What do indigenous scholar Kyle Whyte, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and the RRU Climate Action Summit have in common? They helped me define how, where, and why I show up to lead.

Of all the papers I read throughout the MACAL Program, the one by Kyle Whyte (2019) jolted me awake. I have cited it in almost every paper I have written, including my thesis, and I have shared it with many colleagues. In a previous blog, I wrote about the Paradox of Climate Leadership (Lash, 2022) based, in part, on this paper. The article is called “Too late for Indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points” (Whyte, 2019), and for me, it exposed the tension lying at the junction of climate crisis, reconciliation, and leadership. 

The tension is between the need to act as quickly as possible to reduce emissions while increasing resilience so we can better weather the climate impacts that are coming AND the need to slow down, build relationships, decolonize, and adopt new worldviews based on reciprocity and respect. I want to do both, and it drives me crazy that I can’t. My leadership journey has focused on how I can sit with this tension and move climate action and reconciliation forward.  

And from my perspective, former Founder and CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, best articulated how to get through this tension in what is commonly known as the Lost Interview  (Sen, 2012), when he said:

Replace “product” with “policy” results in, to me, a precise description of the challenges facing civil society and governments today. There are many ideas on reconciling with Indigenous Peoples and confronting the climate crisis, but turning those into global, national, provincial, or municipal policies is hard work. Public policy is shaped by public opinion, the ambition of politicians , and existing power structures in society. It is a good idea to break down the power of oil companies; it is another thing to make it happen when the consequences could meet economic destabilization, massive unemployment, and an angry electorate that votes a leader out of government in favour of a leader who maintains the status quo. From my experience, 10% of the work is the idea, and 90% is finding a way to push the existing social structures up a hill to a more just society.  

We were asked to identify the Three Horizons of Climate Leadership at the Climate Action Accelerator. Horizon 1, or H1, is the Dominant Culture, H3 is the Emergent Culture, and H2 is the Disturbance that shifts us from H1 to H2. We spent most of the session identifying H1 and H3 – an assessment of how the current culture got us into this situation and a creative brainstorm of external forces influencing change. This innovative process of self-reflection was an unrestricted exploration of ideas. It was well facilitated, and many participants shared many intriguing concepts.

When we got to the H2 conversation, I felt the process fell into the “disease” described by Steve Jobs. We were asked what, as leaders, we need to do to disrupt the existing patterns of the dominant culture and open the door to the emergent culture. This is a fascinating question, but I found two errors in the execution. ,

1. It presented a few ideas and framed them as transformative and positive or incremental and negative. 
2. It failed to ask HOW, as leaders, we would disrupt the dominant culture’s power and transition to the emergent culture.

The facilitators applied the transformative/incremental and positive/negative values without considering the policy and power context. In this approach to leadership training, participants are given the freedom to dream big, and there is a culture of belief that coming up with big ideas is 90% of the work, only to become frustrated when faced with implementation challenges. If, on the other hand, we are encouraged to dream big while understanding how decisions are made, our ideas can become reality: 10% idea, 90% implementation.

A common response to this kind of analysis is that we need to “take politics out of the discussion”. But in her book Policy Paradox, The Art of Political Decision Making, author Deborah Stone argues that public policy is not a rationale quantifiable process. Rather it is a messy conversation of values and reasoning. In other words, the development of public policy is an examination and insertion of the values we want reflected in our society. To think that decisions can be made without politics and the public policy that is generated is wishful thinking at best, and misleading at worst..

Failure to consider the decision-making context when identifying disruptions puts higher emphasis on the idea and less on implementation, thereby falling victim to the disease described by Steve Jobs. 

There will always be visionary leaders who push us to think outside the box, like Dr. Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and her latest book, Hospicing Modernity (2021). But most of us will lead within an organization, company, or government. We will be practicing politics whether we want to or not. How to lead through politics is an essential skill.

 Kyle Whyte described the tension I strive to lead through. The Climate Action Accelerator helped explore what an emergent just society could look like. And Steve Jobs reminded me that once you have the idea, you still have 90% of the work to do. 

A good leader is fearless in tackling the 90%.

 References

de Oliveira Andreotti , V. (2021) Hospicing Modernity, North Atlantic Books,  ISBN 9781623176242

Lash, J (2022, June 11), The Paradox of Climate Leadership, https://webspace.royalroads.ca/jlash/the-paradox-of-climate-leadership/

Sem, P. (2012), Steve Jobs – The Lost Interview [Film], Jon Gau Productions,

Stone, D. (1988). Policy paradox and political reason. New York: Harper Collins.

Whyte, K. (2019, October 23). Too late for indigenous climate justice: Ecological and relational tipping points. Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.603. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira