so long, conference!

Many thanks to the conference organisers and all who attended who made this such a wonderful two days. And thanks to you for navigating this far, for reading this, for the comments I'd love you to make, and to continuing the discussions.

attack of the 40 foot Siamese twins - responses to the panel

Here's where the empire strikes back: John, from Warwick, is speaking now. Go for it John - give 'em hell! John is asking about differences in the types of discourses between science and more ordinary discourses. Robin is responding with an erudite and referenced (he's talking in paragraphs, just like the science language that John has raised the question about). And its a long paragraph... it's still going. I have, of course, missed the bulk, nay trimmed the bulk of the answer to this question by my nibbling at this keyboard. Now Michael Cox from Canada has stood up, next to me, asking knowing why and knowing what - how do you bridge those solitudes? Praxis is nice, but it seems to me that they really are two different worlds driven by two different logics. Jean is saying that perhaps each position learns from the other position. You mean one defines the other? Whey hey! Enter Ferdinand Saussure stage left. Jean is saying we need a good dialogue between these competing/mutual positions. Need a good rodding, a good seeing to, via the dialectical method (talking, it's good to talk). Now Kim is talking, addressing the duality of this conference - practice/theory. What is the subsequent output of this dialectcism? I'm a much more difficult manager, more prickly, spikey, more tougher person. practitioners may not want to know what theorist want to know, and vice versa. Umm, interesting. Now Roger Gill, who is bringing academics and practitioners together. Neither group wanted to meet with the other group - yuk, I'm not meeting them. Isn't theory about good practice (I think you'll find it was Einstein who said that)? A gent from Cardiff now (sorry, I didn't catch your name, just your city and institution - how strange), will we get any closer to practice given the funding politics we're currently repressed by? Right on brother! Here's Robin with a 'yes and no' - yes, repeat, NO. Robin has lifted the veil of his disguise; maybe he never had one. In the sum total of things, its not important. Come on conference! Get this into your heads - you've blown this out of all proportion! Look at the figures, the vaguely facty and absoluty (plenary) figures. Now Keith is backing the yes/no answer. Academics are supposed to be indecisive, rather than dam well doing it. Here's a tension to chew on! Lara Croft, from Tomb Raider University, eat your heart out!

Simon Weston, now, from Lancaster - pressure towards practice, that pure theory is a good thing, there's a place for both not either or. Today's critical theory is tomorrows normative fodder. What production line is this, what Fordist factory are we visiting here on this factory visit? Now Denis from Abderdeen; as academics, even when we try to become normative, we always surround it with qualifications, 'ifs' and 'buts', and that we're "willing to abandon our theories". But practitioners want certainty. Enough of this wishy wishy, Dr. professor washy! Do we (both sides of the sectarian divide) have to abandon some of our values? Robin is applauding consultants who appear to embody certainty but who back-door radical uncertainty. Peters & Waterman of In Search of Excellence. Pull on this bit of wool and it will unravel. Another question running towards the riot police of the panel:, shields raised; here, capitalist/academic agents, chew on this molotov cocktail. Now Martin Clarke: do managers really want quick responses? No: not in his experience. They value the reflective space that this academic staging enables [nods from the panel]. And Ivan, from Cranners: we seem to be struggling around some practical issues. Organisations are always pilgrimiging to academics and finding an irrelevant lack of action. Consultancies provides answers, solution and direction. We must provide direction too - we are directionless. Quick, where's the sat nav? We're lost! What substitute gadget can you go out and buy? Now Anne from Lancaster, who can't believe what she's saing, who's defending her role as practitioner and who's defending the consultancy model. Don't think, cos you'll cock-up on the money front. Steady! Now a gent from Canada - sorry, I didn't catch your name. Executives are obsessed with minimising risk. Consultants rock! "Listen, Mr Consultant, I want you to minimise our risk with some fancy thinking". Academics are obsessed that we'll be attacked on page 84, paragraph 3 of our papers around our statistics. Get a life, Dr Academic! Vive la intuition, spring of '68 revolution, don't crave another academic paper. What we have right now is lousy, NYPD blue. Now a measured response from Jean from the Panel (who've now, effectively, capitalised their name by commenting on the comments from the audience, rather than sitting back in the audience, exit the cockpit). Frank Hamilton: let's reframe this a minute...don't have a minute to spare, to reflect, too busy earning, publishing. How do the reward structures we're under mould what we're doing? How many of us are changing what we're doing, based on the inflexibility of the structures in academe? What mechanisms will allow us to talk to practitioners? Now Mike Osbaldeston, who's quizzing the tightrope: see the storm?; run for your life, inelegantly, down that tightrope! Grab, grapple, swing but scurry on to the next rope. Sod the pole, sod the finesse of getting along the rope. The pressure of context forces us back on our intuition: hey, at last, a triumph (a trump) for irrationality. MO has a lot of time for intuitive practitioners. I haven't got time to read another paper! Spare me. Now David Collinson; it might help us to drop the dichotomy. Drop the dead dichotomy! Cumon David, we need a new comment here... And on that note, the panel is closing. Robin is having the final word... Course textbooks reach practitioners, at least, but they're not real. No no, Kim is last wording about design science and predictive (I always forget the opposite in this distinction that David Tranfield uses) science. This has been the attack of the 40 foot Siamese twin's (thanks Michael for suggesting the image to this post) response to the panel. Phew!

