Rare.

Being a Leader is hard.

That's why it's rare to find her.

Organisations call 'Leaders' people who:

• Made a Widget well enough to supervise other people to make (often different) Widgets
• Did something in another organisation that their boss wants them to repeat for them
• Get invited to meetings with limited chairs to learn to advocate their boss's opinion 
• Umpire Widget conflicts (rarely) and interpersonal conflicts (mostly)
• Make their Widget better than anyone else in the organisation
• Control others so that the boss doesn't have to

Boss's call them 'leaders' to acknowledge what they want them to do is hard - yet not Leadership hard.

It's a rare boss who will pay you to make decisions that contradict her.

It's a rare boss who will trust you to trust others to change direction from the one she chose.

Rare good bosses means rarer Leaders.

Firms.

In November 1937 Ronald Coase discovered Good Decision Making.

He won a Nobel Prize for Economics in 1991.

Here's the gist of what he published in his paper.

The patron of the Good Decision is the Entrepreneur.

She creates a Widget.

Other Entrepreneurs apply their Widget to hers on its way to a buyer. Each demands decisions: pricing, colour, size, insurance, contracts, transport, dispute resolution, intellectual property ownership. Each decision has a cost which is passed on to the price of her Widget. 

She realises it's cheaper to bring all of those individual decisions under one roof.

The Firm is born.

The external costs of decisions move to be cheaper internal Firm expenses that still add to the cost of the Widget.

The price of a Widget is the sum of each decision that is made on its way to find a buyer.

The Firm is only viable if its Decision Making costs less than out in the market - or another firm.

Good Decision Making defines the successful Firm.

In May 2012 at age 101 and a year before his death, Ronald Coase made another contribution to our understanding of Good Decision makers.

When asked why such a great mind as his failed to predict the speed of China's rise as an economic power, he said:

'I've been wrong so often I don't find it extraordinary at all.'

Configuration

Flight NZ175 from Auckland to Perth was descending.

The passengers heard the whirr-thump of the wheels lowering and locking.

Then the even whine of the two Rolls Royce engines changed pitch to a roar and the aircraft accelerated into a climb.

Toppling the dominoes.

Landing slot with Air Traffic Control lost.

Ground crews, refuelers, caterers, baggage handlers reorganising themselves. 

Every extra minute costing the airline $170 in fuel.

350 passengers, their waiting families, taxis, flight connections, hotel transport, crew changes delayed.

Thousands of dollars lost and hundreds of people inconvenienced.

While still airborne and circling in the landing pattern again, the pilot made an announcement.

He had aborted the landing because he had made 'a configuration error'.

Dan, my Air Traffic Controller friend confirmed that a 'configuration error' probably means that the pilot had not set the flaps correctly for the landing.

How naïve of the pilot to make such an admission of his error.

How reckless of him to say 'Hey everyone still buckled up back there that I'm carrying aloft at several hundred kilometres an hour several thousand feet above the ground and who are still relying on me to get you back to earth - I screwed up.'

Yet on reflection - how refreshing.

Honest. Confident. Respectful. Brave.

The pilot wasn't naïve. He knew what he was doing.

Just what you want in the bloke controlling the metal tube you're travelling in 10 kilometres above the ground.

Doubt.

'Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
         At last he beat his music out.
         There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.'

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

'One of the reasons that a person is interested in what other people have to say is they know they don't know. Doubt is the place in me for you to affect me.'

- John Patrick Shanley

A Leader holds certainty with doubt.

A Leader is someone whom others choose to follow. People won't easily abandon their driftwood and tread water over to your raft if you're bailing water.

Doubt is never on the PowerPoint list of The 10 Qualities of a Leader.

Yet Leadership is inherently a transitional state between certainties. Leaders are on a journey from here towards their belief in Something Better Over Somewhere. Otherwise it's Management. (There's nothing wrong with that.)

People who complain about their Leaders almost always don't need Leadership. They need a Manager. Or a parent.

