We have been educated to have clarity in our plans, excessive rationality in our questions and solutions. Most of our tasks in school and college have been focusing on clearly structured assignments with little margin to ambiguity. Crises like COVID remind us that reality is not always predictable. Moreover, crises like COVID remind us that we can hardly always control reality. They also remind us that there are certain values that are objective and universal.
If we look at the last 100 days, where the world has so madly changed, all the three previous statements just came true. Nobody predicted the medical and economic emergency we are enduring (reality is not always predictable). Nobody has managed to be prepared to technically solve the effects of COVID – not yet at least (we can hardly always control reality). Nobody would have dreamed that in such an individualistic world, we would have seen an outpouring of solidarity and care for the weakest (COVID has reminded that there are untouchable and universal values that are always there and shared).
An idea, a book, a TED talk
I don't want to write long as there are many interesting articles out there. I want to suggest an idea to think about, a book to read and a TED talk to watch.
Idea: COVID is a reality check for our leaders. I believe the COVID crisis is a huge wake-up call to our leaders who have many times thought that they can plan the future, control the challenges at their will and set for other their own chosen values. A famous leadership author (De Pree) would say that the "first responsibility of a leader is to define reality".
This crisis could be a good learning process to grow in humility: the capacity to accept reality as it is. The first truth for leaders is that we can't always predict everything, we can't always control outcomes, we can't always impose our own values. Leaders should instead have a constant listening attitude to reality, should educate their capacity to gain support when they need it and should always respect the most authentic and deepest human values.
Book: The Abolition of Man by C.S.Lewis. He wrote it at the end of the Second World War and it became one of the most prophetic books about modern times. The Abolition of Man (which I discovered during my doctoral studies) explains how we can lose the capacity to think clearly if we forget the objective truths of civilization – the natural law or Tao.
This crisis could bring us back to reality. We live in a generation that greatly appreciates tolerance (acceptance of other people's values). However, if tolerance becomes relativism (the disappearance of common and objective values), our leaders lose the capacity to understand the priorities of their decisions. The many spontaneous responses of the society to the crisis have reminded the leaders that some values are universal and untouchable.
TED Talk: The Power of Vulnerability by Brene Brown. In this talk, Dr. Brown makes the point of how important it is to understand our own vulnerability in order to understand who we are. There is plenty of evidence that one of the most crucial traits of successful leaders is empathy.
Empathy grows largely with our capacity to understand our own fragility and failures (our vulnerability). The era of social media is an era of exposing ourselves us untouchables, as "unbreakable". The reality is that we need support, we need others. COVID will be a big wakeup call on this and might make a lot of leaders become better as they will learn to ask for help.
When C.S.Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man, he did it from his experience as an educator of big minds and leaders in Oxford. Even more, he did it during the peak of the Second World War. The reason probably is that Lewis understood that leaders need to be in full alignment with reality if they want to solve great crises.
Education plays a key role in building this capacity. Does our education system help our future leaders to understand that they are not self-sufficient, and that reality is not fully predictable and controllable? Does our education system allow our future leaders to train their capacity to adapt their behavior and thinking when reality requests it?
Crises like COVID can make a lot of people fall into cynicism, pessimism, passivity. Wilde defines a cynic as someone who "knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." The role of education is to help our future leaders to understand the value of things, their reality. This is important always but especially during times of big crises like COVID where leaders need to have clear priorities in their decision making.
For what I said about, it is clear to me that we will win the first battle against COVID in the health system, but we will win (or lose) the war in the education system. Because only through education we can help our leaders to see reality as it is.
Dr. Claudio A. Rivera, Associate Professor in Leadership at Riga Business School, Latvia