Metamodern Leadership

A History of the Seven Values That Will Change the World

James Surwillo, James Surwillo

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781635682199
• eBook ISBN: 9781635682205
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Metamodern Leadership outlines the seven values that identify the character of our future leaders based on the circumstances that make the Millennial Generation who they are. It is at once an attempt to implore youth to seize their potential by tying their values to ancient wisdom, as well as a warning to everyone else to understand the impacts of disregarding the inevitable tendencies of a very distinct new demographic. This is the untold story of the personal responsibility required of the Millennial Generation, against the messaging and memes that portray them as entitled and lazy. It is an optimistic and pragmatic interpretation on the leadership mandates in the near future. The ancient virtue of leadership required broad knowledge as the basis for critical thinking and self-examination. The late twentieth century required myopic versions of leadership, which neglected the truths of centuries of wisdom. Our younger generations will lead and follow based on new foundations that seem counterintuitive to most yet will be the status quo within a decade. This distinction will lead to pragmatism and problem solving for the future rather than the dogma and gridlock of today. We will require a generation of leaders who can once again link the complexities of the future with the ancient wisdom of progress.

Introduction

Metamodern Leadership

In recent years, leadership has become an industry, a discipline, and a philosophy that uses a mix of character and skills to encourage motivation to comply with a vision. Business school leadership curriculum has guided dry tutorials to apply to positions and insert into organizations. The leadership industry has thousands of “thought leaders” who have gained key universal insights of personal experience and expertise. Organizational culture has embedded leadership within its teachings and applications, which always prescribe static and eternal methods of success. The entire understanding of the constructs of modern-day leadership was developed and tested within the span of one small cultural era, which has no method to project the inevitable and drastic transformation of generational leadership change. As the current generation of the post-war baby boomers, who dominate our ideas of leadership, begin to retire, a new generation of leaders will begin to fill in the voids with completely new ideas and values. The way we understand leadership assumes that these new humans will assume the old roles without questioning its constitution. For the sake of continuity and progress, we must dig deep to fully understand the state of affairs that has formed our youth. The near universal mistake of the leadership industry is attributing past success to future standards, especially as it relates to a starkly different category of human beings.

Generation Y, or the millennial generation, are the adults who have come of age after the new millennium. They are the largest and most diverse generation in American history with ideas that contrast with the leadership status quo in nearly every manner. Most of the dialogue regarding this generation attempts to apply their current behaviors to current realities but are usually viewed through the context of a different era. Without question, their leadership models will be the status quo within a decade. The expertise of technology is always skewed toward the young. As the exponential pace of technology change increases, leadership in the near future will shift from experience to competence. Culture at large, consisting of all conceivable and inconceivable institutions and organizations, will transform in the image of a generation of new decision makers. Thus far, there has been no sincere interest or intellectual pursuit to understand this generation besides occasional articles that attack character or relegate their skills into obscurity. They have not engaged in a power struggle because they are an innately optimistic and pragmatic generation who understand that time is their only vehicle for change within existing structures. In their youth, they remain relatively apolitical. They were raised in a world where the individual has gained more power in nearly every aspect of their lives while simultaneously losing power politically. Twenty-five years ago, generational theorists William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted the “awakening” period indicative of the power of the youth of the 1960s, which would inevitably swing toward a “crisis” period, where power would be inaccessible to the youth by the second decade of the new millennium. The role of youth today is, instead, tending to institutions in new ways. Therefore, transparency and democratization of leadership as a means to power and progress will be their legacy.

In The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, “Since Cato the Elder, a certain type of maturity has shown up when one starts blaming the new generation for ‘shallowness’ and praising the previous one for its values.” Fareed Zakaria’s In Defense of a Liberal Education recounts that the Greek poet Hesiod called the young callow and morally unserious around 700 BC. Xenophon and Plato would later comment on the decaying virtues of youth. It may seem in fashion to highlight how the values of youth are out of touch with mainstream society, but it has gone on for at least 2,700 years. We always forget that the values and events of the past are directly connected with the present and future. Beliefs and experiences of a generation will be embraced or rejected based on the amount of truth perceived by the latter. Eventually and inevitably, worldviews develop, which define a generation. To a lesser extent, cultural norms, which define eras, have been changing at an exponential pace. The period of late modernism, for instance, was understood to be the one hundred years of industrialization from roughly 1850 to 1950, underscored by great cultural and technological progress. The postmodern period, a strange illiberal trance of decadence in the post-industrial decades, lasted from sometime in the 1950s to around the turn of the millennium. Generational periods remain unchanged in length, although cultural period timeframes are diminishing. This rarely studied phenomenon makes generational change in our current environment even that more drastic. Never before has the speed of cultural era been in competition with the static pace of generational change. Simultaneously, the largest generation in American history, which has shaped the country in their image, will begin to relinquish their leadership roles to an even larger generation.

