2 Part question with 4 questions

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Part 1

Please limit your response to each question to three sentences. Conscise, thoughtful answers will score full points.

1. What does Meg Wheatley mean by "participation is not a choice"?

2. Briefly explain what Wheatley refers to as a paradox created when reaching group decisions.

http://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/life.html

Margaret Wheatley - Here's a short video to give you an overview of the book.

Here is the

Margaret Wheatley video transcript Click for more options

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powerpoint presentation Click for more options - recycled but still relevant.

Part 2

Please limit your response to each question to two to three sentences. Conscise, thoughtful answers will score full points.

1. Identify two of the characteristics of effective organizations listed on page 27 (Beckhard & Harris) that you can relate to from personal experience. Briefly (max. 2 sentences per example) explain how you have seen these examples as either support for or against the authors' list.

2. Burns concludes that conflict is necessary for change. Do you agree or disagree? Elaborate with an example.

Complex Change

and Dynamics of Organizations.pdf

LEADING ORGANIZATIONS

P E R S P E C T I V E S F O R A N E W E R A SECOND EDITION

GILL ROBINSON HICKMAN E D I T O R

Kathleen E. Allen N. Anand Alexandre Ardichvili Bruce J. Avolio Barbara R. Bartkus Bernard M. Bass Joao M. G. Boaventura Mike Boon Juana Bordas Hilary Bradbury James MacGregor Burns Albert A. Cannella, Jr. Linda L. Carli John S. Carroll Melissa K. Carsten Yi-feng Chen Donna Chrobot-Mason Joanne B. Ciulla Hannah Clark Jay A. Conger Gordon J. Curphy Richard L. Daft Maxine A. Dalton George S. Day Frank G. A. De Bakker Gregory G. Dess Alice H. Eagly Alan B. Eisner Sydney Finkelstein Adalberto A. Fischmann Mark Gerzon Al Gini Robert C. Ginnett Myron Glassman Lynda Gratton Robert K. Greenleaf J. Richard Hackman Donald C. Hambrick S. Alexander Haslam Ronald A. Heifetz Gill Robinson Hickman Douglas A. Hicks Frank Den Hond Ann H. Huffman Richard L. Hughes Douglas Jondle Katrin Kaeufer Surinder S. Kahai Sooksan Kantabutra Barbara Kellerman

C H A P T E R 6

Leadership (Excerpts)

James MacGregor Burns

Williams College and University of Maryland

O ne of the most serious failures in the study of leadership has been the bifurcation between the literature on leadership and the literature on followership. The former deals with the

heroic or demonic figures in history, usually through the medium of biography and with the inarticulated major premise that fame is equated with importance. The latter deals with the audiences, the masses, the vot ers, the people, usually through the medium of studies of mass opinion or of elections; it is premised on the conviction that in the long run, at least, leaders act as agents of their followers. The leadership approach tends often unconsciously to be elitist; it projects heroic fig ures against the shadowy background of drab, power less masses. The followership approach tends to be populistic or anti-elitist in ideology; it perceives the masses, even in democratic societies, as linked with small, overlapping circles of conservative politicians, military officers, hierocrats, and businessmen. I

describe leadership here as no mere game among elit ists and no mere populist response but as a structure of action that engages persons, to varying degrees, throughout the levels and among the interstices of soci ety. Only the inert, the alienated, and the powerless are unengaged.

Surely it is time that the two literatures are brought together, that the roles of leader and follower be united conceptually, that the study of leadership be lifted out of the anecdotal and the eulogistic and placed squarely in the structure and processes of human development and political action. I hope to demonstrate that the processes of leadership must be seen as part of the dynamics of conflict and of power; that leadership is nothing if not linked to collective purpose; that the effectiveness of leaders must be judged not by their press clippings but by actual social change measured by intent and by the satisfaction of human needs and expectations; that political leadership depends on a

Chapter 6: Leadership 67

long chain of biological and social processes, of interac tion with structures of political opportunity and clo sures, of interplay between the calls of moral principles and the recognized necessities of power; that in placing these concepts of political leadership centrally into a theory of historical causation, we will reaffirm the pos sibilities of human volition and of common standards of justice in the conduct of peoples’ affairs.

