Leaderlessness

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." Lao Tzu

Leadership means different things to different people around the world, and different things in different situations, it could relate to business, community, religious, political, and/or leadership of campaigning groups.

Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill encompassing the ability of an individual or organization to "lead" or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations.

The word "leadership" can bring to mind a variety of images, such as:

• A political leader, pursuing a passionate, personal cause
• An explorer, cutting a path through the jungle for the rest of his group to follow
• An executive, developing her company's strategy to beat the competition

"The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it." Mao Zedong

Leaders help themselves and others to do the right or wrong things. They set direction, build an inspiring vision, and create something new. Leadership is about mapping out where you need to go to "win" as a team or an organization; and it is dynamic, exciting, and inspiring.

Yet, while leaders set the direction, they must also use management skills to guide their people to the ultimate destination, in a smooth and efficient way.

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower

B. F. Skinner is the father of behavior modification and developed the concept of positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement occurs when a positive stimulus is presented in response to a behavior, increasing the likelihood of that behavior in the future. The use of positive reinforcement is a successful and growing technique used by leaders to motivate and attain desired behaviors from subordinates. 

Situational theory also appeared as a reaction to the trait theory of leadership. Social scientists argued that history was more than the result of intervention of great men as Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a Scottish historian, satirical writer, essayist, translator, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher suggested.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1906), an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era, concurred with Karl Marx (1818-1883), a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary, that:

"the times produce the person and not the other way around."

On the other hand, leaderless resistance, or phantom cell structure, is a social resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells), or individuals (a solo cell is called a "Lone Wolf"), challenge an established institution such as a law, economic system, social order, or government.

The non-hierarchical, decentralized organization is simple and difficult to stamp out. However, with the absence of a formal hierarchy and formal criteria for membership and affiliation, they are vulnerable to appropriation, false flagging or hostile takeover from the outside, since anyone can declare oneself a member of and affiliate with the group.

A covert cell may be a lone individual or a small group. The basic characteristic of the structure is that there is no explicit communication between cells that are acting toward shared goals. Members of one cell usually have little or no information about who else is agitating on behalf of their cause. Leaderless movements may have a symbolic figurehead. This can be a public figure, a multiple-use name, or an inspirational author, who picks generic targets and objectives, but does not actually manage or execute plans.

The concept of leaderless resistance was developed by Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, a former U.S. intelligence (CIA) officer, in the early 1960s. An anti-communist, Amoss saw leaderless resistance as a way to prevent the penetration and destruction of CIA-supported resistance cells in Eastern European countries under Soviet control.

Leaderless resistance was revived and popularized in an essay published by the anti-government Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member Louis Beam in 1983 and again in 1992. Beam advocated leaderless resistance as a technique for white nationalists to continue the struggle against the U.S. government, despite an overwhelming imbalance in power and resources.

Autonomic leaderlessness is the non-hierarchical, informal and distributed forms of leadership found in emancipatory social movements, and, in particular, in networked social movements. The Autonomist model is both enacted and, at the same time, disavowed by activists, which creates dissonance and internal tensions. Activists can transcend the fantasy of being leaderless and develop beyond being protest movements to engage in social change with greater agency…

"The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!" Chinua Achebe

Food for thought!