Foresight Exemplary leaders imagine an exciting, attractive, and focused future. They dream of making a difference. They have visions of what might be, and they believe they can make it happen. From the neurological sciences literature, we know that anticipating the future is a human faculty that has supported the evolution of our race and given us selective advantage. Suddendorf and Coballis (2007) stated: In a dynamic world, mechanisms allowing prediction of future situations can provide a selective advantage. Episodic memory ... is part of a more general faculty of mental time travel that allows us not only to go back in time but also to foresee, plan, and share virtually any specific future event ... mental time travel is not an encapsulated cognitive system but instead comprises several subsidiary mechanisms ... the emergence of mental time travel in evolution was a crucial step towards our current success. (p. 299) Foresight is an intentional and multilayered process that is uniquely human. Foresight as a deliberate process informs vision-based claims about the future through scanning prospects, orienting to a paradigmatic definition of the future, conducting comprehensive and ongoing situational analyses, and applying techniques of retrospection and prospection to anticipate the future while striving to minimize errors of prediction and judgment. Without narrative leadership foresight can be reduced to an isolated and often isolating analysis. Narrative Leadership Narrative leadership extends the cognitive, creative, and moral power of the leader through mentally and behaviorally constructing a narrated vision that moves, raises, and invigorates others. Leaders use narrative to influence identity, garner favor, and drive transformational change. They do so by integrating the roles of historian, contemporary analyst, and futurist and by embodying narratives that intertwine values, facts, and reason to influence identity. Leaders use narrative to locate, communicate, and live themes that make sense of present and future circumstances for themselves and others. Leaders have to effectively fuse personal and group narratives so that they are perceived as an embodiment of group identity. Therefore, “Their craft lies in telling us who we are and what we want to be. If they succeed, our energy becomes their tool and our efforts constitute their power” (Haslam et al. (2011 p. 71). Narrative is a tool leaders use to repetitively perform personal and social identity by— 1. Garnering favor. The stories that leaders tell are used to compete for adherents in a society where leaders win followers through a competition of narratives or metanarratives. Leader stories that capture and activate audience interest effectively “transplant, suppress, complement or in some measure outweigh earlier stories and oppositional counter stories” (Gardner, 1995, p. 14). The leader’s unique dynamic perspective, narrated drama, and portrayal of goals and obstacles over time engage and activate action. From Haslam et al.’s (2011) theorizing about the psychology of leadership, three points emerge that are foundational to understanding the dynamics of leadership and narrative: (a) a leader’s narrative about what is real competes with other overarching narratives; (b) a leader can win favor with followers in the war of stories by sharing narratives that people and groups select as representative of who they are or who they want to become; (c) leaders convey data in the narratives that they share, which allows followers to accept or reject them as prototypical, favored leaders ( p. 161). 2. Driving transformational change. Narrative leaders imagine an exciting, attractive, and focused future; dream of making a difference; and believe that their vision will happen (Kouzes & Posner 1987). From Helm’s (2009) perspective, there is a need to make a vision explicit, and to use words, metaphors, and images to describe and share our idealized future. It is both the substance and the way it is delivered that influence whether we perceive some statement (or person) as visionary. A vision, that is, its transformational tension, only really originates in the encounter between what is emitted and what is perceived (p. 102). Vision grabs the attention and energy of followers, creates focus, and pulls people towards co-creation of a shared future. 3. Weaving values, facts, and reason. According to Fisher’s (1987, 1995) narrative paradigm, narrative is the master metaphor of human life. He named our species Homo Narrans and argued that we use forms of discourse that are all essentially narrative to articulate our reasoning about the nature of self and society. Fisher cast our narrative enactments and interpretations of life as the primary form of human knowledge. Narrative leaders then master discourse to persuade others and reason together about the nature of society and self through value infused stories.
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Center for Business and Economic Insight
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