I will deal with leadership as distinct from mere power-holding and as the opposite of brute power. I will identify two basic types of leadership: the transactional and the transforming. The relations of most leaders and Mowers are transactional—leaders approach followers with an eye to exchanging one thing for another: jobs for votes, or subsidies for campaign contributions. Such transactions comprise the bulk of the relationships among leaders and followers, especially in groups, legisla tures, and parties. Transforming leadership, while more complex, is more potent. The transforming leader recog nizes and exploits an existing need or demand of a poten tial follower. But, beyond that, the transforming leader looks for potential motives in followers, seeks to satisfy higher needs, and engages the full person of the follower. The result of transforming leadership is a relationship of mutual stimulation and elevation that converts followers into leaders and may convert leaders into moral agents.

This last concept, moral leadership, concerns me the most. By this term I mean, first, that leaders and led have a relationship not only of power but of mutual needs, aspirations, and values; second, that in respond ing to leaders, followers have adequate knowledge of alternative leaders and programs and the capacity to choose among those alternatives; and, third, that lead ers take responsibility for their commitments—if they promise certain kinds of economic, social, and political change, they assume leadership in the bringing about of that change. Moral leadership is notmere preaching, or the uttering of pieties, or the insistence on social con formity. Moral leadership emerges from, and always returns to, the fundamental wants and needs, aspira tions, and values of the followers. I mean the kind of leadership that can produce social change that will sat isfy followers’ authentic needs. I mean less the Ten Commandments than the Golden Rule. But even the Golden Rule is inadequate, for it measures the wants and needs of others simply by our own.

I propose, in short, to move from the usual "practi cal” questions to the most exacting theoretical and moral ones. Assuming that leaders are neither "born” nor "made,” we will look for patterns in the origins and socializing of persons that account for leadership. Using concepts that emphasize the evolving structures of motivations, values, and goals, we will identify distinc tive leadership roles and qualities. We will note the interwoven texture of leadership and followership and the vital and concentric rings of secondary, tertiary, and even “lower” leadership at most levels of society, recog nizing nevertheless the role of “great leaders,” who exer cise large influences on the course of history. Searching always for the moral foundations of leadership, we will consider as truly legitimate only those acts of leaders that serve ultimately in some way to help release human potentials now locked in ungratified needs and crushed expectations.

Do skill and genius still matter? Can we distinguish leaders from mere power holders? Can we identify forces that enable leaders to act on the basis of com mon, non-culture-bound needs and values that, in turn, empower leaders to demonstrate genuine moral leadership? Can we deal with these questions across polities and across time? Can we, therefore, apply these concepts of political leadership to wider theories of social change and historical causation?

If we can do these things, we can hope to fashion a general theory of political leadership. And, when we return from moral and causal questions to ways of practical leadership, we might find that there is nothing more practical than sound theory, if we can fashion it.

* * *

Leadership and Followership

Leadership is an aspect of power, but it is also a separate and vital process in itself.

Power over other persons, we have noted, is exercised when potential power wielders, motivated to achieve certain goals of their own, marshal in their power base resources (economic, military, insti tutional, or skill) that enable them to influence the behavior of respondents by activating motives of

68 PART II: LEADERSHIP CONCEPTS AND THEORIES

respondents relevant to those resources and to those goals. This is done in order to realize the purposes of the power wielders, whether or not these are also the goals of the respondents. Power wielders also exercise influence by mobilizing their own power base in such a way as to establish direct physical control over others’ behavior, as in a war of conquest or through measures of harsh deprivation, but these are highly restricted exercises of power, dependent on certain times, cultures, and personalities, and they are often self-destructive and transitory.

Leadership over human beings is exercised when per sons with certain motives and purposes mobilize, in com petition or conflict with others, institutional, political psychobgical and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers. This is done in order to realize goals mutually held by both leaders and fol lowers, as in Lenin’s calls for peace, bread, and land. In brief, leaders with motive and power bases tap follow ers’ motives in order to realize the purposes of both leaders and followers. Not only must motivation be rel evant, as in power generally, but its purposes must be realized and satisfied. Leadership is exercised in a con dition of conflict or competition in which leaders con tend in appealing to the motive bases of potential followers. Naked power, on the other hand, admits of no competition or conflict—there is no engagement.