Almost by definition, if someone has certainty about where they're going and how they're going to get there, they are not a Leader. They're an airline pilot or a train driver. (There's nothing wrong with them either.)

Each of us hears the call towards Something Better Over Somewhere. Many of us respond, only to fall back as the tether between our ego and the opinions of the world tightens.

She breaks free and suffers the whiplash of our jealous displeasure.

She lays down a pathway of good decision making to a familiar beat of self-doubt that calls:

'Come! I am just like you.'

Kanye.

Musician Kanye West explained how Good Decision Making and Widget Thinking help him to become who he is.

His life and creative process and therefore his mistakes are before the world. They are the product of Good Decision Making and therefore teach others so he can never be wrong:

'I'm opening up my notebook and I'm saying everything in there out loud. A lot of people are very sacred with their ideas, and there is something to protecting yourself in that way, but there's also something to idea sharing, or being the person who makes the mistake in public so people can study that.'

Kanye also understands that it's all about the Widget. And it's never about the Widget:

'It's more about the art of conversation, the companionship, the friendships, and the quality of life that you get out of working—it's about the creative process even more than the final product. I think there's something kind of depressing about a product being final, because the only time a product is really final is when you're in a casket.

My mission is about what I want to create.' 

Answers.

'You only have the answers for things that don't matter.'
- Peter Block

You don't say 'I don't know' too often and keep your job.

We're paid to Know.

People rely on us to Know.

There is little patience even for I'm Not Sure.

Which means our Widget doesn't matter.

Could this be why only 13% of the world's workers are engaged in their work?

Or why only 7.5% of workers consider themselves productive?

I'm not sure.

Error.

But what if I'm wrong?

'Anything worth doing is worth failing at'.
- Fr Greg Boyle

‘Experts step outside their comfort zone and study themselves failing.’
- Josh Foer

‘An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. We learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again.
- Niels Bohr

‘The only mistake is when I'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did.’
Stephan Harris Jazz Musician

‘What amazes me is that people rarely see today's problems as new challenges born out of yesterday's perfect solutions.’
- Anon

‘The freedom to fail is more important than freedom to succeed. A big creative adventure vs. a small, safe future.’
- Anon

‘Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.’
- President Obama

'It is only at the moment of humans' realistic admission to selves of having made a mistake that they are the closest to that mysterious integrity governing the universe.'

- R. Buckminster Fuller

Underpins.

The Report into the Inquiry into the 2013 WA Senate Election provides further rich examples of Good Decision Making - particularly Widget Thinking.

The Executive Summary details the many complex challenges confronting the Australian Electoral Commission in conducting an election. It concludes with this statement (italics added):

[T]his Inquiry noted a range of issues involving culture, planning, systems and practices that contributed to the loss of the ballots. The implementation of the various recommendations, findings and observations throughout this Report could assist the AEC in its future operations. The Inquiry believes that these could be achieved by pursuing a future state where the sanctity of ballots underpins all aspects of the AEC’s operations, from planning to training, to materials management and all other aspects covered in this Report.

How does the AEC/Organisation X resolve the competing demands on it leading up to and during an election/doing business? How does it ensure that there is clarity amidst the chaos/organisational life?

It asks itself: 'What decision will ensure the sanctity of ballots/our Widget?'

It resolves all issues according to this outcome.

Widget Thinking.
 

Productivity.

Whenever you talk in the abstract or the generic to a large group of people, every single person thinks that you're talking to them. Except for you, because you're special and smart.

- Merlin Mann

I designed, organised, advertised and prepared for five presentations on Good Decision Making open to the public.

An hour. Free.

No one registered for the first one.

Two people registered for the second. Neither turned up.

We cancelled the rest.

Lots of possible reasons why. All my fault.

Meanwhile...

A study has found that bosses are losing an average of three months per year of productivity from each worker.

Those with the most unused 'discretionary effort' were knowledge workers.

One of the conclusions was lack of clarity about outcomes. Widgets.

