Leadership lessons from the San culture

An associate asked me the past week to describe a couple of lessons to be taken from the San culture. He specifically wanted me to weave these lessons into a futuristic perspective upon the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution. While I am busy working on that particular scenario, and while I continue to grapple with the problem of how to illustrate my technology submissions on this forum with the graphics I need to explain essential concepts, I thought to share some of my observations about leadership lessons to be taken from the San culture.   I would like to combine this particular submission with one of my images of the famous White Lady of the Brandberg, found deep into the Brandberg mountains of central Namibia. Of course, it is trite that rather than a white “lady” this picture depicts a San shaman (medicine man). And I should add, an immense privilege to be able to regularly visit this mountain and to continue learning from this rich yet sadly now extinct culture.

The San culture had a deeply spiritual character that closely associated with the Cosmos in its entirety. As much as these people depended on the next meal from the surrounding environment, they looked up at celestial bodies for guidance, for consolation, for subjection when there was reason to do so, and for healing. This trait remains to me the primary leadership lesson from the San culture, and I will say more about it. Transplanted to present day, though, it is about stewardship of the earth, the atmosphere, and the rest of the Cosmos. It is about leadership towards sustainability, and what I’d like to term as “liveability”. I dearly hope an opportunity presents itself later to further unpack and scrutinize this particular notion. 

Expanding on this particular trait, is the history, functional roles and practices of the shaman role as this manifested in the typical San group. I cannot do justice to this role in a short submission, but serving as an intermediary between the San group and the spirits (in its widest sense) was the shaman. The shaman had the innate ability to open his/her senses to observe signals from the surrounding environment and to communicate with the spirits when it was necessary to do so, or when the opportunity presented itself. This went along with hunting festivities, with fires and with dancing, and of course with the ability of the shaman to go into a trance and to communicate with the spirits. Often this was the state of mind persisting when the shaman would do rock paintings, and this has led to immense and profound cultural and artistic riches in rock art across our sub-continent – serving as a dictionary and an encyclopedia of the San life and culture. For me, the leadership lesson in the above is that of the critical role now required of intermediaries between the multiple interest groups lobbying and pursuing their various agendas at local, regional and global scale. In particular, the ability to open up for various mediums of communication, whether tacit or obvious, whether between similar or widely different cultures and organizations, whether for significant stakes or the seemingly insignificant. From modern leadership is required an almost artful disposition towards the role of the intermediary. I hope it does not sound strange when I say that the modern leader as intermediary must adopt a stance akin to that of the shaman – I will expand on the personality traits I associate with this role if this was of interest to my audience.   

Yet more about the near-spiritual nature of the San culture is the fact that storytelling and play were key ingredients of sustenance, of education and of relaxation. Much has been written of these forgotten arts as the San practiced them. Of importance for now is that in their stories the San found it intuitively easy to equate people with animals, animals with people, animals and people with reptiles, insects and plants and again the other way around. There was a certain dynamism inherent to this culture, a pliability to exchange roles and to put the self into the shoes of the other, whether animate or indeed inanimate. Related to this was the immense strength and internal cohesion the typical San group was known for. Women generally enjoyed equal status with the menfolk and were highly regarded for their knowledge and skills by the group, which typically could range in size from only 10 to 30 souls or even more.  The leadership lesson herein for the world we live in is, among others, that dogmatism must be avoided, that paradigms evolve and replace each other, and that belief systems must be open for exchange and thought, and for accommodation of the other.  

For now, a final characteristic of the Old Culture I would like to describe was the principle of “sharing with caring”, closely associated with the notion of “affluence without abundance” (with credit to anthropologist James Suzman). Closely associated were the principles of equality, and egalitarianism in particular, which appears to have been an extraordinary characteristic of the typical San society.   Beyond the deeply spiritual dimension of the San culture, this for me was the most important characteristic of the First Peoples. Mainly, the typical San group would share among themselves whatever they had to share for sustenance.   Their practices were all aimed at harvesting just enough. And they did so with an almost intuitive spirit of collaboration and care towards themselves and their surroundings.  The San culture is, in fact, a wonderful if unique example of proving the tragedy of the commons irrelevant. It is going to require extra-ordinary effort of leadership to implant upon the world and generation X the same kind of spirit towards a more equal and just socio-economic dispensation.

 I have to conclude this short submission. I do hope that the equations I offer between San cultural practices and leadership lessons ring a bell to my connections. There is much, much more to be said about this narrative, but I have to suffice with the above.