Bridging the gulf between sustainability norms and
leadership theory
Geoffrey Ahern
University of Liverpool, UK
geoffrey@working-planet.com
Abstract
The article considers adaptive and transformational leadership theories and through a critique
of them identifies sustainability leadership potential. Adaptive theory is not as close to
sustainability sense-making as initially appears, but can be an aspect of it; and
transformational theory, when immature projections are withdrawn, potentially has a
developmental connection with sustainability leadership. The article raises awareness of
apocalyptic interpretations, including ones if devastating scientific environmental predictions
are borne out, and identifies a contrasting longitudinal leadership possibility involving the
introjection by followers of split off charismatic and apocalyptic energies. The leadership
development places irrational resistance to scientific measurement and adaptive
disequilibrium in a broader ecological context with risk management and responsibility at its
heart, and brings the potential for an owned, and thus integrated, inspiration in an extended
self. It complements the transactional culture best suited to the sense-based corporate task of
supply chain and physical environmental measurement.
Keywords
leadership, sustainability, environment, apocalypse, green
There is a gulf between sustainability norms and leadership theory despite predictions by the
world scientific consensus of environmental devastation by the end of the century. Finding
responsible, integrated and inspirational leadership solutions is thus essential. The article
considers adaptive and transformational theories and through critiquing them identifies
sustainability leadership potential. A working definition of ‘sustainability’ as used here is
putting the planet first with a universal approach to human welfare (a fuller exploration of
sustainability as it impacts companies comprises the first section).
Much has been written about the leadership of sustainability both as a planetary social
movement and in terms of detailed practices (sometimes almost manuals) for organizations,
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but much less work has been done on more specific relationships between leadership theory
and sustainability theory. The key to the nature of this theory shortfall is the divide between
the corporate business-as-usual of short-term shareholder profitability, which has in
fundamental ways shaped the thinking behind existing leadership theories, and the planetary
perspective and broader social norms of new, inter-related sustainability movements.
Both sustainability and adaptive leadership theory have been presented in ways which refer to
Darwinian evolution, and so evolutionary compatibilities between the two are looked at here.
Transformational theory and charisma have for nearly a generation taken hold of much of the
corporate leadership imagination, so it seems appropriate to explore this area also in relation
to sustainability. The conclusions reached are, broadly, that adaptive theory is not as close to
sustainability sense-making as initially appears, but can be an aspect of it; and that
transformational theory, despite often being an immature opposite, has potentially a
developmental connection with it.
The business leadership impacts of the sustainability worldview are defined in terms of
synthesising profitability with sustainability’s unprecedentedly incremental yet radical
challenge, managing risk in relation to ecological measurement and science, surfacing
underlying resistance to sustainability, championing long-term sustainability ethics in a shortterm profits culture, deciding the mix between morally considerable and artificial
sustainability, balancing the extended self of ecological experience with loyalty to the
company, proposing a universal, non-discriminatory approach to human welfare, and
facilitating mindset change on sustainability pressures for degrowth. Sustainability theory’s
connections with adaptive leadership theory are approached through making universal human
welfare explicit through uncovering the fallacy of adaptive theory’s inherent democracy,
containing adaptive theory as an aspect of a more inclusive and co-operative evolutionary
analogy, and scaling-up situational factors connecting corporate performance/profits with
planet/people. Sustainability theory’s connections with transformational leadership theory are
considered in relation to moving from transformational theory to the ecologically extended
self, transcending the binary split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ leadership, and raising leadership
awareness of dooms, utopias and implicit apocalyptic thought-forms.
Through the exploration described above, the article identifies a longitudinal leadership
possibility involving the introjection by followers of split off charismatic and apocalyptic
energies. It places irrational resistance to scientific measurement, and adaptive
disequilibrium, in a broader ecological context which has risk management and responsibility
at its heart, and brings the potential for an owned, and thus integrated, inspiration in an
extended self. It complements the transactional culture best suited to the sense-based
corporate task of supply chain and physical environmental measurement. The formulation of
these underlying thoughts is at an early stage and I hope to be able to develop it at the
conference.
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Business leadership impacts of the sustainability worldview
Sustainability perspectives and subject matter as they relate to companies are the starting
point here. Its worldview is new for companies, and shapes critical dimensions of the
leadership discussion in this article. The term ‘sustainability’ is used here in a planetary
ecological sense, and so is distinct from that of corporate viability (de Geus, 1997).