Australians spend more hours at work than those in most other countries and yet according to another study, we rank second last on productivity growth, just ahead of Botswana.

Perhaps everyone who read about my Workshop was part of the 7.5% who considered themselves productive.

None of this applies to you and me though.

I.

 'There is a lot of learning between 'It fell' and 'I dropped it'.

- Anonymous

'You got a sec?,' the strike pilot asked me. His cheeks still had the outline of his oxygen mask. 

I followed him to another room and he pushed a video casette into the VCR. 

'This is vision from the package that I just led.'

The black and white infra red images filmed from an F111C aircraft earlier that night three nautical miles away at 600 knots began playing. He was about to narrate when he paused, smiled, leaned back in his chair and gently closed the door from where three pilots from one of our allies were looking in. 

'See the cross-hairs?' he resumed. 'You'll see me move them over the corner of this intersection.' He jabbed at the screen where the white cross was settling on the outline of the top of a building. 'This was our target. The telephone exchange in the centre of the city. Top left hand corner. Remember it?'

I nodded. I had reviewed and approved all the strike package targets for the Commander earlier in the day.

'See those numbers here?' He pointed at one of several sets of readouts along the edge of the image. 'They are simulating my laser guided bomb coming in. Three, two, one. Perfect. Bang on. Target destroyed. Well, simulated. Now watch.'

The cross hairs remained in place for a few seconds. Then glided to the ghostly outline of the building on the bottom right of the intersection. Then back up. Pause. Then diagonally down. The image flickered to black. 

'Wrong building,' he said, punching the tape out of the recorder. 'I bombed the wrong corner of the intersection. I need you to tell me the consequences. I need you to brief me and the rest of the Squadron on the legal implications of my error. Can you do that?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Good,' he said. 'Thank you.'

There was a knock at the door then it opened to five bearded, filthy and grinning Special Forces soldiers. 

'Come in fellas,' the Air Commodore said, then to me 'Sorry - these blokes just want to see the video of us tracking them along a creek bed last night from five miles away. They're curious. Didn't hear a thing. Want to sit in?'

Fail.

'No plan survives first contact with the enemy.'

- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

'Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth.'
-Mike Tyson

Each decision is a plan.

The plan will fail.

Someone won't like the way the decision affects them. Everyone will think that they could have done better. The result won't pay the dividends that were expected. Execution will take longer. Cost more. 

This is why many (most) organisations lack decision makers - let alone Good Decision Making - because the great majority of decisions don't give the result we intended. We declare ourselves each time we make a decision. We expose our egos to the judgement of others when we inevitably fail. 

There are at least six ways that most of us avoid failing:

We avoid making decisions

We make decisions but don't act on them

We 'do' things that aren't decisions but look like it to anyone who matters. Busy-work is an example.

We hold a position of power that masks our inaction behind its routines, rituals, mantras and the issuing of orders.

We blame someone else for the decision.

We declare every decision a success, despite the evidence.

Good decision making is a process that expects failure, prepares for it, and allows us to learn from it. The Five Steps to a good decision is a process that we can retrace and review and identify which element led to the failure. 

It's the decision-maker's equivalent of the black box flight data recorder.

The reality is that life is messy and complicated and imperfect and more things go wrong than right and many of the right results are the product of happy coincidence than good planning.

The enemy that waits to ambush our plans isn't out there. It's hiding in plain sight.

In our ego.

Committed.

The Australian Electoral Commission continues to model good decision making.

Just to recap.

The AEC conducted the election for Senators in Western Australia. It assembled its Widget.

It counted votes and the candidates with the most votes won Senate seats. It produced its Widget.

'The result was too close,' some people said. 'The Widget isn't right. Make another one.'

'The Widget's fine,' the Western Australian Electoral Commissioner said.

Some of the losing candidates complained. 'We don't like the Widget because we didn't get elected...er, no...because it's not the Widget we wanted...er, no...because there's too much doubt about the democratic process!'

