The Irony of the NRA’s Response to Sandy Hook – and to America’s ‘Culture of Violence’

In response to the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Wayne LaPierre, the Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, called for every school in the country to be protected by an armed guard.  “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun,” he said in summary on December 21, “is a good guy with a gun.”  A “National School Shield” program, to be funded by the federal government, was one aspect of his multipronged proposal for greater school safety.  Other aspects were the greater tracking of individuals with mental illness and the renewed critical attention to violent media, particularly video games, which he claimed engender a “culture of violence” in the United States.

Many have already criticized LaPierre’s comments as being tone-deaf to the desire of many to have a broad-based national conversation about mass killings or blaming any cause for the tragic shooting except guns.  I generally agree with both these responses.  But I also acknowledge the need to look for multiple explanations and to draw together research and expertise from a variety of fields in order to formulate the best social and policy solutions to violence in its myriad forms.  Having researched and written about media violence for most of my scholarly career, I know it goes without saying that violence in the United States, particularly as it helps us to understand and prevent school shootings and rampage killings, is a complex topic warranting a wide-ranging policy debate.  

To pick up a ready example from LaPierre’s remarks on Friday, it should immediately be noted that media violence is not equivalent to a “culture of violence.”  Every society or nation can be said to have a “culture of violence.”  To say so is to state the obvious.  The ancient Aztecs had a culture of violence; so do modern-day South Africans.  Or the Japanese.  Or the Spanish.  Speaking of an American (or any) culture of violence is a means, not an end: the point of such a statement should be to go on and explore a propensity toward violent action or conflict-resolution and to better understand specific norms and beliefs about the legitimacy of violence and how those have emerged historically and are enacted today. 

Following the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary, speaking generically about a “culture of violence,” particularly one caused by media, has the unfortunate effect of muddying the waters of any policy debate related to the myriad forms and episodes of violence in a given society.  Rather than recognizing that mental illness, school safety, media, and, yes, guns themselves variously shape and sustain norms of violence – and have long helped to define the history and guiding myths of America – LaPierre trotted out the “media” as bogeyman and somehow the basis of that overreaching and destructive culture.  We can debate the extent to which media might be understood to contribute to an American “culture of violence,” but to exclude other social actors, institutions, and beliefs is irresponsible and simplistic. 

Any culture of violence we might identify, in the U.S. or elsewhere, isn’t produced simply by contemporary makers of blood-drenched media entertainment.  Such a culture is grounded in the long-held stories we tell ourselves about our founding as a nation and our past triumphs over adversaries and evil.  The American way of violence, in other words, has deep historical roots.  Some of these roots, reaching to Christian tradition and Biblical calls for justifiable retribution, hold that the violent sacrifice of some individual lives is legitimate because that bloodletting is necessary for the larger community or country to regenerate and advance.  In the classic Hollywood Western, for example, the hero (reluctantly) deploys violent and retributive justice to vanquish evildoers who have provoked and threatened civilization.  Likewise, the physical justice dispensed in crime-ridden cities, by police and vigilantes alike, illustrates how the violent forces of social order mounted against the violent threat of chaos can be easily celebrated as effective – and legitimized. 

LaPierre’s proposal for “good guys” with guns to stand at the ready at school to protect our children from evil “bad guys” with guns was therefore hardly novel: instead, it was a call back to the mythical American frontier or, more specifically, the besieged frontier fort or settlement.  A twenty-first century school in this way becomes the site of our last stand against armed bad guys, with children as the innocents who are being threatened and whose defense justifies any manner of violent response.   To those with a certain vision of America, it was a canny pitch for the deployment today of nostalgic, gun-toting frontier justice.  At the same time, and here’s the real irony, it was a call for institutionalizing good guys with guns – many of whom who have indisputably made an enormous difference in the history of the United States but who at the same time have, also indisputably, been at the center of very American culture of violence that LaPierre claims to decry.

Identifying such irony in itself only goes so far, of course.  The more important lesson to be taken from LaPierre’s proposal is that other powerful American stories – say, of building consensus from a shared belief in the exceptional society we aspire to – need to be embraced at this moment as the basis for creating safer schools and less conflict and bloodshed.  If training and posting guards with guns ultimately relies on a culture of violent solutions to violent problems, in other words, aren’t there less or non-violent alternatives?  Is the threat of violence or superior physical force really the way we want to solve the problem of violent conflict or provocation?  Recall such escalation is the logic of first-shooter video games and hyperviolent cartoons. 

Isn’t it better ultimately to identify and treat the bad guys earlier, to make it harder for them to get guns, and maybe to make the guns they get (legally or not) less lethal?  That would seem an approach driven by a logic not of deploying more and greater violence but of taking compound, collective, and enlightened actions to address and prevent what is emerging as a deep-seated problem.  That’s the kind of approach that we could both adopt to protect our children in schools but also be proud to teach them there.

