LEADERSHIP AND THE TROUBLING REALITY OF MISFIT POLITICS
IN times of severe complexity and deepening crises, societies lay blame at the feet of their leaders.
More so than at less exasperating moments in its history, societies point at a crisis of leadership as the root cause of failures.
Rightly so, since societies have no other option but for citizens to distribute all that must be done among themselves – to delegate to representatives as leaders of the collectives and institutions we build to share the load and get things done. On the face of it then, it seems a correct response to focus on leaders and their capacity to lead in times of crises.
Even when commentators and analysts include the impact of established systems, legacies of history, and institutional cultures to investigate and debate leadership crises, the person and capabilities of the leader remain foregrounded as the crux of the problem. On this one variable turns major social and political decisions and developments. The leader is both a symbol of the state of a nation, and a sign that their collectives and institutions achieve for citizens what they must.
Put in theoretical terms: a crisis of symbolic representation and a crisis of social ecology. Such a crisis is one of symbolic representation because people assign meanings to the performances of leaders, which in turn provide them with ways to make sense of their world.
It is a crisis of social ecology because leaders emerge from the diversity and interaction of voices and agendas that come from the communities, movements, collectives and institutions that make up the complex dynamic of a nation.
Crises that mature into a broad crisis of leadership and determine a unique type of politics, which I term a “politics of misfit”.
Misfit politics refers firstly to the observable mismatch, disconnect and distance between leaders and the citizens, collectives, interests and priorities that they must represent and achieve. It is a politics that depends on and develops when dramatic and rapid shifts take place on a societal level that upset and disrupt established ways of doing, thinking and being.
In such situations the interests and priorities that were at the centre of concern may now lie at the margins, and what previously were left to the peripheries of action may now be the one concern above all.
Leaders that were at the centre, may now find themselves incapable of engaging new agendas that arrived from the margins. Problems now at the centre demand leaders from the margins to move to the centre. Such an upset brings about the troubling reality of the misfit.
Misfit politics centres on three mismatches, namely timing, response and resilience.
Whereas the established sense of time and the periods that determine performances by leaders and the institutions follow a traditional chronology to which citizens conform, in a time of misfits, leaders and citizens alike find it difficult to know when to do what and who to speak to when.
To know the right time becomes confused and hazy.
In misfit politics the exponential increase in complexity, urgency and sheer breadth of problems render leaders and citizens alike slow to respond, uncertain of ideologies, priorities and decisions – an unresponsive politics.
Misfit politics, however, offer this one hope: leaders as misfits not because of their failures, but as nonconformists who seek a new and better way.