'I agree that the Widget hasn't turned out the way that it should,' the Federal Electoral Commissioner said upholding the appeal and ordering a re-count. 'Not for the reasons given by the losers, but because our customers ordered a Confidence coloured Widget and its colour is flaking and fading. We have to remake it.'

The re-count began and found that votes were missing. The AEC searched and could not find them. It appointed an independent investigator.

Before the investigator could report back, the AEC said 'We know enough already. Our Widget is so important that we have to get it right. We think it's not good enough. We're not going to wait for someone else to complain about our Widget. We're going to do it. Let's ask the High Court to confirm that we failed and tell us what we need to do fix it.'

Remarkable.

This rare integrity in decision making is only possible when a decision maker has Widget authenticity and clarity.

Every organisation claims to be 'committed to...' something. Committed to excellence in... Committed to the welfare of... Committed to the safety of... Committed to our customers...

Committed.

'Committed to' implies that we've leapt. The bullet has been fired. The train has left the station. We won't be satisfied until we've produced excellence, welfare, safety, customer satisfaction. Nothing will stop us. There is nothing foreseen or unforeseen that will cause us to waver us from what we have committed ourselves to do. We have no choice now.

Yet the reality for most organisations is that Committed To is the excited language of the salesman and the marketer and the PR person being put into the mouth of the Widget maker to get people to buy the Widget. It rarely comes off the assembly line in that colour. It's too hard.

Which is why the decision making of the AEC is so extraordinary and very reassuring, as its role is:

to deliver the franchise: that is, an Australian citizen's right to vote, as established by the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918.

Consequences.

The Australian Electoral Commission gave another example of Good Decision Making today. 

Ed Killesteyn the AEC Commissioner was interviewed on Radio National on the decision by the AEC to declare the Senate result in Western Australia despite the disappearance of 1375 votes.

He began by acknowledging the 'gravity' of the situation and apologising to the electors.

He said that he was left with 'a nagging and almost irreconcilable doubt' about the result of the WA Senate election. 

The journalist then asked him if this was the case, 'Why on earth is the AEC going to declare the Senate result in WA this afternoon?'

'I have no choice,' Mr Killesteyn replied. 'I am obligated to declare the result. Legally I have no other choice.' 

'So you need to do this so that it can be referred to the courts?'  the journalist asked.

'That's correct. The 40 day petition period to the courts is only enlivened once the last of all the writs has been returned. '

The Commissioner then summarised to the Australian public, via the journalist, everything that he had done to find the missing votes. 

The AEC had already begun an inquiry into the missing votes and was reviewing its procedures.

Mr Killesteyn understands that he is a servant of the Law, which says that he must declare the election. Despite some withering criticism, he recognises that he must make this decision to allow the consequences to begin flowing from it, whatever they may be.

He steps back from his own doubt and uncertainty and does his job. He produces his Widget so that others may produce theirs.

Like most good leaders, Mr Killesteyn is not in the heroic model. He is a career public servant who appears to have discharged his duties without fanfare or fuss.

In a 2009 speech he listed the four principles under which the AEC operated in order to build public confidence in its impartiality, one of which was 'decision-making in accordance with objective application of the law'.

He quoted from a speech given by the Indian Chief Election Commissioner, who said that the Indian organisation was able to retain the confidence of the electors because it was 'a listening Commission'.

Listening.

The Indian Commissioner concluded by saying: 

'Being human, we can be wrong sometimes, but our intention should never be impure.'

Mr Killesteyn's words and tone of speech showed that he understood and accepted that his organisation had failed in fulfilling its public duty to deliver on nothing short of the democratic process of a Federal Election.

Yet his voice during the interview was calm, measured, steady and without the edge that one expects from someone under so much criticism. Possibly because he was liberated by the knowledge that while he had failed in his Widget, his decision making was flawless.

His response today was even more remarkable given that it was he who decided to overrule the WA Electoral Commissioner's original decision and to allow the re-count that has ultimately revealed his organisation's errors and undermined public confidence in it, and in him. 