Leaders are a particular kind of power holder. Like power, leadership is relational, collective, and purpose ful. Leadership shares with power the central function of achieving purpose. But the reach and domain of lead ership are, in the short range at least, more limited than those of power. Leaders do not obliterate followers’ motives though they may arouse certain motives and ignore others. They lead other creatures, not things (and lead animals only to the degree that they recognize animal motives—i.e., leading cattle to shelter rather than to slaughter). To control things—tools, mineral resources, money, energy—is an act of power, not lead ership, for things have no motives. Power wielders may treat people as things. Leaders may not.

All leaders are actual or potential power holders, but not all power holders are leaders.

These definitions of power and of leadership differ from those that others have offered. Lasswell and Kaplan hold that power must be relevant to people’s

valued things; I hold that it must be relevant to the power wielders valued things and may be relevant to the recipient’s needs or values only as necessary to exploit them. Kenneth Janda defines power as “the ability to cause other persons to adjust their behavior in confor mance with communicated behavior patterns.” I agree, assuming that those behavior patterns aid the purpose of the power wielder. According to Andrew McFarland, “If the leader causes changes that he intended, he has exercised power; if the leader causes changes that he did not intend or want, he has exercised influence, but not power.” I dispense with the concept of influence as unnecessary and unparsimonious. For me the leader is a very special, very circumscribed, but potentially the most effective of power holders, judged by the degree of intended “real change” finally achieved. Roderick Bell et al. contend that power is a relationship rather than an entity—an entity being something that “could be smelled and touched, or stored in a keg”; while I agree that power is a relationship, I contend that the relation ship is one in which some entity—part of the “power base”—plays an indispensable part, whether that keg is a keg of beer, of dynamite, or of ink.

The crucial variable, again, is purpose. Some define leadership as leaders making followers do what/offow- ers would not otherwise do, or as leaders making followers do what the leaders want them to do; I define leadership as leaders inducing followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations-—of both leaders and followers. And the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders see and act on their own and their followers’ values and motivations.

Leadership, unlike naked power-wielding, is thus inseparable from followers’ needs and goals. The essence of the leader-follower relation is the interaction of persons with different levels of motivations and of power potential, including skill, in pursuit of a common or at least joint purpose. That interaction, however, takes two fundamentally different forms. The first I will call transactional leadership. Such leadership occurs when one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things. The exchange could be economic or political or psychological in nature: a swap of goods or of one good

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for money; a trading of votes between candidate and citizen or between legislators; hospitality to another person in exchange for willingness to listen to one’s troubles. Each party to the bargain is conscious of the power resources and attitudes of the other. Each person recognizes the other as a person. Their purposes are related, at least to the extent that the purposes stand within the bargaining process and can be advanced by maintaining that process. But beyond this the relation ship does not go. The bargainers have no enduring pur pose that holds them together; hence they may go their separate ways. A leadership act took place, but it was not one that binds leader and follower together in a mutual and continuing pursuit of a higher purpose.

Contrast this with transforming leadership. Such leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Their purposes, which might have started out as separate but related, as in the case of transactional leadership, become fused. Power bases are linked not as counterweights but as mutual support for common purpose. Various names are used for such leadership, some of them derisory: elevating, mobilizing, inspiring, exalting, uplifting, preaching, exhorting, evangelizing. The relationship can be moralistic, of course. But trans forming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both. Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and per sonality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with fol lowers who will feel “elevated”' by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders. Transcending leadership is leadership engagi. Naked power-wielding can be neither transactional nor transforming; only leadership can be.

Leaders and followers may be inseparable in func tion, but they are not the same. The leader takes the ini tiative in making the leader-led connection; it is the leader who creates the links that allow communication and exchange to take place. An office seeker does this in accosting a voter on the street, but if the voter espies

and accosts the politician, the voter is assuming a lead ership function, at least for that brief moment. The leader is more skillful in evaluating followers’ motives, anticipating their responses to an initiative, and esti mating their power bases, than the reverse. Leaders continue to take the major part in maintaining and effectuating the relationship with followers and will have the major role in ultimately carrying out the com bined purpose of leaders and followers. Finally, and most important by far, leaders address themselves to followers’ wants, needs, and other motivations, as well as to their own, and thus they serve as an independent force in changing the makeup of the followers’ motive base through gratifying their motives.