Synthesising profitability with sustainability’s unprecedentedly incremental
yet radical challenge
First, to set the scene, the unprecedented nature for companies of sustainability’s challenge is
considered. It challenges companies in unprecedented ways because its impact is incremental
(Redekop, 2010), and yet is an intrusive call to arms against negative externalities, such as
pollution and carbon emissions, which previously were not known to be significant either by
capitalism or socialism. In contrast to sustainability’s incremental intrusiveness, socialism’s
challenge to capitalism hinged on whether the state was Marxist or not, and so tended to have
the clarity of being once and for all if at all. Environmental sustainability is corporately
unique because its legitimacy (derived from the need for custodianship of the planet) is
outside the business, yet it seeks priority without necessarily desiring to supplant shareholder
capitalism.
Corporate leadership is becoming ever more aware of powerful and urgent sustainability
claims transcending the legitimacy of shareholders (Ghoshal, 2005). These legitimacy claims
are increasingly being embedded within companies as entities in themselves (Santana, 2012;
Higgins, 2013; 263), for example through creating the role of the Chief Ethical Officer,
maybe with a seat on the board. Meanwhile ‘profits, profits, profits’ is the pre-existing
identification. The mutual opposition of these forces is accompanied by strategic ambiguity
(Wexler, 2009), greenwash or the pretence of sustainability, and implicit ‘Trojan Horse’, or
thin end of the wedge, environmentalist tactics (Elkington, 1997).
Managing risk in relation to ecological measurement and science
The expert consensus in environmental science forecasts climate change (IPPC, 2013), water
shortages, species extinction, disease emergence, abrupt changes in water quality, and the
excessive nutrient loading of, and major shifts in, ecosystems (UNEP, 2005). On the
assumption of the validity of scientific method, scrupulously and comprehensively measuring
the supply chain and other corporate effects on the physical environment is indispensable.
That the validity of the hypothesis of the anthropogenic threat to the biosphere is science and
measurement-based, and so potentially to a considerable extent transcends subjectivity, need
not stop the processes also being social constructions (Kincaid, 1996). Such science-based
thinking is of course in terms of risk and risk management, not certainty, just as the reinsurance business assesses probabilities in relation to flooding and water shortage premiums.
The corporate transition from the older view that nature is “indestructible by human agency”
(Grey, 1937: 295-96) is of course culturally problematic. Given the alarming scientific
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predictions, the process of communication of the science becomes seen, often accurately, as
normative, emotion-laden and doomful. The science and measurement of sustainability can
be perceived as close to ideological conviction, even to religious conversion. Though
awareness is not a precondition for being a sustainability stakeholder (Mitchell et al, 1997),
the arts of triple loop reflexivity are significant in persuasively making the case. An example
is the labelling of inaction over climate change as ‘denial’ when it is rationally based on selfinterest (for a doubtful interpretation of it as denial, see that of Stoll-Kleeman et al, 2001:
114-115).
Surfacing underlying resistance to sustainability
Thus leadership questioning of resistance (Schein, 1999; Ford and Ford, 2010) to
sustainability becomes critical to the risk management of climate change and other
environmental threats. It is a challenge that doom-laden scientific environmental predictions,
unlike the hopeful applied science habitually utilised by companies to develop their products
and services, elicit an empty, disempowered, inner space. Furthermore, corporate leaders are
challenged, in unblocking freeze reactions and bringing in fuller horizons in others (Cuilla,
2008), to examine such reactions in themselves. Such ambivalence in the self needs to be
confronted while outwardly dealing with what are often fiercely unfair attacks. Opponents
such as climate-change probability deniers often seem to avoid what feels like a threat to their
identity (Schein, 1999) through denigrating scientists’ motives. Also sustainability
measurement can be belittled because commentators make little or no distinction between the
physical and more interpretative social environments (Norman and MacDonald, 2004;
compare Vanclay, 2004: 265). This appears to be cognitive dissonance, and so an aspect of
resistance, given that they do not own the view – one which has been largely restricted to
humanities academics (Midgely, 1995) – that environmental science is nothing but a social
construction. These pressures might be countered through the provision for key
environmentally concerned employees of voluntary and confidential longitudinal support.
