Character

From the chapter's own abstract

This chapter studies leadership in relation to another ancient word - character. It works with a dual sense of the word character. In the Aristotelian sense character is not a trait someone possesses (which is perhaps the simplest way to think about leadership) but something developed through repeated action in specific contexts. It is only something one can evaluate across the course of a career or a life. The other sense of character is what comes to mind more immediately when we think about stories. A character is a role that is occupied within a larger narrative, the position from which someone or something acts and through which they are understood by others.

1. What is being cultivated here through repeated practice, and what is merely being measured?
2. Which of our tasks are genuinely impossible, and which are only very difficult?
3. Whose account of their own actions does this organisation actually require?
4. What is the emotional sequence people are about to go through, and has anyone told them?
5. Who has no role at all in the story we are telling about the future?

• Meaning void
• Habituation
• Narrative accountability
• Emotion as practical judgement
• Impossible jobs and tasks
• Agency myth
• Prospective emplotment
• Meta-emplotment

• Public order policing and the 2011 disorder
• The 1995 Nicaragua property forum
• NHS transformation

Related lens: Character

Related tools: Change Type Reflection · Narrative Landscape Mapper

Status: abstract quoted directly from the manuscript · questions and concepts are site-written · author review required