Oscars, Hope, Fear, Leadership and Change

Incredibly, the Academy Awards Committee hasn’t asked for my nominations for best picture of 2022.  Doubtless the oversight results from the fact that I have two nominations: All Quiet on the Western Front (AQWF) and Women Talking (WT).  Not so incredibly, I, surely unlike the Academy, view both movies, in significant part, through the lenses of systems, leadership, and change…and in light (shadow?) of the debacles populating our present organizational landscape.

There’s an oft repeated and perpetuated truism in the world of change, a fundamental truth: people resist change.  Always. Period. It’s what we do.  It’s a species trait.  Really?  I beg to differ. As long as fear and hope exist, so too will the wish and the energy for change exist.  Those emotions create an opening, fear pushes us and hope pulls us toward something else.  They create the impulse to change. These two cinematic triumphs illustrate this point.

Most basically, both movies concern the same human tragedy: humans dealing with organized, systemic and persisting atrocity created by other humans. In AQWF, a manipulated, false dream of heroics leads Paul, the 17-year-old central character, into an endless, grinding hellscape of WWI trench warfare. Authority, entrusted figures of power, across Europe generally and, in this tale, Germany particularly, misled a generation, millions and millions of them, into carnage.  Individual courage, numbing fear, exhaustion exceeding exhaustion, survival, impotence amidst all enveloping forces of destruction, relentless devaluation of self and never-ending extermination mix with the sparsely administered balm of a caring expression, a moment or just a memory of love protectively stowed and carried--gifts quickly and all but completely devoured by mud and hellfire… all but.

WT presents women similarly trapped in a violating world, a world imposed on them by a male authority cloaked in a religion whose verses and hymns make their pain more searing even as those verses and hymns provide comfort and the hope of refuge…deliverance…and perhaps retribution.  What to do?  Leave, stay and fight, or simply stay.  Desert, struggle on, or seek refuge in a putrefied trench.  How to combat the impotence, how to claim one’s promised humanity, how best to press through the immobilizing power of fear, how to preserve self, how to break the cycle of abuse and oppression, how to envision a dream… for one’s self… for one’s children… and even for the men who perpetrated and perpetuated this muck and mire. 

Numerous key points emerge from the formidable and memorable acting and cinematic storytelling (The work of many gifted practitioners stands before us in these two movies, Frances McDormand’s being first among them). Several key points pertain consequentially to leading in hard times, through anguishing times, and to leading change:

  1. The women in WT demonstrate the importance and power of full, broadband decision-making, of collectively dissecting the system and distinguishing it from its inhabitants, including its creators and maintainers.With emotional and cognitive force and care, they exchange and further their shared understanding of the system—its design, its workings, and its impact.‘Not just the men learned the lesson’ that supported the system under analysis. In short, they demonstrate the power of taking the time to understand what one is dealing with—its origins, character, and manifestations-- before deciding what to do about it.Inhale in order to exhale.Unearth both the desire to leave as well as the desire to aspire.

  2. The relief of just having it stop (AQWF) and the freeing joy of loading up one’s buggy as others load up theirs and then to heading someplace, anyplace, else (WT).Leading change, helping others to move on can rest on naming and ending what was.As the saying goes, “a hungry stomach has no ears”.Restated, tending to hunger (in any of its many forms) improves the hearing.Defining what a change might bring can begin with showing what it will end.Effective change leadership can blend escape from with pursuit of.

  3. Forgiving, especially the egregious sins of others, even others dominated by a system of their own design, runs a deep and too little explored risk: ‘When does forgiveness become permission?’ (WT) For the perpetrator(s)? For others? Great leadership (at any level, in any community, in any organization) takes BOTH empathy and enforcement--forgiving a transgression need not entail forgoing penance. Account, however mercifully tallied, may need settling to better enable one and all to turn the ledger page.

  4. Above all perhaps, the bigger the challenge-- the greater the importance of fellow travelers and pilgrims, of dedicated friends and comrades.Individual persistence matters, of course, but, paradoxically, it is most effectively employed in combination with that of others.Leaders can help us to remember and to act in light of that paradox, to the benefit of one and all.A Seal instructor once characterized one set of those who could not survive the ultra and multidimensional grueling Seal training, ‘those who think anyone can get through it solely on their own.’

The central characters of both movies persist in the company of others.  They battle on.  They long for home, in the actual and in the metaphoric sense.  They long for and aspire for something better.  They hope—for change.  They do all this against a soundtrack that both movies might have shared: “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?  Or is it something worse?” (The River by Bruce Springsteen).

At their best, leaders, and especially leaders of change, eschew false dreams along with ineffective and harmful practices.  They value and further the development of followers and their capabilities.  They design systems to draw forth the better angels of our nature.  They act as sheriff as required…and only as required.  They wade into the fight and yet savor its ending.  They point away from what has been and toward new horizons, toward something beyond…and tangibly better.  They catalyze shared and individual meaning for all who enlist for that good fight…and for their children.

 

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Iraq 20 Years On -- Painful Lessons in Change

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