Leadership, creativity, & truth-saying in an age of: Safety--Part 1, Moral Confusion--Part 2, & Building Cloisters rather than Warrior Spirit--Part 3
I have enjoyed receiving the responses to these articles both the public ones and the private ones. I consider the “Warrior Spirit” article really important. Others have too, but they have asked me to revise it to make it easier for those who are not accustomed to reading moral philosophy. Some have promised that if I did that, they would have friends look at the article. Nothing could be better for us all. Therefore, I have made revisions to do just that.
In Part 1 of this fifth of a series of special briefings, Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting looks at what is happening to leadership, creativity, and truth-saying in our age which is raising the moral importance of safety both because of COVID-19 and generally. In part 2, he will point out the moral confusion caused by the elevation of safety which blinds us to moral luck. In Part 3, he will look at how in our blindness we try to create safe institutions—cloisters—when we need to revive our warrior spirits, especially as we leave our lockdowns.
Part 1: The Moral Elevation of Safety
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.
T. S. Eliot, 1925
Stop and consider for a moment the words that, like Claudius’s poison in Hamlet, are draining into our ears. Listen to this recent statement to US Congress from the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell:
The number one thing, of course, is people believing that it’s safe to go back to work so they can go out,” said Mr. Powell. “That’s what it will take for people to regain confidence.1
Is that what the confidence of US people depends on? Do they need to know it’s safe in order to go to work and make a difference in the world? Remember when people thought that we in the US had a pioneer spirit? Though not fashionable, there was something to it in the willingness of US people to leave home communities and the self-sufficiency they sought. We took the pioneer’s risks. Some still do. Consider all the people currently on the frontlines? Do they have to know that they are safe? Consider too fire fighters, police officers, and soldiers. Look at a list of the most dangerous jobs.2 It is topped by fishers (formerly fishermen) and loggers. How safe are they? Do we write them off as simply having made their own oddball risk and reward assessments? I think not. I think we feel solidarity with those whose daily work risks safety and benefits us. That’s why we in New York cheer our healthcare workers at 7 PM. So how much safety do Americans really need “to regain confidence”? Of course, no one wants recklessness. We want all workers trained and equipped with the best tools and procedures.
Let’s stick, for a moment, with COVID-19 and safety. That’s what Jerome Powell was talking about. As I revise this text, we have in the US a population of 328.2 million and 104,000 COVID-19 deaths, about 31.6 per 100,000. That’s lower than the 44.3 on-the-job deaths of refuse collectors per 100,000 (fifth most dangerous). Of course, COVID-19 deaths are growing. Let’s suppose, as some suggest, that the number of US COVID-19 deaths will reach 250,000. That would leave us with 76 deaths per 100,000 people, still less than on-the-job deaths of fishers (77.4) and loggers (97.6). To start doing valuable work again, I think many of us would, at least for a few months, risk death at the rate fishers and loggers risk it for most of their careers. I believe that even those who do not think their work valuable would do the same in solidarity, but I am not prepared to argue for that here.
Timid in business and life
I’m writing, however, about a deeper problem. As we drink in the new thinking about safety and raise it to a high, life directing moral evaluation (not simply a prudential one), we fall into moral confusion over right and wrong and finally end up timid in business and life.
COVID-19 is only the most recent spur to the elevation of safety among moral evaluations. Safety took a giant leap up in 2015 with Google’s oft-cited study by Julia Rozovsk. The “People people” at Google asked the question: “What makes a Google team effective?” The answer: “Psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics.”3 What is psychological safety? Feeling safe, says the study, means that team members can take “risks” without worries about insecurity or embarrassment.3 I can’t tell what “risk” means in such a world.
Moving forward, Laura Delizonna writing for the Harvard Business Review in 2017 treats Paul Santagata, Head of Industry at Google, as a superstar when he reports the findings of the earlier article and adds: “There’s no team without trust”. (Trust and safety are joined because we trust that our team members will not make us insecure or embarrass us). Delizonna adds:
Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off—just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs.4
Cutting heads off
I love Delizonna’s invitation to look at cutting heads off. What does history show about that and creativity? Let’s take my favorite creative, William Shakespeare. As he rode into London, he saw on London Bridge the heads of Catholics on pikes. His father was a Catholic. Two of the heads on pikes were kinsmen.5 Nevertheless, many of his top market breakthroughs, including A Midsummer’s Night Dream and Hamlet, show distinct Catholic sympathies. No psychological safety there. I’ve already written about the 1,000-year, risk-filled tradition of speaking your mind, otherwise known as telling truth to power. Socrates was killed for it; Plato sold into slavery. Read about Einstein’s safety in my First Truth briefing.