Championing long-term ecological ethics in a short-term profits culture
Ecological ethics are another irreducible component of sustainability. They (Curry, 2011;
Sylvan and Bennett, 1994: 137; Jonas 1984) constitute a philosophical relationship to the
scientific predictions based on measurement. Championing ecological ethics is vastly
different from putting corporate short-term profits first, wherever these ethics are placed on
the spectrum from light to dark green (or eco-centricity), whether or not human survival is
prioritised in relation to the biotic community, and whatever attitudes are taken towards
issues such as the precautionary principle (Giddens, 2009) and restoration (Ladkin, 2005).
This is currently the critical difference for corporate leadership.
A leadership theory of sustainability needs to prioritise the long-term. The UN (1987) report
Our Common Future (the ‘Brundtland Report’ Ch.2.1) famously defines sustainable
development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. The planet seems to be interpreted by
most environmentalists as including future generations of the biosphere. This can be justified
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through anthropocentric as well as eco-centric (Earth-centred) reasoning. Humans are
obviously crucial because, whether or not they are considered to be ethically privileged, they
are the only presently known moral agents.
Deciding the mix between morally considerable and artificial sustainability
The more one’s criteria include ecological experience (described below), the more likely it is
that one prefers self-directed and morally considerable sustainability to artificial
environmental solutions. Conflict occurs especially over big system building (Adams et al,
2012), and to arrive at durable compromises leadership needs to model listening, not the
groupthink of transformationally predefined, premature closure. High-tech innovations
involve a man-made second nature, such as nuclear power to reduce carbon emissions, and
geo-engineering to mitigate their effects. The outcomes may be tolerated as the least bad
possible, or alternatively be rejected as ominous and unstable Baconian nightmares (Jonas,
1984:140; Wright, 2004; Matthews, 2011: 380- 382; Berry, 1988). The latter form of
environmentalism often sees nature in some melancholy, perhaps Romantic, sense as ending
through human agency (McKibben, 2003: 236-37; Wright, 2004; Jonas, 1984: 140; Berry,
1988; Lovelock, 2006: 146). A parallel vision of doom, but without mourning, is to be found
in the fatalism of many geologists and scientists (for example, Herzog, 2007). 1
In order to support long-term environmental implementation which has much internecine
dispute along the way, longitudinal leadership development systems will be required, not the
quick hits of in and out consultancy interventions. Intra-green ethical conflict is inevitable.
Biological research, genetic modification, nano-technology and other high-tech innovations
also of course arouse ethical commentary which is separate from the sustainability debate.
Balancing the extended self of ecological experience with loyalty to the
company
The basic point here for leadership is that ecology as a cultural movement involves
identification of the self with the planet, biosphere and environment. Ecology as a movement
experientially mirrors the holistic methods of ecological science. This is expressed in various
ways, often with a pantheistic sensibility.
Examples include expansion to a wider self (Sylvan and Bennett, 1994: 108); humanity
needing wisdom (Schumacher, 1974: 26, 160, 250); the earth awakening (Russell, 1982);
‘ecosophy’, that is a personal worldview guiding decisions involving oneself and nature
(Naess, 1989); our becoming a collective mind for the earth (McKibben, 1989: 170); ‘the
Way’ (Goldsmith, 1996); the transformation of human consciousness through engaging with
Gaia, the living earth (Kumar, 2012 and 2005); eco-therapy (Jordan, 2009); eco-psychology
(Totton, 2011); and the emergence of the shamanic personality through the development of
consciousness (Berry, 1988).
Pro-environmental corporate employees seem to have quite similar experience. Awareness,
profundity and reflexivity have been identified by several leadership researchers as necessary
qualities for corporate transformation for sustainability (Lowcarbonworks, 2009: 77, 80 &
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83; Kakabadse et al, 2009: 53, 55,56; Quinn and Dalton, 2009: 34; Ballard, 2005: 144 & 149;
Bekker, 2010: 219; Ladkin, 2007). This is not to deny that it is possible to be a purely rational
advocate of it through ecological science (risk management) and ethics with no holistic
experience, but such a stance appears to be relatively unusual.