Millennials, it is said, are unserious, lazy, entitled, and ignorant to the workings of the world. It is my attempt to refute these charges by explaining their origins, defining their values, and contemplating their possibilities. They just happen to be a generation at the right time and place to possess and act upon the great wisdom of the ages. The greatest generational power shift in America’s history is on the precipice, yet it has not been acknowledged because their power in the current context is nearly irrelevant. This is the great human interest story of our times, yet we are distracted because they seem more narcissistic than the Baby Boomer Generation, who were the original narcissists in their youth, or more coddled than Generation X, who were left to their own devices as children in the staunchly adult culture of the 1970s. Of course, the “micro-aggressions” of language, “trigger warnings” of unsuitable material, and “safe spaces” for psychological comfort are alarming. As I will uncover, these are the remaining pieces of the postmodern hyper individualistic dead ends that have been the cultural trajectory since before this generation was born. As our young adults mature, they are primed to gain a stoic nature that uses pragmatism to guide their idealism. In 1917, John Dewey taught the virtues of “practical idealism,” which has been defunct for generations. The grand idea of its return is best defined by Dewey as “aligning what is right with what is possible.”

Our youth is the most educated generation in American history and among the worst educated in American history in relation to the rest of the world. They are the first to literally compete with the entire world at the inception of their career. They have new and more requirements to be successful than any generation previous. They have, at once, more reasons to be happy and more barriers to happiness than ever before. Average in America was once successful to the world. Because of the displacements of jobs due to globalization and technology, starting wages and median wages are falling in the United States and rising in the rest of the world. This is less due to government policy and more due to the fact that the United States infrastructure has been built for decades and the possibilities for infrastructure throughout the developing world are much greater and much easier thanks to modern technology. The space in between is developing a generation of innovative and creative individuals who can solve the big issues, which have gridlocked organizations for years and now decades. Our most educated generation has within them the greatest repository of knowledge any group of humans ever has known. They also possess a device in their pocket, which may attain nearly every objective fact on earth. The ability to decipher truth in new ways is an exercise in creativity. Creativity leads to innovation, which is the cornerstone of every industry in the twenty-first century. Innovation gives us greater productivity, which translates economically to freedom and progress. That freedom is a virtuous cycle of purpose and passion, which allows us to embrace even more creativity.

In other words, the virtues of a liberal education, thought to be for most of the twentieth century an exercise in futility to display elitist knowledge in an intellectual capacity void of any progress or productivity, is actually the foremost requirement for everything, from science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines to art. A liberal education is an exercise in being “the complete man,” which allows freedom from ignorance. It is the ancient tradition of learning disparate knowledge to apply to the future. Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls it practical wisdom, in the vein of Aristotle, which happens to be in demand. The twentieth century had mostly been geared toward ever more specialization and skills based learning, which ran in contrast to the practical, varied, and project-based curriculum taught by our early twentieth-century visionaries such as William James and John Dewey. Famed biologist E. O. Wilson has said, “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world, henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.” Tony Wagner, an expert in twenty-first-century education and skills, sees the main issues as society still valuing the knowledge worker in the information economy. The knowledge worker was coined in 1959 by management visionary Peter Drucker, yet knowledge can now be searched for by anyone. Acquiring facts has no relationship to innovation. Acquiring wisdom by knowledge of various disciplines has the far better likelihood of innovation.

The original intention of the liberal arts was to become the “experienced navigator” in Plato’s analogy of the philosopher as leader in The Republic. Only the person who had knowledge of the ship, the weather, the water currents, the stars, and capabilities of the crew should have access to governance of the ship. In other words, a broad base of knowledge is ideal in order for action to have more truth. There are great social implications when power is bestowed at the hands of the ignorant. America’s founding fathers took Plato’s advice by separating political powers and electing representatives to prevent the “tyranny of the masses,” which Plato had feared. The great liberal tradition championed educating the masses for the advancement of culture. Thomas Jefferson once bragged, “Ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.” Nearly a century later, Victorian England still found itself mired in the social hierarchy mostly absent from American life. In the years after the American Civil War, educational reformer Matthew Arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy as a means to push society forward in the great liberal tradition of progress for all. To Arnold, education was the development and balance of human potential, accessible to all society. For nearly one hundred years, into the 1960s, the great liberal tradition of the pursuance of self-development in education for riddance of egocentricity, selfishness, and narrowmindedness for the greater good was the mark of education well done. The humanities, social sciences, and civics, however, eventually gave way to generations of facts and skills-based learning, which separated the great liberal trajectory of the west. The disciplines of STEM as presently administered were never rooted in culture as Arnold prescribes. Anarchy, in modern culture, is the narrowmindedness of the pursuance of a single discipline at the expense of the enlightenment possible by understanding all.