But surely I’m being unfair. Delizonna is not speaking about such freaks of nature as Shakespeare, Socrates, Plato, and Einstein. She is writing about, as she explicitly says, “moderate risk-taking”. Let’s look at that. In my review of the academic literature on the successful management of average creatives and risk takers, I found with the exception of a few,6 most organizations whose employees are creatives—theaters, restaurants, recording companies—successfully manage creatives by realizing that creatives need to be creative, can’t negotiate around that. These organizations negotiate with the understanding that so long as they offer creatives a bare platform for the expression of their creativity, creatives will give in on other demands. Normally, creatives go to work each day fearing that they will be replaced.7 There’s no psychological safety for your average or even near great actors, chefs, or recording artists.
Creatives in other industries are treated largely the same. Read about how Nike founder Phil Knight treated Jeff Johnson. He gave him a platform to serve runners and virtually no support and few shares.8 I think that deep down deep, we know this fact about managing creatives and truth sayers. We know that those who absolutely need a platform to exercise their creativity or truth-saying have poor negotiating positions. Creativity and truth-saying is not for them an option. Isn’t that negotiating disadvantage at least partly how we explain to ourselves the famous #MeToo actresses? They were at a disadvantage in negotiating to get a stage for their craft.
In the next part, we will think about moral luck, whose clarification is one of the most interesting philosophical developments of the last 50 years. We will then look at the necessity of moral risk-taking, which precedes moral luck, for creativity, truth-saying, and leadership. Prepare to think through some knotty moral problems.
Notes
1 Wall Street Journal, 19 May 2020
2 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-according-to-bls-data.html or https://www.themarlincompany.com/blog-articles/dangerous-jobs-2019/.
3 The Five Keys To A Successful Google Team, re: Work with Google, November 2015
4 Harvard Business Review, 24 August 2017
5Greenblatt, S. Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., pp. 173 & pictures between pp. 192 & 193 for Visscher’s engraving.
6 Austin, R., Hjorth, D., & Hessel, S. (2017). How aesthetics and economy become conversant in creative firms. Organization Studies, 39, 1501-1519.
7 Eikhof, D. & Haunschild, A. (2007). For art’s sake! Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28, 523-538. Thompson, P., Jones, M., & Warhurst, C. (2007). From conception to consumption. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28, 625-640. Townley, B., Beech, N., & McKinlay, A. (2009). Managing in the creative industries. Human Relations, 62, 939-962. Cnossen, B., Loots, E., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (2019). Individual motivation among entrepreneurs in the creative cultural industries. Creativity and Innovation Management, 1-14. Svejenova, S., Mazza, C. & Planellas, M. (2007). Cooking up change in haute cuisine. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28, 539-561.
8 Knight, P. (2016). Shoe Dog. New York, NY: Scribner.
Leadership, creativity, and truth-saying in an age of:
The moral elevation of safety (Part 1),
Moral Confusion over Moral Risk (Part 2),
and Building Cloisters rather than Warrior Spirits (Part 3)
In Part 2 of this fifth briefing, Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting explores the deep moral confusion that flows from our elevation of safety; it blinds us to the importance of moral risk and its attendant luck, as uncovered by the philosopher Bernard Williams. With out clear sight of moral risk, we are beginning to lead cloistered lives.
Part 2: Moral Confusion and Moral Luck
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
John Milton, 1644
In the last briefing, we looked at the elevation of safety into a moral value by those thinking about COVID-19 and then also by those in business thinking about what atmosphere is best for creatives and truth-sayers. Google and Google disciples have promoted safety as the bedrock for creativity and truth-saying. I pointed to Shakespeare, Socrates, Plato, Einstein and even today’s actors, chefs, musicians, and running shoe designers to show that safety is not the basis of their success and that the greatest have defied safety. To wish for safe risk and trust without the possibility of betrayal is to wish for roses without thorns.
Roses without thorns
Outside of Google, life is not set up so that we can take risks with safety, have trust without the worry of betrayal, or enjoy roses without thorns. To think otherwise is not just to be naive; it is to miss out on an important—I would add, beautiful—feature of moral life, the possibility of moral luck, which the late, great philosopher Bernard Williams brought out clearly for us.1 Results matter not only just economically but morally.