Certain forms of power and certain forms of leader ship are near-extremes on the power continuum. One is the kind of absolute power that, Lord Acton felt, “cor rupts absolutely.” It also coerces absolutely. The essence of this kind of power is the capacity of power wielders, given the necessary motivation, to override the motive and power bases of their targets. Such power objectifies its victims; it literally turns them into objects, like the inadvertent weapon tester in Mtesa’s court Such power wielders, as well, are objectified and dehumanized. Hitler, according to Richard Hughes, saw the universe as containing no persons other than himself, only “things.” The ordinary citizen in Russia, says a Soviet linguist and dissident, does not identify with his government. “With us, it is there, like the wind, like a wall, like the sky. It is something permanent, unchangeable. So the individual acquiesces, does not dream of changing it— except a few, few people.”

At the other extreme is leadership so sensitive to the motives of potential followers that the roles of leader and follower become virtually interdependent. Whether the leadership relationship is transactional or trans forming, in it motives, values, and goals of leader and led have merged. It may appear that at the other extreme from the raw power relationship, dramatized in works like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984, is the extreme of leadership-led merger dramatized in novels about persons utterly dependent on parents, wives, or lovers. Analytically these extreme types of relationships are not very per plexing. To watch one person absolutely dominate another is horrifying; to watch one person disappear,

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his motives and values submerged into those of another to the point of loss of individuality, is saddening. But puzzling out the nature of these extreme relationships is not intellectually challenging because each in its own way lacks the qualities of complexity and conflict. Submersion of one personality in another is not gen uine merger based on mutual respect. Such submersion is an example of brute power subtly applied, perhaps with the acquiescence of the victim.

More complex are relationships that lie between these poles of brute power and wholly reciprocal lead ership-followership. Here empirical and theoretical questions still perplex both the analysts and the practi tioners of power. One of these concerns the sheer mea surement of power (or leadership). Traditionally we measure power resources by calculating each one and adding them up: constituency support plus access to leadership plus financial resources plus skill plus “pop ularity” plus access to information, etc., all in relation to the strength of opposing forces, similarly computed. But these calculations omit the vital factor of motivation and purpose and hence fall of their own weight. Another controversial measurement device is reputa tion. Researchers seek to learn from informed observers their estimates of the power or leadership role and resources of visible community leaders (projecting this into national arenas of power is a formidable task). Major questions arise as to the reliability of the esti mates, the degree of agreement between interviewer and interviewee over their definition of power and lead ership, the transferability of power from one area of decision-making to another. Another device for study ing power and leadership is linkage theory, which requires elaborate mapping of communication and other interrelations among power holders in different spheres, such as the economic and the military. The dif ficulty here is that communication, which may expedite the processes of power and leadership, is not a substi tute for them.

My own measurement of power and leadership is simpler in concept but no less demanding of analysis: power and leadership are measured by the degree of pro duction of intended effects. This need not be a theoreti cal exercise. Indeed, in ordinary political life, the power resources and the motivations of presidents and prime

ministers and political parties are measured by the extent to which presidential promises and party pro grams are carried out. Note that the variables are the double ones of intent (a function of motivation) and of capacity (a function of power base), but the test of the extent and quality of power and leadership is the degree of actual accomplishment of the promised change.

Other complexities in the study of power and lead ership are equally serious. One is the extent to which power and leadership are exercised not by positive action but by inaction or nondecision. Another is that power and leadership are often exercised not directly on targets but indirectly, and perhaps through multiple channels, on multiple targets. We must ask not only whether P has the power to do X to R, but whether P can induce or force R to do Y to Z. The existence of power and leadership in the form of a stream of multiple direct and indirect forces operating over time must be seen as part of the broader sequences of historical cau sation. Finally, we must acknowledge the knotty prob lem of events of history that are beyond the control of identifiable persons capable of foreseeing develop ments and powerful enough to influence them and hence to be held accountable for them. We can only agree with C. Wright Mills that these are matters of fate rather than power or leadership.