Leaders are Brave. 

Assembly.

The Atlantic Magazine had a recent article about how some companies in the United States are bringing their factories back home.

While increasing wages in developing countries and higher transport costs from the factory to market are part of the reason, most are found in Widget Thinking. 

The time from when a product came into fashion and then fell out had shortened from seven years to two. It meant companies had to shorten the feedback loop between factory floor and design table.   

General Electric is one company reversing the overseas outsourcing trend. It originally had designers in the United States and manufacturers in China. It decided to bring the workers who built washing machines into the same building as the engineers and designers.

Workers on the factory floor identifying any improvements or issues could immediately inform the engineers who could consult with the designers who could modify the Widget. One example was when workers recommended a design change that cut the hours needed to assemble a washing machine from 10 hours to 2.  

This 'inherent understanding' (unconscious competence?) of the product had been lost with the outsourcing to cheaper labour in China. GE got it back by closing the gap between assembly line and designer. 

Co-located assembly and design also allowed companies to adopt the ‘Lean’ manufacturing techniques popularised by Toyota. Everyone has a say in critiquing and improving the way work gets done, with a focus on eliminating waste. It requires an open, collegial and relentlessly self-critical mind-set among workers and bosses alike –a  culture that is hard to create and sustain.

It requires a Leader. 

Each worker adds their widget to the Widget moving along the assembly line. It's the job of the manager to make sure that the assembly line is itself assembled so that the work is as easy and efficient as possible. The best way for the manager to achieve this is through an open, collegial and relentlessly self-critical approach.

In the GE example, the dishwasher team created its own assembly line based on its practical experience of assembling dishwashers. The result was that it eliminated 35 percent of labour. 

Here's where the bigger SPEAR picture is important to Widget production. The GE workers only shared the information that led to the reduction in labour after management promised them that none would lose their job.

The Leaders and managers had succeeded in creating the Space where the workers felt safe enough to be so innovative that they did put their very jobs at risk. 

Every organisation is making something - its Widget. It's probably not literally an assembly line. It is at least made up of people who each makes something that contributes towards the Widget.

Is this process open? Is  it collegial? Is it relentlessly self-critical? 

Does every worker feel that they have a Leader who has created their Space, defined their Purpose, Equipped them, Affirmed them.?

Then got out of their way? 

Dance.

Dance, as with most art, can teach us about how to harness the tension between order and creativity in an organisation and in ourselves.

An hour spent watching professional dancers rehearse is a humbling experience. Their discipline, intrinsic drive to perfect the smallest of moves, facial expressions, even the position of their fingers are inspirational for most workers whose main driver is whether Dorothy put doughnuts in the boardroom for morning tea.

The Weekend Australian newspaper had an article about the work of the choreographer Stephanie Lake that captured the paradox of creating beautiful art.

"When I watch her create movement phrases, to me it's the musical equivalent of listening to Bach improvise a fugue," says Fox, a renowned composer and sound artist. "It's incredibly intuitive but brilliantly precise at the same time."

Lake says of her collaboration with Fox on A Small Prometheus: "We have pushed each other into this place and we have ended up with a piece that has quite a lot of tension in it. We didn't set out to make that; it's where we have been led."

Lake says she often works with dancers in an improvisatory way and then selects those passages she wants to "fix", or retain in the final piece.

But for A Small Prometheus she wanted the dance to suggest instability, or constant flux, so some passages are fixed and others are a little unplanned. "Bodies melt, cascade, fall into each other," she says. "Often things go wrong. It hasn't been lethal, but it's risky. There are sections in this work - which is new for me - that are essentially loose and unpredictable."

Intuitive. 

Precise. 

Space. 

Tension. 

Led. 

Improvisatory 

Instability. 

Flux. 

Wrong. 

Risky. 

Unpredictable. 

These are the nouns of an authentic life of a person and an organisation. We suppress them at our peril. 

Almost all of us read these as signs of error, failure, disaster, impending job loss. Leaders not only allow these elements to exist, they fan them.