Ecological experience, if not explicitly linked by the employing organisation to
environmental measurement, science and ethics, can be relegated to nice-to-have niches
(Geels and Schot, 2007) to await a more favourable day for environmental transformation,
and meanwhile to act as double loop enthusers of business-as-usual profitability. This of
course defeats the purpose of ecologically based sustainability. To counter this, committed,
hands-on board policy-making is required: this needs to define the company’s commercial
distinctiveness within the overarching context of planetary sustainability.
Proposing a universal, non-discriminatory approach to human welfare
Corporate leadership needs to be aware of a variety of potentially non-democratic
sustainability voices today, for example, those welcoming commodity monopolies, biocracy
(Berry, 1988: 161) or famine (Smith, 2008). Nationalist and fundamentalist visions explicitly
or implicitly take the state, or ethnic cluster, or religion, as their main point of reference.
Social ecology’s best-known early expressions were ethnically particularist: pro-Nazi ‘Blood
and Soil’ environmentalism was powerful in the 1930s (Bramwell, 1985).
The coalition between environmentalism and universal human welfare, which itself is based
on contentious mixes of human rights with economic convergence, is only about a generation
old (Mebratu, 1998). For various reasons today, but maybe not tomorrow, a great many take
the human individual as the main unit in global sustainability negotiations. Western
sustainability tends to link environmentalism with the UN Universal Declaration approach to
human rights (Svensson and Wood, 2008). It is in the obvious interest of poorer countries to
argue for the type of GDP convergence which uses the absolute energy emission averages per
head within a state, not percentage variations taking a state’s aggregated energy emission
starting points as given, as units of comparison (UNEP 2005).
Facilitating mindset change on sustainability pressures for degrowth
Degrowth (Adams and Jeanrenaud, 2008: 31-32) as defined by GDP, pending technological
innovation, is likely to be selectively necessary (Jackson, 2009) if there is to be sustainable
global convergence towards lessening human inequality, both economically and in terms of
rights (put together, ‘welfare’). For example, if the world’s poorest billion’s time is to be
freed for productivity beyond the poverty line through using washing machines, in order to
keep the planet within necessary carbon emission limits the richest billion or so will very
likely have to pay a great deal more for holiday flights so that a ceiling can be put on airline
expansion. The triple bottom line ideal that environmental, social and economic needs can
and should all be reconciled, is obviously problematic. A response is to accentuate the
critique of consumerism and its inflated wants from points of view such as Aristotelian
flourishing, wellbeing (Adams, 2006) and spirituality. The corporate leadership of such a
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profound mindset change, which perhaps has some analogies with employee disorientation
after the fall of the Iron Curtain, will require considerable sustainability sense-making.
Sustainability theory’s connections with adaptive leadership
theory
Now leadership aspects of sustainability theory as it impacts companies have been outlined,
we can move on to leadership theory gaps and how they might start to be filled. Adaptive
theory’s links to Darwinian evolution and democracy would appear to make it well-suited to
be the main leadership approach to sustainability. This is disputed here; but it could form part
of a solution.
Making universal human welfare explicit through uncovering the fallacy of
adaptive leadership theory’s inherent democracy
Assuming a leadership analogy with biological evolution can be made, a problem with
adaptive leadership theory is that it gives the impression of being both Darwinian and
democratically aligned with a universal approach to human welfare when it is a contradiction
in terms for it to be inherently both. Uncovering the fallacy of democratic inherency is
necessary because if a universal approach to human welfare is to prevail, the case needs to be
made explicitly.
Ronald Heifetz’ theory makes an analogy from the intra-biological level of genetic mutation
to the social level of organisations. It uses the vocabulary of organizational thriving,
experiment involving courageous diagnosis of the non-technical causes of disequilibrium,
diversity, variation and selective pressure over time (Heifetz 1994; Heifetz et al, 2009).
Contrasting adaptive with command and control leadership suggests a democratically
normative universe. For Heifetz ‘adaptation’ is dancing on the edge (Heifetz et al. 2009). It is
about radical leadership need arising from disequilibrium, and he likens the conditions
creating genetic mutation to those creating democracy. Heifetz’s (1994:26) adaptive thoughtworld is centred on examples mainly from the US, a culture which happens to combine
democracy and innovation. Thus Heifetz’ adaptation superficially might appear to match the
worldview of sustainability through combining its onward social process of ‘evolution’
(something like ecological measurement and science, ethics and experience) with democracy
(something like a universalist approach to human welfare).