Before making the philosophical claim about ends mattering morally, I need to say a few words about what moral philosophers are doing with their reasoning and examples. Moral philosophers tease out our moral intuitions about what is right and what is wrong. They are interested in intuitions that guide our moral judgments without our awareness. They can work at the level of a single intuition, which we will do here, or work at the meta-level of why we hold a set of intuitions as moral or not. Thus, in the examples that follow, the point will be to determine one’s moral intuition under the constraints given in the examples. In the first example, it is not a matter of figuring out what criminal or tort law would say but what you sense is right or wrong independent of the law. In the second case regarding Gauguin, stick with the constraints of the made-up story. In fact, Gauguin’s wife kicked him out, and he treated people in Tahiti terribly.
Great moral philosophers write boldly when they make both their strongest and their weakest claims. If they are wrong, they want to be shown to be clearly wrong. Hence, Bernard Williams names his discovery moral luck. For most people, luck is repugnant to morality. When we say that someone is a good person, we are speaking as much as possible about that person’s core, and we are certainly not saying that the person is lucky. To think otherwise seems precisely to give up any sense of morality. In contrast, Bernard Williams tells us that when we think that way, we are blind to the way we make genuinely moral judgments. Think of his philosophic statement as in a in a comic book. Moral luck! Bam! As the argument goes, Williams shows that though they normally avoid them, at certain points in people’s lives, they take moral risks (my tamer term). They commit to an action whose outcome they cannot anticipate and for which they know they will be judged morally by others and by themselves. As a simplest instance, I decide to put off fixing my brakes today though I know they are in bad shape. We can agree that this is a bad act, but it could become really bad. Let’s turn to the examples.
Suppose person A and person B are both negligent about repairing the brakes of their cars. They spend the money, let’s say, on gifts for their dying grandmothers. As A drives through an intersection, the light changes, and her brakes fail. However, she sails through free as a bird. Person B is not so lucky. In the same circumstance, his brakes fail, and he runs over a pedestrian. Many like me—but not everyone—feel that person B is morally culpable for more than person A. Both are culpable for negligence. B however should be judged guilty by others and himself for taking a life and therefore should suffer the economic and moral consequences.
I hold the same for the positive side. Williams’s favorite example is a romanticized Gauguin. Gauguin had a wife, five children, and a failing career as an artist. He sensed he needed a whole new, non-bourgeois inspiration, and hit on Tahiti. He abandoned his family, ran off to Tahiti, and produced the great art that we all know him for. Did he do the right thing? Or should he have stayed with his family and produced poor art. Assume those are the only choices. The only way you get the great art is to have the roguishness of Gauguin. (The same could be said for Steve Jobs.) Which seems more right to you to have the great art and a nasty rogue or to lose the great art and have a conventional bourgeois marriage? If it seems like an easy choice, then Williams and I have made a mistake in setting out the thought experiment. Put crudely, you need to break eggs to make an omelet. If it is wrong to break eggs, then it is wrong to make omelets. We might punish egg breakers and enjoy omelets, but I don’t think any would call that a moral stance. Those like me say that the greatness of the art—the way it has increased beauty and changed our evaluation of bourgeois values—says that Gauguin did the right thing in following his inspiration. We may regret the injury to his family, but Gauguin did the right thing.
To take a less romanticized version, Churchill sacrificed all the soldiers in Calais to try to save the British army at Dunkirk. It was a desperate move, unlikely to succeed. Failure would have been disastrous, the loss of both the army at Dunkirk and the troops in Calais.2 Churchill had, in fact, taken a similar moral risk before at Gallipoli and lost. Many reviled him as an immoral wrongdoer who loved war more than peace. Churchill himself acknowledged he had acted immorally at Gallipoli; he was “too ready to undertake tasks that were hazardous or even forlorn.”3 Only the threat of Hitler could persuade the English to accept him as Prime Minister, and it was a close call. If you accept moral risk, you say with me that Churchill did the right thing with the troops at Calais, perhaps changed the course of the war, and should have only the moral regret at the loss of the troops from Calais. He is good. Had he failed, I would see him as an moral wrongdoer with a callous disregard of life. That’s how life and history work.
Bernard Williams and I are not simply saying that ends justify the means. Normally, when we say that the ends justify the means, we mean to say that the anticipated ends justify the means. That’s the reasoning behind the COVID-19 lockdown, which abrogates rights of free assembly. The ends of the lockdown—the saving of lives and hospital space—are clear at the outset and justify the temporary abrogation of rights. In the moral risk cases, neither person B nor Gauguin nor Churchill had anything like clarity around anticipated ends. B, Gauguin, and Churchill could only hope for a good outcome in some shape. They took a genuine moral risk, and person B suffered bad moral luck, while Gauguin and Churchill experienced good moral luck.