We do well to approach these and other complexities of power and leadership with some humility as well as a measure of boldness. We can reject the “gee whiz” approach to power that often takes the form of the auto matic presumption of “elite control” of communities, groups, institutions, entire nations. Certain concepts and techniques of the “elitist” school of power are indis pensable in social and political analysis, but “elitism” is often used as a concept that presupposes the existence of the very degree and kind of power that is to be esti mated and analyzed. Such “elite theorists” commit the gross error of equating power and leadership with the assumed power bases of preconceived leaders and power holders, without considering the crucial role of motivations of leaders and followers. Every good detec tive knows that one must look for the motive as well as the weapon.

W W W

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The Test: Real, Intended Change Most of the world’s decision makers, however powerful they may appear in journalistic accounts, must cope with the effects of decisions already made by events, circumstances, and other persons and hence, like Khrushchev and Kennedy, must act within narrow bounds. Decision-making opportunities typically come to them in the form of a few limited options. The advis ers and institutions and procedures that once upon a time might have been organized to empower them often turn out to have become sources of restraint. The main function—even of those labeled radicals or reformers or revolutionaries—is often to maintain existing political arrangements and hence to contribute to continuity, equilibrium, and stability. Such decision makers are defensive and palliative rather than creative. Occasionally they act at such critical turning points in the great affairs of nations that their tiny leverage tips affairs toward one course of action rather than another or holds matters in balance or in suspension until deci sions can be made at a later time. But those later deci sions may be even more constrained as a result of intervening events.

Napoleon, it is said, could look upon a battle scene of unimaginable disorder and see its coherence for his own advantage. If some decision makers seem to have enor mous influence on history and are thrust into the pan theon of world heroes, this may be in part the result of miscalculation by the chroniclers of their actual impact on the shank of history and their glorification as heroes by panegyrists. Even more the reason may be a faulty or inadequate conception of the nature of change. Dramatic decision-making may lead only to cosmetic change, or to temporary change, or to the kind of change in symbols and myths that will preserve the existing order rather than transform or undermine it. Such seemed to be true of de Gaulle’s regime. A realistic and restricted definition of policy and decision leadership is necessary to a serviceable concept of social change.

By social change I mean here real change—that is, a transformation to a marked degree in the attitudes, norms, institutions, and behaviors that structure our daily lives. Such changes embrace not only “new

cultural patterns and institutional arrangements” and “new psychological dispositions,” in the terms used by Herbert Kelman and Donald Warwick, but changes in material conditions, in the explicit, felt existence, the flesh and fabric of people’s lives. Such changes may be a far cry from the “changes” that legislative, judicial, and executive decisions are supposed to bring automati cally. The leadership process must be defined, in short, as carrying through from the decision-making stages to the point of concrete changes in people’s lives, attitudes, behaviors, institutions. Even the sweep of this process is not enough, however, for we must include another dimension: time. Attitude and behavior can change for a certain period; as in a war, popular fads and emotional political movements change only to revert later. Real change means a continuing interaction of attitudes, behavior, and institutions, monitored by alterations in individual and collective hierarchies of values.

Leadership brings about real change that leaders intend, under our definition. Leaders may seem to cause the most titanic of changes—such as the human and physical wreckage left in the wake of civil war—but that wreckage itself presumably was not the central purpose of the leaders. It would be idle here to measure^ the extent and character of social change unless we also examine the intentions of those who make the decisions that were intended to bring about change. Such an examination is necessary if we are to find purpose and meaning, rather than sheer chance or chaos, in the unfolding of events. A definition that demands so much from leadership also requires that we consider the total ity of decision-making by leaders at all levels and in all the interstices of the polity. For actions or changes that might seem errant or vagrant in relation to visible lead ers may be the planned outcome of decisions by less conspicuous and less “legitimate” leaders far down the line. The test is purpose and intent, drawn from values and goals, of leaders, high and low, resulting in policy decision and real, intended change.

Social change is so pervasive and ubiquitous in the modem world, and often so dramatic and menacing, as to attract intensive scholarly investigation. It has become an intellectual growth industry. Hegel and Marx are not the only celebrated theorists who have dealt with it as a central phenomenon in social analysis and historical

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fact. In surveying the vast literature on change, one remarks once again on the absence of a clear concept of the role of artistic or intellectual or political or social leadership in the processes of change, on the absence in most works of references to leadership in theory or prac tice. Often the process of innovation is explored but not in a broad framework of the leadership motivations, goals, and processes within which innovation takes on meaning and direction. It is as though change took place mechanically, apart from human volition or participa tion. What then, in a preliminary way, can be said about the role of policy and decision-making leadership in the process of real social change?

