Cranfield School of Management
Interview: Professor Keith Grint
Keith Grint on Leadership
TT
So in essence there is not necessarily an essence of leadership,
there is just a platform for making a truth claim?
Grint
Yeah, I would agree with that, I don’t think there is an essence. I
don’t see how you can get to the essence, because you are still
basing that on accounts of individuals or leaders or situations or
explanations, rather than scientifically verifiable data, which is why
the book is called the Arts of Leadership because I don’t think there
is a science of leadership. There might be a science of
management, in the sense of trying to resolve organisational
problems through the application of science, but I don’t think that is
the same as the issue of leadership.
TT
So the leader/manager split – what is your view on that?
Grint
Well if your question suggests are there people who are leaders
and people who are managers, my answer would be no
– I think everybody involves themselves in both bits, but if there is a
division between the two I think it would be on that basis that
leadership perhaps might describe the way that individuals are
wrestling with really complicated, complex problems that don’t have
simple answers. Whereas management might be described as the
opposite of that ie, there is a way of understanding a particular
problem and that has worked before and therefore what we need to
do is reproduce that mechanism that worked before and that takes
as extreme cases of the difference between management and
leadership – one being the resolution of what often are called tame
problems and one being the understanding of wicked problems.
So if you use that as a heuristic device, not an account of reality,
but a way of understanding the difference between the two terms,
that would be the way that I would describe it at the extremes. But
these are points on a continuum, they are not really divisions in
reality.
TT
So management more programmatic and structured and leadership
more comfortable with the uncertain?
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Grint
Professor Keith Grint
Yeah, I think that is another way of thinking about leadership and
the success of leadership is about how comfortable people are with
uncertainty. If you are not comfortable with ambiguity and
uncertainty that very often, I think, makes you a poor leader in the
sense that there is a tendency therefore to search for the answer, to
search for the scientific answer and the absolute resolution of the
problem, rather than being comfortable with the fact that there might
not be a solution to this, or there might not be a complete solution.
For example, when the Buncefield fire broke out last year, Hemel
Hempstead, we know that when the first fire officers arrived they
could have treated this as either a tame problem or a wicked
problem. The tame problem approach is there is a solution to this,
it worked last time and let's just deploy it – that would be a
management task. So it would be there is a fire, let's put it out using
what we know works. The wicked approach to this problem would
be this is a fire that we have never seen before, of this category and
this size, and therefore there isn’t a simple scientific, well tried
solution to it and we know that when the fire officers got to
Buncefield they didn’t know how to put it out because it was an
extraordinary fire, they didn’t have the resources, they didn’t have
the skills and they didn’t know what the consequences would be of
putting the fire out with conventional means in terms of
contamination of the water. So they didn’t actually put the fire out
for 24 hours, they spent 24 hours accumulating people and data
and understanding and trying to work through some collaborative
solution to how on earth do we get this fire under control. So for 24
hours the fire service held the Buncefield fire as a wicked problem,
ie, a problem for leadership, there isn’t a solution to this, let's just
think about how we can get a grip of it. There isn’t a solution to it
that we have currently got in our backpack and we know that if they
try to put it out conventionally they would have actually made it
worse because they didn’t have either the resources or the
information about how to deal with it. So I think there are lots of
ways of understanding this issue of the importance of being
comfortable with ambiguity, of not desperately seeking the solution
to the problem as quickly as possible. And the other classic
example of this occurs in the Cuban Missile Crisis and there is a
point where the American military are trying to persuade Kennedy
to bomb Cuba within 24 hours before the missiles are armed with
their nuclear heads and Kennedy had treated this as a wicked
problem, so for the military it is a tame problem – we know what to
do, we have done it before, let's just bomb them, problem removed
because the nuclear weapons will be removed. And Kennedy’s
response is well what will happen when we bomb them, which is
how you would form it as a wicked problem – you ask questions,
you don’t provide solutions. And the American security advisers
said what will happen is they will resist, we will win, we will invade
and then Kennedy says what will happen then? And one of his
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Professor Keith Grint
advisers says well then something will happen probably in Berlin
and Kennedy says well then what will happen? So well there will
be a nuclear exchange and we will win. And Kennedy thinks this is
completely crazy, this is a tame solution to what is not a tame
problem. There isn’t a solution to this as we currently understand
it. He spends 24 hours with a group of advisers trying to work out
how else might we solve this problem other than bombing the
Cubans, because bombing the Cubans leads to a nuclear exchange
– that is not a solution. There has to be some other way, but he
doesn’t know what the other way is. So it’s a recognition in
yourself that (a) there is this huge ambiguity and (b) you don’t know
what the answer is. But that isn’t the issue. There isn’t an answer
to this – there might be a collective response to it eventually, so you
have to know what the process is that you might get to some
purchase on the problem. And that understanding that you don’t
need to know the answer, I think, is quite an interesting aspect of
leadership because we conventionally assume that leaders are
categorical, they are determined, they are strong, they are forceful,
they know what to do. And this example is precisely the opposite.
If Kennedy had known what to do we would probably not be here
now, so it's being comfortable with not knowing what to do is one of
the aspects of leadership.
TT
And yet from an education or leadership development point of view,
it would seem the whole educational structure is around
programmatic, structured ways of approaching it – so then how do
you instil an appetite for discomfort and uncertainty in that
consumer community?