Creative Leadership is a practice requiring ongoing, even daily reflection, development and implementation

I just completed an energizing weekend leading a course on the Business of Creativity in the executive MBA program in Creative Leadership at Falmouth University College in Cornwall.* One of the learnings we dwelt on was the importance of understanding how creative leadership is an ongoing practice that involves regular, even daily development. 

It's far too easy in charting out creative leadership as a distinct model of or approach to leadership to imagine that it can be embraced through a simple decision or change. While it is useful for learning (and, frankly, for teaching) about creative leadership to cite models or provide case examples that draw sharp contrasts with traditional leadership, the realities of individuals, teams, projects or organizations necessitate a more incremental evolution toward exercising and implementing of creative leadership values and principles.

Take the core principle of creative leadership being democratic. This can be readily contrasted with the more autocratic, typically hierarchical command-and-control principles of traditional leadership. Yet while the contrast is instructive, its application by individuals in specific organizations is hardly straightforward: one doesn’t simply decide one day to re-make one’s own approach to decision-making or collaboration, much less the structure or culture of an organization, to be more open and democratic. It’s a transformation that takes time, both for individual practice and development as well as organizational transformation.

That’s obvious when stated so directly, but it’s important to emphasize when we’re asked to step back and consider how creative leadership, and particularly its core tenets and principles, can help us in our own development as leaders in our own organizations. One of the participants in the Falmouth program, for instance, works at the National Health Service, which she described as a tightly closed and hierarchical system averse to democratic decision-making, genuine collaboration, or non-traditional leadership and problem-solving. No individual act of will or decision to embrace new values of creative leadership will change that or have immediate impact. Yet during the course, this participant recognized that she could productively act upon her belief in values such as democracy, humility, and risk-taking – at least by starting in her daily work and focusing the application of these values on effecting small wins on a specific project.

Creative leadership and its tenets can’t be implemented wholesale or overnight. Instead, they need to be grown incrementally to be maximally successful. Perhaps the best closing example of this concerns the core tenet of introspection and the value of self-awareness. To become more self-aware requires regular reflection and self-assessment. Ultimately, like the embrace of other principles guiding creative leaders, developing and exercising such increased self-awareness involves changing our habits of mind and enacting them consistently, even daily, as a way toward re-making ourselves as more effective creative leaders.

*My thanks to Dr. Maria Jemicz, Helen Wood and all the thoughtful, engaged Falmouth EMBA program participants for their Cornish hospitality and an inspiring course.

Balancing Clarity and Uncertainty in Leading More Successful and Creative Teams

One of the most important trends in leadership, especially of creative organizations and tasks, over the last two decades, is arguably the shift in attention from firm-level to team-level or project-level design and management. About team leadership, especially, there has been a range of immensely valuable insights generated and best practices shared by the likes of Jon Katzenbach and Bob Frisch.

I was reminded earlier of one of my favorite single pieces about building more effective collaboration on teams: Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson's 2007 Harvard Business Review article on "8 Ways to Build Collaborative Teams." The article itself bears regular re-reading and, in using it in classes with executives, I've found that even experienced and thoughtful team-builders and leaders benefit from its practical insights.

The reminder earlier came in a blog posting on "How Successful Virtual Teams Collaborate" by Keith Ferrazzi, who has recently become a leading voice on the topic of leading teams, particularly remote and virtual ones. In his post today, Ferrazzi lists several key lessons: adjust for size, don't be afraid of social media, play games, and train for collaboration

For his last lesson, Ferrazzi references Gratton and Erickson's research, pointing specifically to their counter-intuitive conclusion that the best teams have role clarity but task uncertainty. Collaboration, he notes, "increased when people had clearly defined roles but were uncertain about how to achieve the team's goals.  The uncertainty encouraged everyone to collaborate and think more creatively about different ways in which to fulfill the group's mission." 

That's a fundamental insight about leading better and more creative collaboration on both virtual and in-person teams. It also touches on the more general value of acknowledging and allowing for uncertainty in the effective practice of creative leadership.

Going Deeper on Dark Social: What the Invisibility of So Many Social Referrals Really Means

I've been thinking about a provocative piece published by Alexis C. Madrigal in The Atlantic online last weekend. "Dark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web Wrong" makes a simple yet profound point about the social web that has emerged over the last decade to transform interpersonal interactions and communication. Madrigal's assertion is that while we celebrate the measurement of social interaction on Twitter and Facebook, these sites are but "the tip of the social iceberg." The bulk of sharing done online, he claims, occurs through email, instant messages, and chat that are largely invisible to existing analytics. Madrigal calls this mass of social traffic, which one study has constituting 69% of social referrals, "dark social."

