Diffracting Collaborative Leadership: A Pragmatist Project

Leadership, as an area of research, seems to be a source of endless fascination. So much has been written about it, and yet the questions keep coming. It is almost as if we are asking the wrong questions. Here, we seek to tackle this problem by taking a novel approach that proposes leadership in organizations is constituted as a duality comprising ‘leaders’ and ‘leading’. Whereas the topic of ‘leaders’ is arguably saturated in the organizational literature, the processes of ‘leading’ remain significantly under-developed. At least part of the reason for this imbalance is that familiar research methodologies, and the theories that inform them, are designed to represent ‘reality’ as stable, or at least temporarily stabilized structures and entities. As such, however, they are not well equipped to deal with performative realities that are constantly emerging in lived experience. Grappling with the slipperiness of a world-on-the-move requires a serious commitment to ontologically processual research that can join with the flow. Pragmatism offers a philosophical way of accessing such a process ontology, providing a systematic approach to engaging with the fluidities of leading. Using Pragmatism to diffract the experiences of the senior management team in an arts-based company, this book explores ‘leading’ as a creative, collaborative process of future-making. It argues then, that ‘leadership is what we do when we don’t know what to do’.