Clearly, however, the natural world of Darwinian adaptation for survival is not inherently
democratic. Nature does not, without cultural assistance, serve human liberty. It is
reductionist to identify human society completely with the natural world. We are not genes:
genes do not have our purpose, volition or reflexivity. As Mary Midgley (1995:146-7) points
out, amoebas survive best; in contrast, what interests us is what the life of the species is.
Furthermore, Darwinian theory involves randomness, and this has nothing to do with human
rights or equality.
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The necessary linking of Darwinism and democracy is a contradiction in terms. Indeed,
adapting to environmental sustainability has already involved dictat, not democracy.
Examples are the one child per family edict in China, the relative preservation of the rain
forests in the Dominican Republic (Diamond 2005:340) and calls for ‘choice editing’ (a
telling euphemism: Roger 2011) for consumers. There is much environmental pressure to
relativise democracy: for example, through the forces favouring unilateral geo-engineering to
combat global warming (Brand 2009: 282); and on strong states in Asia to put an end to
underpriced environmental and resource inputs (Nair 2011:155). As Giddens (2009:54)
observes, there is nothing necessarily democratic about the green movement; indeed, as has
been mentioned, the first popular environmental movement to get alongside power was
linked to the Nazi party and the selective eugenic ideal of Nordic breeding (Bramwell
1985:71). Sustainability’s processes could well freeze (Schein 1999), on becoming accepted,
into authoritarian positional leadership; and so ‘adaptation’, even where it starts
democratically, could simply reflect sustainability’s initial unfreezing of the business-asusual paradigm, not a permanent democratic unfreeze involving open-ended continuous
change (Weick and Quinn, 1999).
Containing adaptive theory as an aspect of a more inclusive and co-operative
evolutionary analogy
A more inclusive and co-operative evolutionary analogy than that provided by adaptive
leadership theory is required. This is both for overarching ecological and, within that,
universal human welfare purposes. An evolutionary analogy centering on human
responsibility towards the planet and society provides a closer match with sustainability
norms than does adaptive leadership theory. Adaptive theory could be an aspect of this.
Adaptive theory seems ultimately to be oriented towards success as measured by corporate
profitability. Its rhetoric is well matched to competition, and this presumably will remain a
major must-have for economic effectiveness within the overarching imperatives of putting
the planet first and universal human welfare. However adaptation’s red-in-tooth-and-claw
popular associations lack the cooperative consciousness required to rise to the urgent
collective challenge of the Earth-centred, socially-created ecological crisis; this includes the
critical need to secure big-power (Giddens, 2009) restraint to avert a massive tragedy of the
commons.
Outside the field of leadership theory, other forms of post-Darwinian social evolution better
express environmental and social sustainability theories. Julian Huxley (1957) seminally
proposed the ‘religion without revelation’ (supposedly) of evolutionary humanism, and today
such anthropocentric agency has been radically taken further to a stance of eco-centricity. A
development of consciousness or, most minimally, a stewardship approach involving
ecological agency or responsibility transcending biological determinism, is a common
normative strand in much environmental thinking. This goes much further than servant
leadership (Greenleaf, 1977/1991), which is based on the individual and is not framed by the
planet.
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Scaling-up situational factors connecting corporate performance/profits with
planet/people
The two outer, containing rings (planet and people) in this version of the much-used triple
bottom line model provide the ethical framing for the inmost circle (performance/profits).
Situational factors at the level of the business organisation connect the inner circle of
performance/profits with the two outer ones of planet and people, and so scaled up situational
leadership thinking may also be significant in a new evolutionary leadership analogy. The
individual is currently the unit of analysis for situational leadership theory, not the corporate
stakeholder cluster. Yet the latter is also seen to be unique, striving (Galbreath, 2009) and
situated. Creating shared value (Porter and Kramer, 2011) sheds some of the primacy of the
traditional individual homo economicus and instead, through distinctive positioning and
location, emphasises corporate social identity which develops the unique sense of ‘us’
(Haslam et al., 2011). It involves building industry clusters at the company’s locations
through unique positioning, and value chains and profits involving a social purpose, with
ecological corporate measurement carrying on alongside. This approach is perceived as
driving the next wave of technological innovation (Porter and van der Linde, 1995: 133), and
as a higher form of capitalism.
