Leadership as Patternality not Personality Chris Blantern Tom Boydell Murray Anderson-Wallace Inter-logics Consultancy In this session we are suggesting, that when it comes to initiating changes in social practice in organisations and communities that the traditional obsession with ‘personality’ would be better directed to an appreciation of ‘patternality’. What might be called acts of leadership, or indeed followership, are re-viewed as being called out by patterns of exchange. We propose, we are better off disturbing patterns of engagement than we are attempting to promote the ‘eight characteristics of effective leaders’ or fixing so called individuated deficiencies in ‘dysfunctional’ followers. “ I assume that the proper study of interaction is not the individual and his [sic] psychology, but rather the syntactical relations among the acts of different persons mutually present to one another….. …Not, then, men [sic] and their moments. Rather moments and their men.” (Erving Goffman,1982, p 2) We will build on the shift in focus that a ‘Social Constructionist’ or relational stance allows – that the world is ‘interactively occasioned’ – when we talk about the world we are creating co-operative positions (pro-positions) for others to act into – rather than describing the world ‘as it really is’. So, we attempt to foreground ways of recognising forms of engagement occurring in the performance of these or those ends. Primarily we use ‘pattern’ to signify ‘template’ like qualities that pre-scribe the range of person-like activities that are warrantable in this or that context. Patterns actively distribute characteristics to their human counterparts. Outside interactions people do not possess characteristics. “Given his attributes and the conventionalized nature of the encounter we will find a small choice of lines will be open to him and a small choice of faces will be waiting for him.” (Erving Goffman, 1982, p 7) “I invented possible readers whose reactions and belief I anticipated….. …..In doing so, I built up an inscribed reader to whom I prescribed qualities and behaviour, as surely as a traffic light or a painting prepare a position for those looking at them. “ Bruno Latour, 1995, p 230
From this standpoint we recast personality or leadership traits like enthusiasm, motivation, commitment, imagination, decisiveness and even sensitivity and intelligence, as occasioned by the forms of talk. Those qualities, that organisations might want to promote in their leaders or see people as being deficient in, are mostly occasioned or inhibited by the patterned forms of engagement that we do not know how not to do. In the session we will seek the help of Mikhail Bakhtin (Dialogics), Erving Goffman (interaction rituals), Bruno Latour (actant-networks), J L Austin (Pragmatics), Monty Python (patterns of expectation) & Sooty (pre-scriber of the mischief trait) to help us illuminate this stance and we will invite participants to experiment with the ways in which ‘patterns of interaction’ might be characterised and disturbed.
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