That's why Leaders are brave and rare. Not for the reason we traditionally assume - ie that they need courage to make the tough, unpopular decisions needed to preserve order.

A Leader is called to create the space and hold all of these contradictions within, amidst the fear, anger, anxiety, conflict and uncertainty that inevitably arise. The Leader perseveres despite the failures and the criticisms because this is what she is called to do.  There is almost no choice for her.

As Stephanie Lake said about her work:

'We didn't set out to make that; it's where we have been led. '

Wrong.

In 2003 in the case of Australian Communication Exchange v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation the seven Justices of the High Court of Australia ruled 4-3 in favour of granting an appeal.

This meant that three of the wisest, most experienced lawyers in the country - including the Chief Justice - who were in the minority and denied the appeal were 'wrong'.

It meant that the Barristers and Solicitors who quoted legal precedents, legislation and fact in support of the respondent before the High court were 'wrong'. 

It meant that the three Judges of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia who made the finding that was the subject of the appeal and the barristers and solicitors who appeared in that trial on behalf of the losing party that was overturned by the High Court was each 'wrong'. 

It meant that each bureaucrat in the Australian Tax Office who made decisions and internally reviewed and upheld decisions that applied and interpreted legislation, policy and case law that were eventually overturned by the High Court was wrong. 

From the first public servant to the judgment in the High Court, dozens of decision makers and their advisers including three of the sharpest legal minds in the land, each with education, experience, expertise and wisdom and hundreds of combined years of interpreting and applying policies and procedures and laws were....'wrong'.

The High Court, Federal Court, Supreme Courts, District and County Courts, Magistrates Courts and miscellaneous other tribunals across the country overturn thousands of decisions of lower decision makers every day. Their 'wrong' legal reasoning, reputation, credibility and intellect will remain pinned up in the public square of the World Wide Web for the world to see as long as there is such a thing. 

Law students, solicitors, barristers, text book writers, Queens and Senior Counsel, judges associates, judges and High Court justices will continue to read and study their 'wrong' reasoning and use it to form and strengthen their own arguments based on different facts and sometimes even law. 

Next time that you're 'wrong' about something, remember the Chief Justice and his two other High Court of Australia brethren and Australian Communication Exchange v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation.

You're in good company.

Purpose.

Every experienced decision maker knows the frustration of having to deal with the aftermath of the right decision that was made the wrong way. 

Nicola Roxon, the former Federal Attorney-General and Health Minister gave a speech this week in which she told of the previous government dealing with the same consequences. It was a rare insight into the fundamentals of good decision making in the leadership of the country.

She explained why the Labor Party chose to remove Kevin Rudd as the Prime Minister. 

'I think we had all the right reasons to act,' she said,  'but I think we were clumsy and short sighted in the way we did it.' 

'Even though the reasons were there to justify our action, I don’t think we handled it properly at the time, and Labor has paid a very high price for this mishandling ever since.'

In other words, Labor's process leading up to and following the removal of Kevin Rudd revealed, tested and shaped its Widget in the eyes of the electorate. The re-defining of its Widget that this caused, and the damage to Labor's integrity is hard to overcome.

'If Kevin had been an employee,' Ms Roxon a former industrial lawyer said, 'he would have won his unfair dismissal case. Not because there wasn’t cause to dismiss him, but because we didn’t explain the reasons properly to him, let alone to the voting public.'

'I used to see a lot of these cases - where there was good cause to dismiss someone but the employer hadn’t given notice of the problem, or used a different excuse because it was too embarrassing to simply tell a colleague they weren’t up to the job, or that everyone found them unbearable.'

She spoke about how attempts to save people from the consequences of their actions and the decisions that they draw upon themselves can actually be crueller in the long run.

'After the most brutal and speedy sacking, we got overcome with politeness and thought it would save Kevin pain to say as little as possible and move on quickly. What the rest of the world calls a polite white lie, became political poison.

