Thinking has provided consultancy work with a focus on innovation, strategic
thinking, facilitation, design and translation between different disciplines.
Craig has a particular interest in ‘wicked problems’ and is currently engaged in writing up
research for his PhD thesis, while working part time.
Dr Robert Long
PhD., (UWS) BEd., (USA) BTh., (SCD) MEd., (Syd) MOH (La Trobe), Dip T., Dip Min.,
MACE,.
Executive Director - Human Dymensions Pty Ltd (www.humandymensions.com)
Rob has a creative career in teaching, education, community services, government and man-
agement. He is currently Honorary Fellow at The Australian Catholic University (ACU).
Rob has lectured at various universities since 1990 including University of Canberra, Charles
Sturt University and ACU National. He has also had a distinguished career outside of
academic life including Manager Erindale Evacuation Centre during the Canberra Bushfires
2003, Emergency Coordination Operations Group Beaconsfield 2006, Community
Recovery Beaconsfield 2006 and Risk Management Coordinator World Youth Day
(Canberra Goulburn) 2008.
Rob is the founding principal of the Galilee School which he established in 1996 to educate
the most high-risk young people in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). He was
Director of Youth, Community and Family Support services in the ACT Government and
has served on numerous Australian inter-governmental task forces, committees, ministerial
councils and working groups in areas such as gambling, crime, homelessness, indigenous
disadvantage, social infrastructure, child protection, youth-at-risk, drug addiction, prisons
and social justice.
Rob is engaged by organisations because of his expertise in culture, learning, risk and
social psychology. He is a skilled presenter and designer of learning events, training
and curriculum.

139
Notes

141
Understanding what happens in the space between those who lead and those who follow is the new
frontier in the leadership debate. In this book, the fourth in a series on risk, the authors focus on this space,
naming it ‘The Zone of Reciprocal Relationship’. They deliberately depart from the traditional leader-
centric approach that so dominates our thinking about power, authority and influence. This approach is
best captured in the ‘hero-myth’ model so familiar from ancient stories of myth and legend right through
to modern fantasies like Star Wars. In contrast, the authors present an alternative model, where the
emphasis is on mutuality between followers and leaders. For this reason they connect the ‘Following-
Leading’ dynamic in one hyphenated word, in which the hyphen becomes more the focus of interest than
the words it joins. What happens in this space ‘between’ is social, relational, ethical, educational and ‘risky’.
Since 2004, a change has begun in the leadership discourse, through the influence of social movements
evidenced by Wikileaks, GetUp, the Arab Spring, Snowden and the Occupy Movement. These social
movements have led to a shift in the balance away from the power of the leader toward that of the follower.
In The Art of Followership, Riggio says:
‘Too often, followers are expected to be agreeable and acquiescent and are rewarded for being so, when in fact
followers who practice knee-jerk obedience are of little value and are often dangerous. If I had to reduce the
responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak the truth to power. We know that toxic
followers can put even good leaders on a disastrous path – Shakespeare’s Iago comes immediately to mind. But heroic
followers can also save leaders from their worst follies, especially leaders so isolated that the only voice they hear is
their own.’ (2008, p.xxv)
In Australia in 2014, a litany of enquiries has revealed corruption in high places, in the church, politics and
unions. Faith in leaders is at an all time low. It is often the whistleblowers, followers and those in the ‘out-
group’ who are doing the leading. A paradigm shift is needed in leadership, especially as it relates to risk.
In the New Testament, Jesus says: ‘And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst
the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins,
and both are preserved. And no one, having drunk old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, The old is better’
(Luke 5:36-39).
The message in this series on risk is that risk makes sense. There is no learning through risk aversion.
As risk is a social activity, learning and discerning in risk must be undertaken communally rather than
individually. There is no hope in absolutes like zero and intolerance, but rather in adaptability, relationship
and mutuality. If the management of risk is to be humanised then heroics must go and reciprocity in
leading-following needs to be ushered in.
ISBN 978-0-646-92843-2
9 780646 928432 >

Following Leading in Risk

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Following-Leading in Risk

Dr Robert Long and Craig Ashhurst

Previous Books in the Series

Next Proposed Book in the Series

Dr Robert Long and Craig Ashhurst

A New Look At Leading............................................................................................... 1

The Power of Following in Following - Leading .....................................................33

The Following-Leading Adaptive Toolbox.....................................................................91

The Close - But It’s Not The Close........................................................................................ 119

Figure 1a. The Traditional Model of Leadership in Risk. ..................................................................... 6

Field Guide Postponed

About the Book Logo

A Special Note on Collaboration

xii Following-Leading in Risk

A Special Note on the term ‘Collective Coherence’

What This Book Is About

xiv Following-Leading in Risk

xvi Following-Leading in Risk

Structure and Use of the Book

Section One: Traditional Leadership vs Following - Leading

Section Three: The Following-Leading Adaptive Toolbox

xviii Following-Leading in Risk

We seem unable to unshackle ourselves from conventional and seductive

The Occupy Movement

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 3

The Paradigm of Traditional Leadership

Leadership in Risk: Accentuating the Hero

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 5

The traditional approach in practice (Craig)

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 7

The Hero Myth

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 9

The Leading-Following Dynamic

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 11

Interests of Social Psychology

Table 1. Interests of Social Psychology

Subject Interest - Suggested Researchers Subject Interest - Suggested Researchers

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 13

The Authoritarian Personality

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 15

Figure 3. Milgram Advertisement in Local Paper.

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 17

Figure 4. Arrangement of Experiment

Figure 5. Proximity Configuration

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 19

Figure 6. The Cognitive Dissonance Cycle

Chapter 1: Introducing Leadership, Social Psychology and Following-Leading 21

The Health Services Union and Corruption in High Places

Chapter 2: Ethics In Leadership 23

Victims of Abuse in The Australian Defence Force

Chapter 2: Ethics In Leadership 25

A Social Psychology of Ethics in Leading

Chapter 2: Ethics In Leadership 27

The Secret Transit Lounge (Craig)

Chapter 2: Ethics In Leadership 29

Violence: A Test of Ethical Method

Chapter 2: Ethics In Leadership 31

Football Following (Rob)

Chapter 3: A Focus On Following 35

Utopia and Dissent in South Australia (1829-1857)

Chapter 3: A Focus On Following 37

Visionary Middle Managers

Managing the In-between (dissolving the line of opacity)