This question can be answered only in the context of the conditions of stability, continuity, persistence, and inertia that grip most of humankind. We of the modern era hear and see so much of what is called dizzying change—the rise and fall of leaders, dynasties, and whole nations, the continuing eruptions and disrup tions of technology, massive migrations, the “popula tion explosion,” rapid alterations in economic conditions, the flux of artistic, literary, and other fashions—that we tend to underplay the fixity in human affairs. “Social interaction is to be found in social fixity and persistence as well as in social change,” Robert Nisbet observes. “That is why, if we are to answer the question of causation in change, we are obliged to deal with, first, the nature of social persistence and, then, with variables, not constants, when we turn to the mat ter of what causes the observed change in structure, trait, or idea.” Systems, once established, generate countless forces and balances to perpetuate themselves.

Our very assumption of change is culture-bound. “For most of the world’s people, who have known only the changelessness of history, such stress on the diffi culty of change would not be necessary?” according to Robert Heilbroner. “But for ourselves, whose outlook is conditioned by the extraordinary dynamism of our unique historical experience, it is a needed caution. Contrary to our generally accepted belief, change is not the rule but the exception in life.” And Leonard Meyer says, at the start of a chapter headed “The Probability of Stasis”: “The presumption that social-cultural develop ment is a necessary condition of human existence is not tenable. The history of China up to the nineteenth century, the stasis of ancient Egypt, and the lack of

cumulative change in countless other civilizations and cultures make it apparent that stability and conservation, not change, have been the rule in mankind generally?’

What then is all the activity? Much of it is the appearance of multitudinous readjustments as the system absorbs small variations in the basic pattern and maintains its own pace and direction. The anthro pologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown noted the changes within structures that did not affect the structural form of society. He made a sharp distinction between system maintenance, the kind of readjustment that was essen tially an adjustment of the equilibrium of a social struc ture, and what he called system change or “change of type,” which he defined as “a change such that when there is sufficient of it, the society passes from one type of social structure to another.” The vast proportion of the decisions of decision makers, high and low, is read justment that maintains the equilibrium of the social structure.

A system can appear dynamic in guarding its own statics. A leader who departs from system or group norms in some decision will suffer undue attention, pressure, sanctions, and perhaps rejection or exclusion. To cite one of innumerable laboratory experiments, F. Merei demonstrated that a child with evident leader ship qualities was nevertheless forced, to abide by the established play norms of a small kindergarten group. If a change in one part of a system seems to threaten other parts, it is sealed off; at most it is not allowed to change much faster than the others. A host of institutional safe guards, some of them vested with sacrosanct status or mystification, is built around stabilizing decision making processes. Outsiders and outside ideas are smoothly rejected. One of the most common tendencies in the history of arms development and change has been the resistance of military decision maters to weapons innovations that much later, after being adopted in crisis or catastrophe, took on their own institutional protection.

A number of strategies have been developed to over come resistance to change: coercive strategies, norma tive strategies (achieving compliance by invoking values that have been internalized), utilitarian strate gies (control over allocation and deprivation of rewards and punishments), empirical-rational strategies (ratio nal justification for change), power-coercive strategies (application of moral, economic, and political resources

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to achieve change), and reeducative strategies (exerting influence through feeling and thought). Coercive strate gies need not detain us here, since we exclude coercion from the definition of leadership; the majority of the other strategies provide for deprivation of group sup port for the beliefs, attitudes, values, and concepts of self that combine to tie a person to the status quo. A common thread—-perhaps the only common thread— running through these diverse strategies is their diffi culty. Most seem to be aimed not so much at altering the attitudes and behavior of the ultimate targets of change—citizens in their daily fives—but at the subor dinate decision makers in government or business or other collectivities who are supposed to administer the change. Even if top policy makers were able to exert control down the line over subordinate policy makers, a huge gap remains between their operating decisions and real change in the behavior of the greater public. “In here” is still sharply different from “out there.” All this simply confirms in theory what decision-making leaders find in practice: that breaks and erosions and disturbances in the “line of command” produce attenu ation of purpose and of action at the grass roots and that, even when they do not, the target publics may not respond. Decisions are rarely self-implementing. Many of the administrative devices intended to communicate command and direction from the top become means for blunting or distorting the chain of decision.

