Figure-Ground

Figure and ground is borrowed from perception: what stands out, and what recedes into background. Dominant leadership theory makes the individual the figure and the system the ground. The chapter dismantles that arrangement — neither the leader nor the context has a fixed essence, and each is producing the other.

This lens is the corrective to any reading of the book that makes narrative all-powerful. Some situations require a shared social space to be produced before conventional leadership is possible; some require an existing space to be defended; and some require the most uncomfortable act of all, which is refusing to resolve. Material and structural conditions do not disappear because a story is being told about them.

Elias supplies the first move. The image of the self-contained individual — homo clausus, the closed human — dissolves into a figuration: an interdependent web of relations from which the actor cannot be extracted and still be the same actor. You cannot understand a political leader without the electorate, party, media, opposition, bureaucracy and history that constitute the position. The better question is not what the leader did but what happened in this figuration, and how the role was enabled and constrained by it.

Lefebvre supplies the second. Space is not a container that activity happens inside; it is produced, through a three-way tension between the practices that make it, the official representations that depict it, and the lived meanings people give it. Civic order looks like a fact until it is disrupted, at which point it becomes visible as an accomplishment that has to be maintained and, when challenged, reasserted.

The 2011 disorder shows both levels at once. On the street, order was restored territorially, yard by yard. In Parliament, recalled from recess, it was restored in language: four themes dominated the debate and each performed a tidying move, sweeping heterogeneous events into single categories. There were 99 references to gangs or gang culture in a single day's debate. The category placed participants outside the civic frame and cued the appropriate response — you do not negotiate with gangs. Officers on the ground described something quite different and did not talk about gangs at all.

Nicaragua shows the prior case: what leadership must do when the figuration has been shredded rather than merely stressed. External sponsors held open a space one participant named with a precise metaphor, amortiguador — shock absorber — so that parties who had been at war could negotiate without publicly capitulating. The task was not filling a meaning void but building a floor before anyone could stand on it. The standard literature cannot see this role, because the shock absorber is neither leader nor follower.

The Socratic strand is the sharpest edge. The elenchus works by taking a confident account seriously, following its implications until it contradicts itself, and leaving the person in aporia — productive not-knowing. That is anti-transformational by design: it does not supply a vision, it dissolves the false certainty that makes visions feel obligatory. In the Enron reading, the consequential leadership work is done by the person who asked the question, not by anyone who had a vision.

Terms you will meet in this chapter, kept in the author's vocabulary:

• Figuration
• Homo clausus
• Production of space
• Representations of space
• Tidying
• Amortiguador / shock absorber
• Holding environment
• Elenchus
• Aporia
• Premature closure
• Exclusion

In your situation, what is being treated as background that someone else would put in the foreground — and who benefits from that arrangement?

This lens is developed in Chapter Four: Figure-Ground.

Related tools: Critical Narrative Review · Narrative Landscape Mapper

Related cases: The 2011 disorder in England · The 1995 Nicaragua property forum · Enron and the unasked question

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