Jeffrey S. Nielsen: Time to take back control of our lives

Seventy-three per cent of Americans have no confidence in their leaders and more than 60 per cent believe the United States is experiencing a leadership crisis, according to a survey by US News & World Report and the Centre for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. I believe a similar result could be found in most countries today.

The almost daily news stories about the corruption, incompetence, and poor judgment of some leaders, and the criminal activity that seems so easily to infect leadership practices, has created a growing sense that something is terribly wrong in our democracy and in our business corporations.

In almost every type of organisation we have observed some with leadership rank - the organisational elites - take advantage of their power and position to conceal the truth or to extract unfairly wealth and resources to benefit themselves, enrich their friends, and further their own ambitions. All of this comes at the expense of those beneath them.

But most people are optimistic, so the survey did show that those interviewed were hopeful better leaders would emerge in the future. Perhaps now is the time to ask why we believe future leaders will be any better than our present ones.

Is it possible that the fundamental cause of the troubles is our very model of leadership? Perhaps it is time to examine our nearly universal belief that leaders and leadership are necessary and begin to explore an alternative.

David Bohm, the late physicist and social thinker, first raised this possibility for me. "Though we have all been taught that society cannot function without leaders, maybe we can," he would say.

Under the "myth of leadership", a select few are privileged to monopolise the information, control most decision-making, and command obedience even through coercive and manipulative means.

This ideology creates the powerful belief that it is natural and correct that a few individuals should be anointed leaders and trusted to make the decisions.

So many of us willingly relinquish control of our choices and our own lives to someone in a position of hierarchical authority.

Even in democracy, we allow our elected representatives to govern in secrecy and the leaders of our democratic institutions to manage people and affairs, too often in an autocratic fashion.

There is an implicit judgment that leaders are somehow superior. An entire leadership industry helps to keep this illusion alive, while government and corporate hierarchies are set up to pamper with privilege those in executive positions.

When we use the word "leadership" we immediately create a ranked division that does not serve healthy, long-term organisational relationships.

The appointed leaders are saddled with impossible burdens, and the followers are left with few opportunities, or resources, for growth.

The heart of this problem is the corruption of communication. Genuine communication tends to occur only between peers and, more often than not, secrecy breeds corruption and abuse of power.

We tell people we think are superior only what we think they want to hear, and we tell people we believe are somehow inferior only what we think they need to know.

And that is directly tied to secrecy - keeping secrets from each other - because in the absence of full communication, individuals, out of insecurity, feel the need to defend their position by protecting what they know.

The remedy is not to find some new leader to whom we surrender our future but to create genuine peer-based organisations.

As long ago as Aristotle, it was recognised that the wisdom of the many is frequently better than the expertise of the few in making many types of decisions.

Today, the open software movement has realised the effectiveness of leaderless decision-making. They have a saying that to many eyes all bugs are shallow, meaning that the less centralisation and the more involvement and greater participation you can get in solving problems, the better the result.

The viability of the Linux operating system demonstrates the possibility of functioning well without rank-based leaders.

The answer, then, to our present leadership crisis is to replace the concept of leader and model of leadership with the practice of peer-based managing through peer councils.

Peer councils are similar to the elementary republics Thomas Jefferson endorsed at the founding of the United States. Unlike in his day, technology and the information processing capability make peer councils more realistic.

Jefferson's dream of decentralised self-governments might be possible through the implementation of a council-based democracy and peer-based work organisations.

The mechanics of managing work through this, whether administering government or business, requires learning the competency of peer deliberation, a competency we all can and should learn to take back our democracy and make our organisational lives more meaningful.

We are at a crossroads where we can make the choice to remain satisfied with surrendering information and decision-making authority, and control of our lives, to the next round of rank-based political and business leaders, or we can choose to create peer-based organisations.

Our human inclination to co-operate with others makes this possible - our human propensity to take advantage of others makes it necessary.

* Professor Jeffrey Nielsen is an organisational consultant with international experience who teaches philosophy at Brigham Young University and is the author of The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organisations.