'So although at the time it seemed unimaginable to contemplate being so publically rude to your own PM, with the benefit of hindsight, some of us should’ve spoken out - if not before, at least immediately after.

'Instead, we made a brutal decision and then shied from the brutal explanation that was needed.

'We left everyone looking for other answers and by doing this we did a great disservice to both Kevin and Julia. On its own it would’ve cast a long shadow over the next three years in government, and with active fanning by Kevin and his supporters, it proved impossible to recover from.'

It's either sobering or reassuring for the average boss to know that the senior law and justice officer in the country and an expert in employment law was collateral damage from her government's poor workplace performance management and decision making. 

This is a striking example of how even the most experienced, intelligent and powerful decision makers can be so fixated on the need to make the right decision, to be 'decisive', that they neglect to make the decision in the right way. 

They got what they wanted - the removal of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister - yet at the cost of their Widget. As Ms Roxon said in response to the argument that political expediency justified the decision:

'We know bums on seats in Parliament do matter - but they aren’t all that matters. If the damage to our sense of purpose, to our reputation for delivering good policy and for caring for the community is severe, this reputational loss, and lack of purpose, can take longer to recover from than it takes to win back seats here and there.

'And it is harder to win the seats back if your people don’t think you stand for anything.'

Hard.

A Leader recognises the tension between the uncertainty, anxiety and chaos that flow from navigating virgin territory, and the fear that this is evidence that she is failing and that she needs to turn back. 

Leadership is Leadership because it is advancing where no-one has been before. Leadership is taking people in a direction that they otherwise wouldn't have chosen. It follows (no pun intended) that this will give rise to emotional turbulence in both the Leader and those following her.

It is hard.

Leaders are Leaders because they continue to advance towards where they want to be beyond the point where the PowerPoint leaders turn back because there's no path and it's hard and people are complaining.

The PowerPoint leader talks of leadership of leading of leaders of lead of leadership positions with the background hum of their wheels running over the smooth bitumen highway that was beaten, then surveyed, then graded, then laid out in front of them to travel on in air conditioned comfort with the cruise control on directed by the onboard navigation system while everyone's asleep in the back.

The PowerPoint leader then makes a decision in their voice to deviate. They immediately become disconcerted by the sound and unevenness of the gravel and the bumpy ride as they veer off someone else's route. Those in the back seat stir and mutter at being disturbed by the poor driving. They peer through the windows and feel anxious as they don't recognise their surroundings. They seek comfort and affirmation of the legitimacy of their fears in the other anxious fellow back seat faces. There's murmurs of dissent.

The PowerPoint leader makes another decision that relies on what they learned from their first decision. They veer off the track and into virgin terrain. The back seat grumbles grow into calls to turn back because surely the vibrations and the shaking and the noise and the uncertainty mean that this can't be the right direction.

Wrong way. Turn back. You must be lost. There's no track let alone marked highway and signs. Look around. Nobody else is on this route. Here - look at the map that proves you're wrong. Everyone in the back seat thinks you're wrong. We took a vote. Democracy.

The fear for the novice Leader transcending from PowerPoint slides is that the voices behind them and in their head might be right. Who do they think they are to deviate off the bitumen?

The real time symptoms of error are the same as those of Leadership. It's only those who may follow who can see the sense and predictability of the path.

Choosing to transcend the PowerPoint slides and into Leadership demands exceptional confidence that can survive the battering to ego and identity and the ceaseless gnawing of self-doubt that is louder than the critics' voices. Not motivated by any external goal or incentive because these may never be grasped.

But because to do so is to become who you are. 

Integrity.

The events leading to the suspension of James Hird as coach of the Essendon Football Club are a classic study in how decisions reveal, test and shape who we really are - beyond what we say we are.

James Hird stated in January that he took 'full responsibility' for everything done in the Football department. To you and me 'full responsibility' means that whatever happened, James will accept the consequences as if he pulled every lever, regardless of what he actually personally did or knew.  

