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The essay below was written in reflection upon the many activities that were undertaken in the W. K. Kellogg Foundation project, Northern Lights LINC; the latter acronym representing "Leadership for Institutional Change."

To Lead, or be Led, is not the Question

Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, employ good people, and free them to do the same. All else is trivia. --Dee Hock, Birth of the Chaordic Age. [i]

Knowing what next to do, how to lead, is not a matter of careful calculation, it is merely doing, beset with uncertainty, conditioned by experience. It is a matter of trying, assessing progress, feeling pain, resolving to do otherwise, then trying again. Without pain, there is no learning. Pain is the answer to the universal question: Why not?

So it is that scholars in the cognitive sciences have discovered that infants only learn by replacing faulty models with others, eventually leading, not necessarily to truth, but to something that will work well enough to allow them to continue to pursue truth. Success, or winning, is not the end point, but a platform providing respite, from which a new beginning is possible. Failure merely provides impetus for the next step. The trick, it seems, is to allow a measure of failure without killing the subject, or the subject's will to seek another solution.

Another quotation from Dee Hock: "Success, while it may build confidence, teaches an insidious lesson: to have too high an opinion of self." And we have explored, these past few years, the consequences of individual and institutional arrogance in assuming that discovery of knowledge is sufficient reward for inflicting the pain that discovery entails. Sufficient for whom? I wanted to ask Dee how his perception of academia as innumerable fiefdoms insulated from their benefactors might be transformed into chaordic institutions, self-organizing, adaptive and harmoniously blending both chaos and order. But chaos intervened as the Twin Towers collapsed under the fury of an alternative world view, and we all scuttled for our burrows, deferring questions and answers to an uncertain future.

The lessons from LINC are many, touching many, but grounded for me in a few memorable moments of reflection. Each of these is a story too lengthy to relate here, but growing in significance as the details of their initial telling become obscured by time.

Our Native American collaborators led us to appreciate the uncertainty of the cosmic position of "the pitiful two-leggeds." Meanwhile, arrogant university administrators were pledging allegiance to the banner of academic freedom flapping in the wind, while failing to hear the same breeze whispering in the rice. It is small comfort that duty draws them back to their committees and laboratories, away from the classroom where their oppression can still the will to learn.

The power of metaphor has been manifest in all that we have done. The arts, science and humanities are one, nourishing each other even as they strive for ascendency in the public mind. Dee Hock recognizes that "competition and cooperation are not contraries. They have no opposite meaning, they are complementary." And so, our creation of public art has rewarded us with new meanings and new opportunities for expression. We are today, by virtue of our mutual participation in creation of new meaning, better able to ask our confreres how they have come to know this world, this life. The trust engendered by this endeavor has empowered us to ask, and to answer with candor, the most revealing questions of faith and belief that have separated human minds for millenia. Some among us will stand stronger for having challenged the struggle between faith and science, the tangible and the divine, evolution and theology. If one indeed conceives of spirits as separate from bodies or physical entities, then no conflict between organic evolution and the notion of a spiritual world exists. For a scientist, an explanation of spirit that is not in conflict with theories of the material universe is reassuring and implies an ease in connecting two communities and worldviews in an increasingly profound manner. This has been, and will continue to be transformative in what we teach, how we live, and who we are. [ii]

Our quest to understand and to fully engage with our constituencies encourages us to explore the power of myth and of metaphor in examining the possibilities for the future. Knowing that whales can talk to people, and that maples, rice, and the hunted give themselves willingly for the sustenance of others, provides evidence that we too can be vessels of transformation, if we choose to expose ourselves to the hazards intrinsic to knowledge and faith.

When Parker Palmer wrote in astonishment that nuclear scientists were willing to risk the combustion of the earth's atmosphere in detonating the first nuclear device, he called upon all of us to pause and reflect upon the consequences of our "knowing." [iii] To paraphrase, with respect, another artist of extraordinary talent, our quest in LINC has revealed 'a woods, dark and deep, and we have promises to keep, ..., and miles to go before we sleep.' [iv]