Sustainability theory’s connections with transformational
leadership theory
Transformational theory, the dominant theoretical approach in leadership studies for several
decades, is contrasted with sustainability theory. In doing so, a potential developmental path
is traced, leading from the introjection of the immature energies involved in the projected
aspects of charismatic leadership to the extended self-boundaries of ecological experience.
Moving from transformational theory to the ecologically extended self
The pinnacle of corporate transformational leadership, the charismatic visionary, is typically
made prominent through a supporting structure of cognitive and affective evasion. Such
collective identity is created by follower reverence (Conger et al, 2000) and the attribution of
charisma to the leader from the group. Though the leader may also genuinely possess the
charismatic qualities perceived, the attribution often arises through social interaction which
takes place outside direct leader-follower relations, through secondary leaders routinizing the
charisma projected onto the leader (Meindl, 1990). The corporate, follower-leader
charismatic field tends to be intrusive, coercively persuasive and monocultural, and may
involve a money-based spirituality (Tourish, 2013). Typically the charismatic leader is
narcissistic (Maccoby, 2000), often in an organisationally damaging way. Charismatic
leadership is frequently justified through a merely functional claim that it is effective at
generating profits, though even this itself is very questionable.
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Sustainability theory is in contrast. The spirit of its experience involving extension to a wider,
ecologically-rooted self is about a broader identification with nature: what Mary Midgely
(1995/79: 346) terms the ‘entirely beyond us’, not about inflating the narrow ego (1995/79;
346); and what Freya Matthews (2011: 377) in an ideal formulation terms ‘biosynergy’, or
the highest stage of biomimicry in which the agent’s conativity or ends are mutually adapted
with those of other entities.2 The necessity for environmental measurement is a humbling,
sense-based reality check which, if carried out independently, reduces the room for
charismatic falsification. Furthermore, the huge pay packages of many charismatic business
leaders fly in the face of a universal approach to human welfare.
Projected fascination becomes owned inspiration in the move from the charismatic followerleader field to an ecologically aware, extended self. It involves using much the same energies
in a different way. The follower has the cultural opportunity to confront his or her projections
onto the leader of an ideal self, the secret desire to be charismatic oneself, identification with
the aggressor, fear of challenging, the desire for safety and simplicity, protection from fears
and vulnerabilities, and delegating responsibility to the leader alone. These and similar
evasions result in trust being placed in an individual often marked by grandiose selfimportance, fantasies of unlimited success, a sense of being special, a requirement for
excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, exploitation of others, a lack of empathy, and
envy, arrogance and haughtiness (Stokes, 2007). A developmental path out of the dark wood
of cultivating charismatic leadership could on its journey begin by revisiting the two-way
participation of the transforming theory of Burns (1978:141-257), though this is largely
restricted to Anglo- and Francophone humanism. It might detox the organisational culture to
a ‘decaffeinated’ (Tourish, 2013: 203) form of transformational leadership, such as authentic
leadership, or consider managing quietly (Mintzberg, 2009).
Transcending the binary split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ leadership
Ecological experience and a universal approach to human welfare transcend getting stuck in
the roll-out of ‘good’ (in contrast to ‘bad’) leadership solutions which, without regard to
ecological ethics, modishly match members’ egos to short-term profitability. Gradual
development towards the ideals of sustainability theory will require transcending the binary
split into good and bad leadership, and rediscovering instead the traditional model in which
even the best (or least bad) leadership has doubtful aspects to it, and even the worst
leadership has some positive aspects. The most acclaimed leaders, such as Mandela, Gandhi
and Lincoln, also have their critics and failings. Even the worst become formidable through
bending good qualities to achieve dark ends: for example Himmler’s Posen speech about the
extermination of the Jewish race is particularly disturbing because it makes a virtue out of the
inner emigration required (Cohen 2001: 80, 156, 159). In the higher reaches of enabling the
development of others, coaching, spiritual direction and therapy recognise the warping nature
for practitioners of the power involved, and take steps in mitigation: it cannot be entirely
abolished. As Plato said in The Republic (quoted in Grint, 1997: 36) of the philosophy into
which we backwards project leadership, transcendence of the primary socialisation process is
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necessary; and it is not humanly possible for leadership in the irreducibly emerged corporate
world to entirely attain to this notional state.
