Management, leadership and the arts
It is easy to believe that future historians—if there are historians in future—will see the first decade of the 21st century as a turning point. Certainly, many eminent thinkers already seem to do so, though they agree less about the nature of the change humanity is living through. For some, the attack on New York in September 2001 and its aftermath changed everything. For others, the drift of power towards China and India is what matters. Economists point to the 2008 banking crisis1 or the price of oil reaching $147 dollars a barrel. But historians may be more concerned with the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference; perhaps James Lovelock is right and humans have already lost the power to influence the conditions of their survival. That will be the real end of history. Slavoj Žižek worries about it all, which is why his latest book is called ‘Living in the End Times’.
from The Art of Uncertainty
This month’s Old Words are unusual, since they don’t get around to the arts until the last quarter of the essay, and even then the focus is theoretical rather than practical. The essay, written principally in 2010, was a reaction to the financial crisis of 2007-08 which I saw then, and still see, as a decisive turning point in modern history. Much of the chaos that has followed, from austerity to Brexit, from the Trump presidency to war in Ukraine, I believe to be directly attributable to how global leaders in politics and other fields misinterpreted that event and their actions in consequence. Thinking about that led me to read in fields with which I’m unfamiliar, including economics and management theory, and I learnt a lot, some of which went into this essay.
If you work in the arts, you might think this essay won’t have much to offer you, and who am I to say you’re wrong. I will say, though, that if you work in the arts the distinction between puzzles and problems, Ralph Stacey’s Edge of Chaos theory and Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle’s ideas about how artists act as leaders, might all get you thinking about what you do, why and how. You’ll find them in this essay, among other things
The Art of Uncertainty v.5 (06/22) is was originally commissioned in July 2010 and published online by NESTA and the Clore Leadership Programme. This version was published on 3 June 2022 at https://miaaw.net
François Matarasso 