For anyone who has already puzzled over how to measure, analyze or monetize social traffic, particularly across multiple platforms and networks, this is a daunting proposition. Madrigal's piece goes on to make an important observation about the structuring of social referrals. Essentially, he says, the ability to measure and analyze social traffic rests on public publication and sharing. Public sharing, in turn, is made possible in exchange for the personal data that we as individuals provide the networks.  That logic is powerful and drives Twitter and Facebook but it doesn't operate as directly with a range of other semi-private networks, again with email and IM being the most obvious examples. The implications of this line of thinking for marketing, brand communication, social media generally and even privacy are immense.

Yet for me the power of "Dark Social" is what it potentially says more broadly about open markets, the visibility and publicness of social interactions, and capitalism itself. That's quite a lot, of course, and I'm currently researching some of the complex connections for a project entitled, "The Age of Piracy." Suffice it here to extend Madrigal's provocations in two comments. First, there's a need to step back from believing that increasing social traffic or digital communication is somehow necessarily accompanied in lockstep by an increasing capability to measure and analyze that activity. The often-defining unwieldiness and dynamism of social technologies and platforms means that neither the hopes of marketers seeking foolproof metrics and monetization schemes nor the fears of civil libertarians wanting to deny ever-greater techno-surveillance and intrusiveness into private lives are being fulfilled today. Social traffic and networks may not be in the Wild West stage of their development but, as systems and networks, they remain largely fragmented, unstable across diverse markets, and obscure to consistent analysis.

A second extension or, really, expansion of Madrigal's thinking is the topic of the project I mentioned. Piracy today can be understood to embrace familiar acts of criminality and violence on the high seas, infringement of digital rights and other intellectual property, and the financial machinations of rogue traders, black markets and off-shore banks. Unlike terrorists, whose attacks rely on media amplification to instill fear across wide populations and to create platforms for political and economic critiques, these apparently disparate behaviors are driven by many of the same strategies: their actors want to remain invisible before the glare of media, they care little about conventional nation-states or legal regimes or religious values, and they seek to participate in unfettered capitalism. A final twist, ironically, and as I've previously written here, is the moniker of "pirates" adopted by the creators of the MacIntosh computer led by Steve Jobs at Apple and, in years since, by other innovators wanting to think differently. 

Piracy, in this sense, is more than the cyber-criminality that Misha Glenny and others have written about or even the cyber-threats made to both national security and individual privacy. Instead, it is the shadow of twenty-first century global capitalism that thrives precisely by exploiting the system’s digital and global connectedness, uncoordinated regulation, penchant for risk-taking, and pursuit of quick and massive profits. While that may seem an intellectual leap from Madrigal's invisible emails and instant messages, I would contend the difference is of scale and complexity rather than kind. For social traffickers and economic pirates alike, the informality and lack of metrics that have emerged around the boundaries of new technologies, networks, and markets allow for enormous opportunities to operate in the dark. Our challenge in response may therefore should not simply be to strive to create new tools for shedding light on what's currently invisible (emails, again, from Madrigal) but to re-think the structures of emergent networks and markets such that their boundaries (say, of intellectual property regimes) don't create such dark shadows.

Innovative Leadership: A Thoughtful Model and (free!) Online Self-Assessment from Metcalf Associates

Metcalf Associates, a management consulting and leadership coaching firm, helped to plan a recent "Creating a Marketplace of Ideas" gathering in Columbus, Ohio. The event brought together several heavyweight thinkers about creativity, innovation, and creative cities and economies: Sir Ken Robinson, Jeff Dyer, and Richard Florida shared various insights that aimed to help local individual and businesses innovate and grow. While their presentations (at least as reported in the preceding link) recapitulated some of their respectively best-known ideas, the ideas themselves not only bear repeating but seem particularly layered and substantive when considered together.

Beyond my believing in different ways in each of the speakers it mentions, I cite the posting because at the end is the requisite blurb about Metcalf Associates. The blurb references their book, the Innovative Leadership Fieldbook, and also linka to their model and a free online Innovative Leadership Assessment. An "innovative leader," for Metcalf, delivers results using the following (and I'm simplifying): "Holistic Leadership," which aligns dimensions from the individual to the systemic; "Strategic Leadership," which inspires individuals and organizations; and "Tactical Leadership," which influences individuals, processes and systems. To be successful, innovative leaders need to exercise these types of leadership along five coordinated domains. The free online Innovative Leadership Assessment is organized around these five domains.

Once you've taken the assessment, your results point to your personal tendencies (and potentially areas for attention or improvement) in each of the domains.

The results, for most, will probably reinforce existing understandings of leadership strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. But it's worth the ten minutes to take the assessment. Why?  While I can't vouch for the finer points of the model (or individual results), the idea of "innovation leadership" marked by alignment, inspiration, and influence strongly resonates with some of the priorities of creative leadership that I conduct research on, teach, and embrace.  Even more basically, though, I support any thoughtful exercise, however brief, that offers an opportunity for leaders to reflect meaningfully on their own values and practice cross multiple dimensions and domains.