Raising leadership awareness of dooms, utopias and implicit apocalyptic
thought-forms
A development path for sustainability leadership may be important as a stable model in a
chaotic world if the predictions of environmental science are borne out. For risk management
purposes, a middle path consensus seems to be about 3°C overall global warming by 2100
with perhaps half a metre of sea-level rise, and a relatively under-populated Americas (north
and south) and Europe of about one billion each, compared with four billion each in Africa
and Asia. Of course, this could be radically altered by other factors, such as a new ice-age, a
mass epidemic reducing the population, a catastrophic volcanic eruption at Yellowstone, the
outcomes being outside the confidence levels, or the predictions turning out to be just plain
wrong-headed. The social effects of the predicted environmental outcomes are likely to be
turbulent, including attempted mass emigration to the more northerly parts of the European
landmass. These borderline, stigmatising (Steyrer, 1998), mass crisis conditions with
desperate families are likely to be breeding grounds for charismatic leaders. This could be
more in the wider society, involving total institutions and a reversion to Weber’s full category
of prophecy, than in companies, many of which may be relative havens of transactional
survival.
Over millennia charisma has been channelled prophetically through apocalyptic projections
in troubled times. For example, Norman Cohn (1970: 53) describes how the messianism (a
form of Christian apocalypse) of the disoriented poor in the Rhine valley from the end of the
eleventh to the sixteenth century was accompanied by ‘serious overpopulation’ and rapid
economic and social change. The cultural template of apocalypse is active in
environmentalism, both through excessive automatic alarmism in the green movement, and
through the misguided optimism immanently within neo-liberal environmentalist
interpretations of markets. Thus apocalypse functions as an implicit leadership theory: it has
historically included millenarianism and, in the last century, notions of both the thousand
year Reich and the Marxist withering away of the state. It operates through splitting the self
into present and future states, which in turn are split into the plus and minus of salvation and
damnation, or secular equivalents.
‘Apocalypse’ is used here in the culturally longitudinal sense of meaning more than doom.
Cohn (2001 Foreword) summarises apocalypse as a single, final consummation, upon which
‘the elect will thereafter live as a collectivity, unanimous and without conflict, on a
transformed and purified earth’, and ‘the human agents of evil will be either physically
annihilated or otherwise disposed of’. Apocalypse is not culturally universal but has a
specific history (Cohn, 2001: 105, 163, 215), developed initially in the Middle East from
combat mythology. Through the total ultimate defeat of demonic powers in the Christian
Armageddon, it is a major, often latent, Western way of making sense.
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Environmental sense-making frequently emphasises apocalypse’s downside, not the
redemption for some which is also intrinsic to it. Apocalyptic links with the environment may
be quasi-Christian (for example, McIntosh, 2008 on Nimrod’s pride); or extended metaphor
(as in the evocation of Dante’s Inferno in Mark Lynas’ (2007) Six Degrees; or apparently
scientific, as with James Lovelock’s (2006) Arctic Rim circle of salvation in a hellishly
heated world, and UK ex-Astronomer Royal’s, Martin Rees’ (2003), Our Final Century, with
its suggestion that only a few may survive the applications of science, and this through
exiting Earth in a spacecraft; or visual, as in in Franny Armstrong’s (2008) disturbing film,
The Age of Stupid, on runaway climate change; or in the form of science fiction. Such
depictions typically claim ontological realism (based on environmental science), and for
many appear to carry added force because their predictions are not seen also, in a postKantian way, as clothed in contemporary social constructions. Though apocalypse originally
meant uncovering (Cohn, 2001: 163), not many environmentalists, while retaining the
ontological validity of dire scientific predictions (Arbib and Hesse, 1986), seem to follow
Emerson (Hodder, 1989: 24, 33, 71) in conceiving that the veil of the apocalypse-to-come
can be taken off in the here and now.
In pro-corporate forms of environmentalism there are also echoes of apocalypse, but typically
emphasising the salvific, upside aspect. There is a strand of faith that capitalism will
inherently see us through the environmental crisis (Lomborg, 2007, and 2001: 312, 318, 329).