Moral risk is part of life
Who disagrees with advocates of moral luck? Rational moralists like Kantians believe that there are rational principles such as the golden rule always to be followed. Similarly, utilitarians believe that you do the right thing if you make a responsible calculation in advance of the greatest good for the greatest number and then act on it. There are also non-philosophers, my personal doctor, some VISION associates, and no doubt all who hold by Google’s thinking, who just recoil against the unfairness of moral luck. They claim that person A and person B should receive the same penalty and suffer the same moral guilt for negligence in taking care of their brakes. Likewise, moral luck rejectors will claim that Gauguin should not have fled even if it meant giving up the great art the world now has. Since COVID-19 moves us to raise our evaluations of safety, it certainly militates against taking moral risks? No moral risks, no moral luck. Just how important is moral luck anyway?
Let’s apply the lessons of moral luck to those who are making market breakthroughs and speaking their minds (speaking truth to power). In almost all cases, a creative achievement or telling truth to power requires breaking a convention. Conventions have moral content. They are the right things to do. Frequently, you cannot anticipate the outcome when you break one. Therefore, you take a moral risk, that’s exactly what creatives, truth-sayers, and (I add with explanation to come) leaders have to do.
Those of us who accept that moral risk is part of life say that, based on the results of your moral risks, you will rightly be judged good or evil, brilliant or a jerk (or fool). But what does it look like when, in the name of psychological safety, management tries to remove the negative judgment from moral risk taking? Person A takes a moral risk with a marketing campaign that breaks a privacy convention. Person B takes a moral risk with a marketing campaign that breaks a similar privacy convention. Person A’s campaign succeeds gloriously with huge financial rewards. Person B’s campaign fails with huge financial losses. However, in a world that esteems psychological safety, both A and B deserve the same reward for their bold creativity. Only Google might have enough money to pay meaningful bonuses on such a psychologically safe bonus scheme. I am doubtful that Google really does that. But if it does, then I would follow the poet John Milton in calling Google a cloister.
Cloisters and the real world
Why a cloister? The poet John Milton coined the term “cloistered virtues” for virtues that one could only successfully cultivate and maintain within a cloister.4 For most of us in the world, breaking a convention and thereby causing a huge financial loss might well bankrupt our companies. Moreover, we would expect and want to feel the moral emotions of guilt, shame, and embarrassment if we did that. Wouldn’t we be moral monsters, indeed, psychopaths if we felt none of those moral feelings? And we would expect our colleagues to act on moral evaluations like our own. Likewise, when we dare to break with a convention that leads to better lives for most and huge financial gains for our organizations, we would feel morally justified in feeling we had done the right thing. We changed the world, and that is a good beyond our bold creative intention.
I hope you are coming around to seeing that raising the moral value of safety reduces moral risk-taking which in turn reduces both moral good and bad luck. I hope to that you see how creatives and truth-sayers take the moral risk of breaking with conventions. If we think of Churchill, we will have some reason to believe that political leaders have to take moral risks. In the next part, I will claim that business leaders do so as well. If we all acknowledge so much, what are we to do with the elevation of safety Google advises? My answer to that question comes in part 3.
Notes
1 Williams, B. (1981). Moral Luck. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
2 Churchill, W. (1959). Memoirs of the Second World War. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 266-267.
3 Churchill, W. (2015). The World Crisis Volume 1. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, p. 240.
4 Milton, J. (1957). Complete Poems and Major Prose. Indianapolis, IN: The Odyssey Press, p. 728.
Leadership, creativity, and truth-saying in an age of:
The moral elevation of safety (Part 1),
Moral Confusion over Moral Risk (Part 2),
and Building Cloisters rather than Warrior Spirits (Part 3)
In Part 3 of this fifth briefing, Dr. Charles Spinosa from VISION Consulting turns to looking at the ways we cloister ourselves in our elevation of safety, deprive ourselves of moral risk-taking, and then can only break out by reviving our warrior spirts to build our teams and organizations fearlessly.
Part 3: Breaking out of our cloisters by reviving our warrior spirits.
Our deepest insights must—and should—appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1885
As I claimed in the second part of this briefing, speaking truth to power and taking creative acts almost always require breaking conventions, and that means taking moral risks. When we take moral risks, we set ourselves up to face moral evaluations, which will praise or revile us. Giving safety a high moral evaluation takes us out of the moral risk-taking business and puts us in the cloister where our refined morality judges only our desires and intentions and not our actual acts in the world. I call this way of thinking a deep moral confusion about what really matters morally.
