Chapter Four
Figure-Ground
The conditions that must exist before leadership is possible
Abstract
From the chapter's own abstractThis chapter draws on Norbert Elias’s idea of the figuration and Henri Lefebvre’s account of the production of space to enhance understanding of the context(s) in which leadership operates - its “grounds”. These theorists help us see that it is a mistake to understand context as separate from leadership. Instead of being a kind of container within which leadership happens, contexts are actively created, contested, and disputed. Leadership does not simply take place “in” space. It helps to produce space. The chapter develops this through three cases. The 2011 English riots show civic space being temporarily dissolved and then reasserted, with MPs’ speech acts reconstituting order through language while officers brought about restoration of order in territorial struggles in the streets. The case of post-conflict Nicaragua shows what leadership has to do when the spatial and figurational preconditions do not yet exist. This goes beyond just filling a meaning void to a more foundational act of building the “floor” on which any meaning-making becomes possible. Finally, the example of Socrates’s style of questioning shows what leadership often requires but rarely provides: a refusal to provide solutions prematurely and instead to hold onto doubt and uncertainty.
Key questions
- What is being treated as figure here, and what has quietly become ground?
- Does the space in which this conversation could happen actually exist yet?
- Who is holding it open, and at what cost to themselves?
- What is the question this figuration's stories are designed to prevent?
- Is uncertainty being closed prematurely because closure is more comfortable?
Central concepts
Cases in this chapter
Work with it
Related lens: Figure-Ground
Related tools: Critical Narrative Review
Status: abstract quoted directly from the manuscript · questions and concepts are site-written · author review required