For example, in more than a mere echo of apocalypse, Desrochers (2010: 172 & 189
especially) argues that the interplay of voluntary exchange, private property and self-interest
has generally and immanently (Voegelin, 1974: 329) resulted in environmental sustainability:
this is through the more efficient use of materials (dematerialisation, transmaterialisation and
by-product development). This type of neo-liberal ideology goes beyond Hayekian claims for
the boundaried morality of markets, and though it is latent and authorially unexamined,
something like utopian dialectic is thereby brought into ontology.
Through raising awareness, including disseminating the already existing research into the
historical background, and through ecologically aware development which owns projected
charismatic energies, alternatives to the harmful effects of ecological apocalypse can be
strengthened.
Conclusion
This article identifies sustainability leadership potential through focusing on the mismatches
of two current theories, one which is not as inclusive as appears, the other a currently
predominant one which misleads. Adaptive theory, with its resonances with Darwinian
evolution, needs to be positioned as an aspect of a broader evolutionary analogy with
sustainability, one in which the imperative of responsibility (Jonas, 1984) is to the fore.
Transformational theory with its fascinating charisma is critiqued as being at the wrong end
of a developmental path that leads to the ecological experience of the extended self and its
inspiration. Finally, apocalypse combined with charisma is critically examined, both in its
© Geoffrey Ahern PhD November 2013
12
current guises of excessive doom-mongering and neo-liberal utopianism, and in relation to
the scientifically predicted end-of-the-century state of the planet.
It is held here that there is a much-needed, longitudinal developmental possibility leading
away from the excesses of transformational charisma with its affective energy field of
projected fascination. Initially this involves the introjection by charismatic followers of split
off energy. The development links corporate adaptive disequilibrium and the resistance to
scientific measurement to an ecological leadership frame with rational risk management and
responsibility at its heart, and leads to an owned, integrated, inspiration in an extended self.
Other splits to be transcended include the idealised notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ leadership, and
the splits inherent in the implicit leadership theory of apocalypse, which projects present
states into the future, and energises them in a way which is itself split into plus and minus
alternatives. The developmental possibility complements the transactional culture which,
unlike charismatic inflation, is best suited to the painstakingly detailed, sense-based and
humbling task of supply chain and other physical environmental measurement. The latter’s
comprehensiveness is an ecologically mandated priority for companies. A transactional
approach, as part of a responsible, integrated and inspirational leadership response, also gives
space for the creation of human dignity and for greater exercise by the individual of
principle-based ethics.
Notes
1
Bill McKibben (2003: 236-37) cites Paradise Lost on man being cut off through being
‘lodged in a small partition’: he states that we have ended nature because we have altered it,
and so we cannot feel the same about it. James Lovelock (2006: 146) compares
anthropogenic climate change to the cosmically irrevocable and dark moment of the breaking
of the ropes of fate in Wagner’s Ring. In Werner Herzog’s (2007) documentary Encounters at
the Edge of the World, the current dominance of mankind is explained as just another
evolutionary bloom in which ecological mishap is to be expected and, in the light of the Earth
sciences, to see this is merely to discover what has been there all along.
2
Ecological thinking emphasises the significance of the planet. E.F. Schumacher (1974)
states that economics as a thing in itself is a deluded vehicle for greed and envy, and takes as
his starting point a damaged biosphere. In Mary Midgley’s view, instead of conquering
nature we should acknowledge our kinship with the rest of the biosphere: she sees a
continuum, not a divide, between animal and human communication. The influential
American visionary, Thomas Berry (1988: 167, 75, 215, 21) sees the earth as our best model
for any commercial venture, in contrast to the Wall St Journal, the daily diary of the
American Dream, and calls for renewal of our human participation in ‘the grand liturgy of the
universe’: biocentricity is re-enchantment. In Freya Matthews’ (2011: 377-378, 385)
biosynergy, Goethean science can be used for the imaginative understanding of the
‘signature’ of a forest. She claims that such reflexivity is not sufficient to amount to dividing
the wholeness of the cosmos (i.e. dualism), because although it gives some choice it does not
extend, in a pan-psychic universe, to mind.
© Geoffrey Ahern PhD November 2013
13
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