Leadership and Hope

Another riff or two on the River Kwai (can you hear the whistling in the background?)

Nicholson began to subsume the goals of his organization under his own goals.  His own goals were not as wired in to Reality as they ought to have been.  In order to sustain those goals, he had to cut himself off from feedback that might challenge his constructions of Reality.  That feedback came chiefly from the British army doctor who was serving in the prison camp.

The doctor was the only consistent voice that raised doubts about the whole bridge enterprise.  When the doctor did finally challenge Nicholson face to face, he was rebuffed.  You may be a fine doctor, he was told, but you have a great deal to learn about the army.  By the end of the movie, it is clear that the doctor knows a great deal about the army.  And he is reminded of the power of human self-deception.

The movie closes with the doctor perched on a hillside.  He sees the wreckage of the bridge and the dead Nicholson downstream.  All the doctor can do is repeat his diagnosis: "Madness, madness!"

It is a form of madness when we use our goals to screen our perceptions.  In psychological terms, it is called "confirmation bias."  That bias occurs when we adopt an understanding of reality and then sort out our experience and information accordingly.  The information and experiences that support our understanding we regard as normal and acceptable.  The information and experiences that contradict our understanding we regard as aberrant and dangerous.  So truth is constructed rather than explored.

If a person or an organization persists in confirmation bias long enough, the result will be ruin and death.  We each have our personal perspectives on the nature of things, and in that sense there is no one "orthodox" view of what is right.  On the other hand, Reality will not be denied in the end.  At some point, the consequences of our actions land upon us.  The chickens come home to roost at sunset.  If our understandings are far enough from reality, our worldview will collapse under the weight of accumulated falsehood.

So the psychology of hope points us toward the critical value of goals.  I expand that, however, to the pursuit of ends that truly matter.  The psychology of hope doesn't, from within its own structures, offer a way to evaluate the goals themselves.  That comes from a larger worldview.  It is that larger worldview that requires the theology of hope and more particularly the Reality of the Resurrection.

Genuine hope encourages and fosters an open information loop.  On the one hand "High hope individuals focus their efforts on both individual and collective goal attainments.  They hope not in isolation, but in relation to others frequently pursuing 'common goals'" (See Helland and Winston, "Towards a Deeper Understanding of Hope and Leadership").  Nicholson was able to impose his hopes on others, but he was not able to accept healthy and helpful feedback.  His community ultimately shrank to a nation of one.

On the other hand, high hope individuals have tremendous flexibility when it comes to the future.  "Rather than trying to concretize and force the realization of a preconceived future, by hoping people prepare the way for possible futures to emerge" (See Ludema, Wilmot and Srivasta, "Organization Hope: Reaffirming the Constructive Task of Social and Organizational Inquiry").  Nicholson was unable to allow such flexibility.  He experienced it as the anarchy of the rabble and moved quickly to impose order at the cost of longterm health and success.