definition of 'plenary' - full, complete, entire, absolute

Here we all are, back in the big room, the full jar, with an array of academics sat at the bottom of the room, the ranks of amassed practitioners stacked in a bank above them, waiting to discuss. What is practitioner oriented about this staging? What is full, complete, entire, absolute (dictionary definition of plenary) about this? Jonathan Gosling is asking "what benefit will come about, what are we adding to via our studies of leadership studies?" Are we closer to an anatomy of leadership via these efforts: what are the affordances of productions such as this conference and its wider discourse? So these questions, or proxies for these questions, have been posed to our august panel.

Keith Grint is starting: he's criticising comments from a critic of 'all this philosophic nonsense' rather well, using humour. The below the belt target that Keith has centred in his sights are the banks of airportainia books that are consumed on flights, at airport gates, in snatches of time where we're acting the travelling business person. What is the ineluctable draw towards normativity? Are we compromising ourselves, or rather, why do we compromise ourselves? It's as if there's a gigantic magnet pulling at our metallic clothes, at our suit of armor, drawing us inexorably towards normativity. Keith is naked in front of us: he's unmeshed himself from the suit - and receive a ripple of applause.

Robin Wensley is now in the pedagogic cockpit of this laboratory room 16. Most of the issues that can be posed about leadership research can be easily classed under the management debate. Robins is enumerating several issues that are true of both discourses, e.g. the role of the normative pull: what are our scholarly outputs; epistemology and ontology questions. It's only partly a Mode 1 and Mode 2 issue. We should be more interested in what is the specific nature of leadership knowledge? What is the balance between folk wisdom and 'scientific' knowledge? We cannot but engage in these debate, but there are some underlying differences in the nature of these knowledge. So what have scholarly outputs to do with this? Let's look at the annual UK consultancy business revenues - approx. £10 billion. UK b-schools, £1bn. RAE and research funding, £10m. So, we are "small bit players" in this game, based at least on these foundational figures. Or, we could look elsewhere for affordances: we should look at more than just stories; to look more carefully at which the argumentation is presented in particular fields. There are various ways of being critical and rigorous in our endeavours; but we should be doing more that just stories. And so the the 'ologies. A particular version is to argue that management knowledge is so context dependent that effectively management itself ia 'category mistate' It could be that this is even truer in the case of leadership"

Jean Hartley is staying seated: should we be contributing to theory or norative practice. We should be looking at both, says Jean. What are the ways to link theory to practice? PRAXIS is the best notion to explain this: theory informs practice and practice informs theory. Weick's notion of sense making is a good example of praxis. How about walking a tightrope, with a balancing pole, with theory on one end and practice on the other. Loose hold of either of these pole components and you'll fall to your (academic) death - in fact you're dead already [my comments, though I know Jean thinks this, so that's OK]. How annoying to have this simplistic bipolarity: this is Jean's point but my point to Jean. Practicing thinkers and thinking practicers - really Jean? Why do we uphold this distinction still, after all this time? Who's talking here, panel? Weick, and sense making or sense imposing? A dialectical process - is that all that's left to superglue theory to practice? Trouble with glue is you get it on your hands; don't get superglue on your hands cos you'll stick your fingers together: you'll fail in your enjoining intentions, but succeed in not using what is surely a normative solution to the T/P gap. Jean is talking about 'time' now, and now methodological - access to research fields and the kind of evidence we're able to collect. What is evidence anyway? And CONTEXT is important too - really? What has that added precisely?

is distributed leadership in its infancy?

