4 INSIDE THE BLACK BOX In 2000, as Jim Collins filed the final copy for his business classic ‘Good to Great’, he was inadvertently priming the clarion call for Anti-heroes. In ‘Good to Great’ Collins identifies the essential characteristics of great organisations capable of changing the world. In the book he notices that the leaders of these organisations are quite different from conventional leaders such as your average politician or company director. He says that these people tend to be a ‘study in duality’, being both modest and wilful, shy and fearless. At the time, Collins wasn’t able to go beyond some of the headline characteristics he had observed, describing these findings as a ‘black box that we don’t yet understand’. Here we take a look inside the black box and start to understand what it is that makes Anti-heroes special.
What is An Anti-Hero? Despite Collins not knowing what was inside the black box of anti-heroic leadership, over the last 40 years, teams of psychologists, medics and human development academics have found ever-increasing clarity as to what specific attributes are needed to better navigate complexity26. Similarly, over the last decade there has been mounting evidence27 as to the value of Anti-heroes in handling complex, wicked issues. Combining Torbert and Rooke’s research results with those of Kuhnert and Harris we find that Anti-hero leaders have been discovered to be better than other leaders at key task such as: • Thinking strategically about the future • Creating a compelling vision
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