Grand policy-making and decision-making leader ship, in short, can wither at the most crucial phase— that of influence over popular attitudes and behavior. Is there any way out of this dilemma?

The answer to this question ultimately turns on the nature of the goals of decision-making leadership. These, of course, vary enormously. On the most per sonal and individual level policy makers may seek small changes that affect only themselves. This may be a service from a government bureau, exemption from a regulation, some honor or special recognition from the state. Frustrated by the regular bureaucratic decision making machinery, they may “walk their papers” through the administrative labyrinth. In realizing their own specific and perhaps narrow goal, in effecting a small change for themselves, they leave the decision making process itself hardly touched. They have “beaten the system,” but the system in the long run

beats them, for their very success lowers pressure to improve the machinery—at least on their part and for the short run—hence it may continue to operate poorly for the great number of persons it services. Some indi vidual efforts, however narrowly and self-servingly motivated, may implicate others in a beneficial way, but those benefits will rarely rise above the “satisficing” level.

At the general or collective level, on the other hand, the goal of a leader may be such comprehensive social change that the existing social structure cannot accom modate it. Hence, in the eyes of certain leaders, that structure must be entirely uprooted and a whole new system substituted, probably through revolutionary means. Revolutions do not always succeed, however, and when they do succeed, revolutionary action, in dis rupting existing structures and mobilizing new social forces, incidentally arouses new needs and establishes new goals. Real change may take forms very different from the revolutionary goals originally sought. The most violent revolution, no matter how far-reaching its professed desire for reconstructing society, typically falls short of complete real change. The notion of “a complete change in the structural form of a society i s . . . incoherent,” Ernest Nagel says.

Between the extremes of planning discrete individ ual change and planning comprehensive and drastic change lies middle-range planning, responding to shared needs and other motivations and aimed at col lective goals that represent the main planning effort of political leadership in most societies. This kind of plan ning leadership seeks genuine social change for collec tive purposes, though not necessarily at the same pace, or on so wide a front, as that of revolutionary action. The task of this kind of leadership is political and gov ernmental planning for real social change.

The critical problem concerns the implication of planned ends for planning ways and means, the demands that comprehensive real change puts on exist ing social and political systems (which we will label here “social structures”). We are defining planning here not only as the establishment of definite social and eco nomic goals to meet popular wants, needs, and expecta tions, but as the considered and deliberate reshaping of means necessary for the realization of comprehensive real change. Lewis Coser, like Radcliffe-Brown, has

74 PART II: LEADERSHIP CONCEPTS AND THEORIES

made a useful distinction between changes of systems and changes in systems. He refers to a change of system “when all major structural relations, its basic institu tions, and its prevailing value system have been drasti cally altered.” Changes in system take place more slowly and affect smaller sectors of a system. Given enough time, however, changes in system, through mutual stim ulation and adjustment, can produce extensive change if not fundamental transformation of system. The accu mulated changes in the British political system over the past two centuries have substantially altered the politi cal structure, but these changes (such as extension of the suffrage) appeared at the time to be changes within the system.

Changes in system would seem far more system transforming than changes of systems, if only because the latter type of change comes so hard. Yet the extent of change of political systems since 1800 has been remarkable. Ted Gurr has found that the incidence of “system-transforming political change” has been high and pervasive both in the Third World and in the European zone of influence. The median duration of historical Latin and Afro-Asian polities and of European nations during that period was about the same: twelve years. The incidence of abrupt political change had increased markedly from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, Gurr found. “Of the 150 histor ical polities in the sample which were established before 1900,” according to Gurr, “half survived for 20 years; but for the 117 historical polities established after 1900, the ‘half-life’ was only nine years.” The extent to which these transformations took place as a result of collective and comprehensive planning by leaders varied widely, but these findings underline the vulnerability and impermanence of social structures that may appear to be well established.

Planning for structural change, whether of the system or in the system, is the ultimate moral test of decision making leadership inspired by certain goals and values and intent on achieving real social change; it is also the leader’s most potent weapon. It is a test in that planning calls for thinking and acting along a wide battlefront of complex forces, institutions, and contingencies; if the planners really “mean it,” they must plan for the reshap ing of means as required by the ends to which they are committed. It is a weapon in that a well-conceived plan,

along with available planning technology, supplies lead ers with an estimate of the human, material, and intellec tual resources necessary to draw up and drive through a plan for substantial social change. Planning is designed to anticipate and to counter the myriad factors that impair the line of decision and action between the policy-making of planning leaders and real change in the daily lives of great numbers of people.