I'm in a punning mood this morning: I'm playing with the words that we're hearing in lecture room 17 right now, from a team from the OU entitled An empirical study of the factors influencing the emergence of distributed leadership. We're hearing a genealogy of the concept of DL: an increased dissatisfaction with leader-focused approaches; increased need for team-based interdiciplinary knowledge work; growing adoption of social constructivist paradigm in studying leadership; such is the basis of this paper's claim.

So, "DL is in its infancy", we're told - I'm not so sure my little hombre, as the argument in my previous post alluded to. I think you'll find this infant is either as old as the hills or an 'emperors new clothes' concept that emerge out of conferences like this. DL is still posited, here, as based on singular individuals or groups of individuals - infants or otherwise. In what way is DL written into existence, too? Is it written into existence by the very smart, statistical and coherent presentation that is being delivered to us as I type? The performativity in this presentation is most definitely the figure for me today, from the ground of the conference and the ground of an apparent extra-linguistic leadership field. There is a performance going on here: plenty of rules, a stage, a script, a critical audience who are mostly silent, a dramaturgical tradition, criteria of goodness. How is this performance being consumed?; not to mention, why is it being consumed in this fashion?

distributed leadership - distributed conference

Day 2 - and we're off already. I'm sat at the back of lecture room 17, in the 'distributed leadership track' of the conference. The team from Exeter are presenting their piece on distributed leadership and I have half an eye on it, half an eye on this blog, and the other half (!) on visioning my own presentation just before the break. I was never good at math, and so it seems something has to give. I'm affraid that this morning it's the current paper that is the looser - sorry Exeter.

One other conception of distributed is 'networked': and I'm pleased to see that stevemac has joined this networked discussion. The speaker in front of me has been given his 2-minute call and is speeding up. What does this say about the patterns of consumption and production of knowledge in this conference, in this traditional staging: I've heard several apologies from speakers these two days, a regret or dissapointment about the process of delivering the paper and not having enough time. I find this interesting, as I do, of course, what it is speakers are saying, don't get me wrong. But I also find the activity of this blog interesting, the conversation I'm having with my brother in Devon right now, via instant messenger, the quality of the interface of the installation software that I'm currently downloading, the Blackberry on my hip that is vibrating. Distraction?; disruption?; lack of attention?; distributed?; distributed attention?;yes and yes. The discussion in front of my has changed to questsions and answers, probing the speaker's notion of distributed leadership.

spectral leaders, spectral speakers

After all, this blog was never an attempt to document the conference, nor, I believe, even just those presentations that I attended. This was always going to be my re-presentation of these presentations. Uppermost in this interpretation is my joy at having heard all of the speakers I was fortunate to enough to listen to. Sadly, half of todays' speakers aren't featured on these pages, and my apologies to anyone who feels excluded. I can only offer some poststructurally oriented solace in that we can only ever filter, exclude and marginalise what we receive, or what there is to receive. This is differance, in a Saussurian and Derridian sense: to differ and to defer are the bases of linguistic meaning - a part of what 'flipchart' means is not chair nor computer. Whilst it seems rather far fetched to say that my exclusion of other speakers has in some way defined those absent speakers, I would say that shared the discourse of the non-spectral speakers I, in some way, beckon the others. Then perhaps I'm just trying to philosophise my way into relevance.

I look forward to the second day of the conference. If you're taken by the urge to comment on this blog, please go ahead and click on the 'comment' link under the post that takes your fancy.

Philanthropeneurs: social change leaders or quiet revolutionaries? An eighteenth century Irish case study

Colm is up next, following on from Robert and Peter, which continues the historical theme. Colm speaks quietly in a darkly rich Irish accent, and talks of a personal oddessy. He's talking about his experiences in Dubai, and how he heard praise for Osama bin Laden as a leader, and the incongruity of the bin Laden family owning and running a major construction company in Dubai. So Colm is both provocative and evocative - expect some music in this (52 slide) presentation. Excellent! The lights are now dimming in the room and some wonderful music issues forth. Wow - you have to hear this fantastic orchestral Celtic pipe music! The accompanying text is telling the story of Edmund Rice. You have to be here to experience this - it's great. Because we, the audience, are doing the reading of the Rice's history, we're imbuing his life with life. The music only adds to this, creating a compelling combination. And, so far, Colm has hardly said a word. Some wonderful puns there on 'shins' that I can hardly comment on here.

Questions: I went into a different place during that presentation. Can philanthoreneurs create learning organisations? Edmund Rice is a change agent: there are comparisons with the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation in the Ricean principles - that education is the future.