The breakdown of our institutions, organizations, and communities has risen in direct conjunction with the economic requirements for singular mastery of a subject. Schwartz says there is a “collective dissatisfaction” in nearly every facet of our society stemming mostly from most people knowing very little except what they know. In a slightly less complex world, most breakthroughs, whether they be in art or science, would be in that particular field or at least a direct adjacent. In today’s world, as told by Tim Harford in Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Cesar Hidalgo, a physicist, created a connected system of networks which outline capacities to grow in various economies. He used information seemingly unrelated from migration patterns to medical records to determine economic opportunities hidden to economists, and gaps certainly beyond the comprehension of anyone dictating public policy. Our next generation will have in their grasp counterintuitive breakthroughs that span the disciplines to enact solutions that seem impossible even by today’s advanced standards. Knowledge embedded inside our vast information systems has barely scratched the surface for mining new applications never before considered. Progress in the 1970s was a postmodern issue, which turned conservatively to skills-based learning and efficiency. Progress today is more in the realm of the grand narrative of human progress and wisdom rather than artificial manipulations of momentary economics.

The possibilities are endless, yet the judge and jury of the reputation of the next generation of leaders require some self-reflection of their own. Our mostly baby boomer leaders have taken politics from the middle to the extremes, and extremism as a whole in the world is growing under their watch. Science, the only perpetual consensus, is being doubted. Democracy, as the one and only great social order, is dying; the natural world is being destroyed; inequality is drastically rising, and risk aversion is making us safe and conservative at a time when releasing the fear of failure should be valued more than all. The 24/7 news cycle mixed with social media personalization leaves us scared and angry rather than optimistic and grateful. Complexity has caused our experts to be among the worst predictors at their subject matter. Imagination has no economic value even though every CEO begs for their employees to be more creative. Statistics, which helps the human mind understand degrees of certainty for the future, is lost in favor of algebra, which only helps the rational mind explain what is present. US debt is skyrocketing and personal debt is increasing as education costs at once rise and become more of a necessity. Personal wealth and long-term savings are nonexistent. The generation mostly casting aspersions has let all of this happen since they have reached adulthood. Their economic livelihood, however, which includes pensions, social security, and Medicare, rests with the success of the generation they attack and which they have never invested any meaningful possibilities of an economic future.

Leadership is as old as time itself, yet its modern constructs adhere to the rational and eternal. It has never needed to answer to its new multidisciplinary masters, living in what has been referred to as the metamodern period. Many twenty-first-century philosophers have come to understand that a new period in human cultural evolution has taken place within the past two decades. It can broadly be described as a reassemblage of the fragmentation of the postmodern. The worldviews of current leadership in every facet of our lives have been in place before the cementation of these new foundations. Therefore, the metamodern is and has been a place of reality; it is just not accessible to the vast majority of the powers that be. As science fiction writer William Gibson has said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The future mainstream is still disregarded as childish and immature, but that does not discourage its inevitability. Granted, there is a substantial population of youth that needs to align their values with their potential, a requirement of maturation, but that can be said about every generation since Cato the Elder. So leadership, as a discipline, concerns itself with capability, but the cutting edge of leadership thought should concern itself also with probability. August Comte said a century and a half ago, “From science comes prediction, from prediction comes action.” I base my entire theory on the fact that my science of generational change is a foregone conclusion of demographics. I ask the same question as Comte, “What would be the action?”

I began the journey searching the principles of metamodern leadership through researching proper education and training of current industry standards. With the incorporation of leadership as a key understanding of success and progress, I wanted to know the cornerstones, which included trust, goodness, and accountability. Through moral psychologists, I learned that morality underlying the same idea may be widely interpreted. This led me to the ethics of Aristotle, in which adherence would land you in jail for child abuse, and the morals of Nietzsche, which questioned the very understanding of goodness itself. Leadership is thus mostly an incantation of the times. A leader in the truest sense has no power over the individual. She only speaks the language compatible with the internal motivation of the individual that had been absent or improperly communicated. In chapter 5 of J. B. Bury’s 1921 masterpiece The Idea of Progress, he identifies the reality that progress is the trajectory of the history of the world, yet since human existence, it has not always been strictly linear in every facet. The overarching themes, however, are that science, technology, and the collective devices of mankind can initiate a social progress that benefits the circumstances of humanity at large.

Problem-solving in recent decades has been limiting not because of our capabilities but because of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call habitus. The hyperindividualism of the postmodern period has caused socially internalized dispositions. Physical and psychological stimuli act to reinforce the habitus of the individual. He claims we have been socialized in a very individual manner, which limits the actual shared potential of mankind. The various ideas of capital and power, which include prestige and reputation, allow for more cultural and social access into a new and various arrays of economies hidden to the generations of the past. The habitus of the postmodern period, which negated progress, never attached itself to the millennial generation. Cheap technologies and connection capabilities give every individual equal opportunity to access infinite ideas and surmount the limitations of the habitus from just a generation ago. Breaking free and expanding our views to inclu...

Table of contents

• Part I
• Part 2