Still, the best laid plans of mice and men go aft agley. Why? In part because the plans are poorly drawn or badly executed. In part because plans encounter “chance” developments no mortal could possibly pre dict. And in large part because most planners focus on technical and administrative factors, minimizing the psychological and the structural forces. At a certain point following the Bolshevik revolution, Alex Inkeles observes, the “political and economic development of the revolution had now run far ahead of the more nar rowly ‘social.’ In the haste of revolutionary experiment, no systematic attention had been given to the congru ence of the newly established institutional forms with the motivational systems, the patterns of expectation and habitual behavior, of the population. Furthermore, as the new institutions began to function they produced social consequences neither planned nor anticipated by the regime.” The problem was exacerbated for the Bolsheviks, Inkeles adds, by a Marxist ideology that predisposed leaders to assume that basic changes in the pattern of human relations, which they viewed only as part of the “dependent” superstructure of society, must automatically follow from changes in the political and economic system.

Planners elsewhere have encountered similar prob lems of human motivation. A British Labour govern ment, in nationalizing the coal mines, misconceived the reactions of the very miners whose lot it was mainly designed to ameliorate. For many miners the change seemed to amount to the substitution of one bureau cracy for another. Indian population planners miscal culated the principal motive of Indian villagers, which was to raise children who would be available for labor and for family income—a motive that overrode the effect of propaganda in favor of limited families for the sake of other goals. American political planners in 1787 shaped a superb political structure for pitting faction against faction and thus breaking the force of faction in

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government, but they underestimated the popular and egalitarian forces that would threaten such balanced and stabilized government from outside. In the light of planning mishaps, it is not surprising that planners often seek to isolate their new structures from unpre dictable psychological forces operating through a polit ical system. Thus the leaders of the Tennessee Valley Authority established their own planning mechanism “in the field” and resented efforts by Washington deci sion makers to intervene. Autonomy was a two-bladed sword, however; it protected sectoral planners against bureaucratic aggression in the central government, but it did so at the expense of contracting the scope and power of leadership planning.

To note that effective planning must consider motives and values is to return to our central emphasis on a general theory of political leadership. Planning leaders, more than other leaders, must respond not sim ply to popular attitudes and beliefs but to the funda mental wants and needs, aspirations and expectations, values and goals of their existing and potential follow ers. Planning leadership must estimate not only initial responses from the public but the extent to which suc cessful plans will arouse new wants and needs and aims in the second and succeeding “rounds” of action. Planning leaders must perceive that consensus in plan ning would be deceptive and dangerous, that advocacy and conflict must be built into the planning process in response to pluralistic sets of values. Planning leaders must recognize purpose—indeed, planning is nonexis tent without goals—and recognize that different pur poses will inform the planning process. Plans must

recognize means or modal values too, especially in pro cedures providing for expression of majority attitudes without threatening rights of privacy and self-expression. And planning must recognize the many faces of power; ultimately the authority and credibility of planning leadership will depend less on formal position than on the capacity to recognize basic needs, to mobilize masses of persons holding sets of values and seeking general goals, to utilize conflict and the adversary process without succumbing to it, and to bring about real social change either through existing social struc tures or by altering them.

“Increasingly,” Karl Mannheim wrote shortly before his death, “it is recognized that real planning consists in coordination of institutions, education, val uations and psychology. Only one who can see the important ramifications of each single step can act with the responsibility required by the complexity of the modern age.” It is the leaders who preeminently must see in this way. But to see alone is insufficient; they must act too, and of all the tasks proposed by Mannheim, the changing of institutions is the most difficult. For institutions are encapsulated within social structures that are themselves responses to ear lier needs, values, and goals. In seeking to change social structures in order to realize new values and purposes, leaders go far beyond the politicians who merely cater to surface attitudes. To elevate the goals of humankind, to achieve high moral purpose, to realize major intended change, leaders must thrust them selves into the most intractable processes and struc tures of history and ultimately master them.

Burns on

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