Yet that conceptual confusion is not what troubles me most. I am most disturbed by the many people who are trying to turn their businesses into cloisters and succeeding at the transformation. As Churchill said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” As a workaday consultant, I travel from company to company and hear the new litany: “I can’t do that because there are a bunch of people who will oppose it.” “I can’t say that because most people do not have the background to understand it.” “I can’t act that way because I no one has my back.” “I can’t make this vital change because I do not have a consensus.” “To succeed, we absolutely need to change the process here, but we don’t have Finance behind us.” And my favorite, because it is so devious and seems to support moral risk-taking, is this: “I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission.”
Do you hear the wobble in the last banality? A person who takes moral risks and fails, knows she has committed an bad act. In the world where actions matter, she can ask for leniency, but she would not want to ask for forgiveness. She wants to face a lenient version of just desserts. It’s in the cloister of safety where one asks for forgiveness and generally receives it. Just to be extra clear, when people start speaking in the ways just rehearsed, they are not speaking merely prudently. They are not saying, “At this moment, it is not prudent to take the risk. It is however a risk worth taking, and I will find the moment.” They are saying that it’s wrong to take the risk. Why do I say that? About half the time, they tell me, “We are trying to build a safe environment here. Haven’t you read the Google article?”
Speak to the warriors
When I hear these expressions, I urge my clients to speak to someone used to taking on difficult odds, like a warrior. These people will say: “It’s worth doing in part because most people oppose it.” “It’s worth my while saying this because people don’t understand it yet.” “Since no one will have my back, I’ll stand for what I believe in and take on the whole group alone.” “Because we can’t reach consensus, I will act.” “Because this action is necessary, we should take it now and bring Finance along later.” And lastly: “I’ll ask for high honors if I succeed and no more than justice if I fail.”
Not just creatives and truth-sayers, leaders too
We have leaders today, and in the recent past, who take moral risks like warriors. Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Elon Musk, Ray Dalio, or looking back a little further, Anita Roddick, Steve Jobs, and Winston Churchill. By my rough calculations by reading biographies, leaders like these take about three moral risks a year. To show his absolute devotion to raising the performance requirements with each new hire, Bezos retired his founding employee.
What is it like to take moral risks?
What is it like to live like this? Churchill’s memoirs come closest to giving a solid answer.1Most do worse. However, we have a savior who can give us a far richer sense of what the heart of a moral risk-taker is like. William Shakespeare, the poor creative who faced real beheading, takes us directly into the heart of the moral risk-taking by bringing us into the heart of a warrior spirit.
Let’s look at a few lines from Henry V. King Henry gives his famous speech to the English troops as they face five-to-one odds. He accepts the risk and asks others to do the same.
Westmerland: Of fighting men they have full threescore thousand.
Exeter: There’s five to one; besides they all are fresh.
Salisbury: God’s arm strike with us! ‘tis a fearful odds.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Westmerland: O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
King Henry: What’s he who wishes so?
My cousin Westmerland? No, my fair cousin.
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honor.
God’s will, I pray thee wish not a man more.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Rather proclaim it. Westmerland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart, his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us. (Henry V, 4.3.3-39)
Watch the whole speech, as Kenneth Branagh delivers it.2 Watch it daily if need be. Shakespeare’s second Hennriad of which Henry V is the final play starts with Bolingbroke (Henry IV) taking the huge moral risk of dethroning Richard II. It ends more gently with Henry V persuading Kate (the French Princess) that together they will take the moral risks of changing social conventions: “Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion” (5.2. 269-270).
Do you have a number of opponents to your proposal? Will you be misunderstood the next time you speak your mind and heart? Will those standing behind you flee when the going gets tough? Would it be nice to have sweet consensus over cold decision? Yes to all.
Let us stop building cloistered businesses out of safety and easy trust. Give those virtues no more than their due in the rough and tumble world where we make a difference. Elevate safety when learning a new skill or conducting a momentous Truth and Reconciliation process; otherwise, keep it inside routines. Seek nobility. Cultivate courageous organizations. Consider this: Where do you want to be when first responders, loggers, fishers, and refuse collectors say that they would not die in the person’s company who fears fellowship to die with them? Let’s not fear such fellowship. As we leave our cloistered lockdowns, let’s build with warrior spirits.
Notes
1 Churchill, W. (1959). Memoirs of the Second World War. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 266-267.
2 Henry V – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM&t=65s