This is a sound legal and ethical position to take. Very commendable. His words gave comfort and reassurance that transcend the uncertainty about what happened. They were saying to us 'Don't worry. I was in charge and you know me. I am a Man of integrity and I would never allow illegal drug taking to go on. If it did, then I'd see it as such a heinous oversight on my part that I would resign. I'm still in charge, so that tells you that all is well. That shows you how confident that I am in my Club, and therefore you should be also.'

Then look at what he actually does because this is what speaks loudest. He dodges and weaves and blames others. What we assumed he meant by 'full responsibility' was wrong.

Yet we don't get to say 'James - you're wrong. You should do such-and-such.'  James gets to define his Widget. Essendon affirms his definition for as long as he is employed as coach. He explains to us what he means by 'full responsibility' by his actions. He's not wrong if he acts differently to what we assumed. We are wrong in what we assumed James meant.

The result for James Hird is far worse than us thinking that he's 'wrong' - or indeed that he was ultimately suspended for a year by the governing body. There's nothing wrong with being 'wrong' - this is important and - in James' case - sad. The result of James' actions is that we can no longer make assumptions about what James will do when he says that he will do something. Indeed there's a double whammy because people also generally react badly to being duped.

'Integrity' is simply doing what you said that you were going to do. James no longer has integrity for those of us who assumed 'full responsibility' meant its plain meaning. We now have to second guess him when he says that something is a spade. Does he actually mean a shovel?  

This should be such a fatal blow to his ability to lead - in any sense. We lack confidence in where he says he's going to take us. He says he's going to lead us to victory. Whose definition of victory? James' or ours? This uncertainty is death to a leader.

Our decisions - not our words - reveal, test and shape us.

It was so, so easy for James to sound noble and Churchillian in January. 'Full responsibility!' Yet James' decisions were harder to make than those words were to utter. Real life tested his courage to stand by his words.

And most fatally for him and Essendon, they will continue to shape how others will behave in the future in response to whatever he or Essendon say. This is damage that can't be undone.

It takes a few clicks of a marketing manager's keyboard to declare what an organisation is 'committed to'. But that is just plastic clickety-clack noise until a decision reveals what that actually means, tests just how 'committed' it is, and then shapes our assumptions about what it will do in the future.

As for James Hird - Essendon has offered him a two year contract extension.  It appears that he has produced his Widget precisely to his employers' specifications.

And as for the governing body - the Australian Football League - what does it tell us about its Widget? How much did the $1.253 Billion in television rights  and James Hird's popularity among supporters and viewers and ratings affect its decision-making? Again, it's pointless for us to argue whether it should have.

A better way to shape the AFL's Widget to our specifications? Stop buying it. Switch off the TV and with it the advertisers who pay the broadcasters who bid for the TV rights from the AFL which decides whether James Hird's Widget is well-made.

Copyright.

It's rare for decision makers to let us in on their decision making.

The fortunate exceptions are courts and the government. We can walk into almost any court and hear the judge explain how she reached her judgment. We can sit in the public gallery in parliament and listen to debate over legislation. 

It's risky for decision makers to explain their reasoning because it may make their decisions look like the product of a methodical process of inquiry rather than the result of charisma or instinct or divine revelation. So we usually don't get invited to meetings or sent the minutes.

If decision makers publish the blueprint of how they do things they fear making themselves redundant. It means that anyone with the same information and process of reasoning could do what they do. Earn what they earn. Wield their power.

A Leader falls over herself to make her decision-making transparent. Her processes are open source. That's how she became a Leader. She's a teacher. She wants to show her working out for others to copy and follow. Leaders become Leaders because people are confident enough in their decision making to choose to follow them. 

A Leader isn't worried about becoming redundant by showing her working out for three reasons:

One: It's who she is. 

Two: While everyone is busy poring over her blueprints to discover and copy the trick, the Leader has long moved on to explore and fail and learn and make decisions and publish their working out for others to copy or follow if they so choose. In other words - Leading. 

Three: Leaders are brave.