Grint
I think the first thing is to challenge the notion of leadership which
implies something about strong and forceful leadership being the
way forward. So if we look at a lot of the current public debates
about leadership emanating from the government, they are really
about the importance of getting stronger, firmer, more decisive
leadership in our public services. And yet the framework for that is
target setting. So what the government, in my opinion, seem to be
doing is suggesting that we need strong decisive leadership, but
actually what they are really implying is strong decisive management
- it is the management of the target setting which is what they are
looking for. So then the question is how can you – going back to
your point – how do you generate that kind of appetite for that level
of ambiguity and how do you deal with it? I think one way of
understanding that is to go back to Aristotle’s divisions between
episteme and phronesis – so for Aristotle you can teach things like
skills and knowledge by episteme – you can do most of that either
in the classroom or you can get people to repeat craft works and
you develop technical skills, but the issue of phronesis or wisdom or
prudential leadership for Aristotle is not something that you can
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Professor Keith Grint
teach. You can’t teach people to be wise and for him you have to
experience life to know how you might attempt to resolve a problem
is a particular situation that doesn’t have any framework around it.
So, I think the issue would be, first of all to recognise that there are
certain things that you can’t teach, so leadership programmes in
this format don’t teach wisdom, they teach skills and techniques,
but they don’t teach wisdom and wisdom has to be learnt through
doing the job ie, you have to lead to learn how to lead. You have
to know when you can apply certain kinds of aspects of techniques
and skills and understandings and all that kind of issue. So the first
thing would be to recognise that you can’t do it all and the second
thing is to provide opportunities for people to learn wisdom and the
learning of wisdom is actually about learning to fail, as well as
learning to succeed and one of the things that we don’t do – in my
opinion – we don’t allow people to fail and learn through failure. If
you look at what happens to politicians or civil servants or leaders
or anybody in the public eye who dares to fail, they become
castigated, they become crucified in the public domain and that can
only make sense if we assume that people are perfect, that they
shouldn’t make mistakes. So the role of the leader therefore is to
be decisive and not to make mistakes, whereas this approach
implies that the role of the leader is to accept a level of humility,
which implies that you are bound to make mistakes and to actually
understand that through making the mistakes you become wiser.
So you have to set frameworks and understandings and
educational opportunities where people can learn to take risks and
fail and still survive, and we tend not to do that. We tend to avoid
the learn through failure route. That is how we learn to live through
life, through failure, but when it gets to an educational framework
this is something which is far too risky.
TT
So the platform you occupy right now – Professor of Leadership – is
really an ambassador or an enabler of doubt and uncertainty? Or
someone that can press the pause button as it were?
Grint
Yeah, in that sense, I don’t think you can teach wisdom except in so
far as you can teach people that wisdom is not something that can
be taught – so I think that probably would be right, that it's about not
casting doubt about the fact that we can do anything – I think it is
much more of a pragmatic issue, it's about understanding that there
probably isn’t a perfect solution to this problem, that there might be
a good enough solution to this problem. But a good enough
solution is probably not necessarily in your knapsack, it probably
isn’t something that you have been around before and it isn’t
something you can get out of a book and you might have to go
round the circle once and perhaps fail to be able to do it the second
time. It’s a bit like – in that sense – the kind of car driving
metaphor. You are not going to be able to drive a car perfectly the
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Professor Keith Grint
first time. You are at some point going to hit something, let’s just
hope that we have got the educational mechanisms so that when
you do hit something it’s the garden gatepost, it isn’t some other
poor driver and only through hitting the garden gatepost at one mile
an hour do you understand that you can’t do this at seventy miles an
hour and survive it.
TT
Where is your thinking going in terms of future research – your next
book? What are you looking to explore further?
Grint
I am working on the issue of the role of sacred and there is
something about the sacrificial aspect of leadership which I think is
quite intriguing in that it runs back into this notion of responsibility
and the avoidance of responsibility – so that is one aspect. The
other aspect I am looking at is leadership development. So trying
to understand – spend globally, something like 50 billion a year on
leadership development, which is a huge amount of money and
there is not a huge amount of research looking at whether that
money is well spent – so what I am trying to look at is the
comparative analysis of different leadership programmes to
understand what their philosophy is, what they are trying to achieve
and how they might measure what they can achieve and the
measurement system is the most difficult. It is almost impossible to
measure what difference these kinds of programmes make to
people – people are very often happy to have done them and
allegedly got something out of it, but precisely how you might
measure that is extraordinarily difficult. So it may be that there is
an issue here about the level of trust that you require rather than
the level of scientific management. Is the search for a
measurement some kind of metric of leadership development? Just
one more problematic approach to leadership development? Is that
the problem that we are desperately searching for this measure and
through the importance of the measure that actually begins to
distort the leadership development. So it is not that searching for
the measurement is a waste of time, that may well be the case, but
searching for the measurement then begins to generate a different
approach to the development. It’s the measurement system that
generates a new world and is that new world the way that we
should be doing it? So it’s a kind of philosophical understanding of
what leadership development is all about rather than searching for
the holy grail of how do you measure, it’s looking at what is the
consequence of looking for the measure.
Transcript prepared by Learning Services for the Knowledge Interchange
www.cranfield.ac.uk/som
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Produced by the Learning Services Team
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© Cranfield University 2007