Trump - What can I say?

This morning, the day after January 6, 2021, a day that will become one of the most infamous in U.S.A. history, I am speechless. I watched the media for approximately 8 hours from afternoon through the evening as the pictures of rioting and insurrection unfolded. Rioting and anarchy have not been on display this graphically in the U.S.A. or anywhere else in the world for many years. As many commentators have said, if this were to happen in another country or if Black and Brown people in the U.S.A. rioted like this, there would be quick condemnation and perhaps intervention by U.S.A. police or military forces. But it was us!

There are now less than two weeks left of four agonizing years with Donald Trump as the President of the United States. Questions are being asked about invoking the 25th amendment, which was put in place to replace a President when she/he is no longer competent to serve. Resignations are being announced of White House staffers although these attempts to save reputation come far too late. The evidence has been clear for far too long and enablers and, yes, good citizens, have continued to think it couldn't get any worse. Well it did when Donald Trump continued to deny his lost election and when he called on loyal supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to protest at the capital. Preparations for such a possible dangerous outbreak were inadequate and the evidence suggests that reasons for the inadequacy include Trump's resistance to defensive actions and the fact that the rioters were white and primarily male.

The questions for leadership educators are broad and deep - how could this happen in one of the world's most developed countries? How has citizenship, leadership, and followership failed us? Many will blame Trump and his enablers but there is an entire system of education and higher education that should have prepared the U.S.A. from the rise of despotism and autocracy. Yes, there are crazy people out there who can break loose and do awful things. But this is the President of the United States and over 70 million of its citizens voted to return Trump to office for four more years. The people who supported and stand beside Trump are scary but they came from families, came through our educational system, and live in communities that should be self-monitoring and self-correcting.

Yesterday, January 6, 2021, was the Day of Epiphany in the Christian calendar and it is clear that it is a day of epiphany for Americans. Leadership and followership failed and this has to be fixed.

Epstein - Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David Epstein’s Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (2019) was mentioned in a recent telephone call among leadership educators so I chose to pick it up to determine its relevance to our work. Epstein traced the origin of the book to a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell who advocates in his writing that special gifts have to be pursued doggedly and with ultimately 10,000 hours of persistent study in order to pay off. Gladwell’s thesis is not undone by Epstein but expanded, with Epstein proposing that genius comes from exploring many different, and often unrelated, ideas and then integrating in creative ways across diverse fields.

The book started by comparing the sports careers of Roger Federer versus Tiger Woods. Their paths to athletic greatness were very different with Federer exploring multiple sports before settling on tennis while Woods pursued golf and only golf from a very early age. “Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success – and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible” (locator, page 6, Introduction). However, the contrasting “slow bakers” perspective suggests that elite athletes exhibit lower intensity in focus in their early years and then rocket past their high intensity competitors around age fifteen.

Citing examples from high performers in diverse fields such as chess champions, musicians, and scientists, Epstein provided evidence that postponing decisions about giftedness indeed contributed to more genius. In addition to the fact that postponing the pursuit of exceptional mastery resulted in greater creative contributions in the end, Epstein cited research that “scientists inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation” and that these outside interests are even more pronounced among Nobel Prize winners (locator, page 32, Chapter 1). Applying knowledge by creative adaptation in another pursuit is key in order to avoid entrenchment of one’s ideas. This kind of creativity is grounded in ‘abstract thinking’ that requires the ability to shift in categories and conceptual frameworks or even better in ‘analogical thinking’ that involves “recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common” (locator, page 102, Chapter 5).

Epstein referenced research indicating that one of the most common paths to exceptionality in musical performance begins with sampling that is complemented by learning several instruments. Like breadth in music,  highly credentialed experts in other fields can stay at top performance levels by not becoming too narrow in focus, a condition that can lead to decline with advanced experience. Truly gifted break-through creatives tend to learn at a slower pace, allowing for the gradual accumulation of deep and integrative learning based on more challenging and frustrating problems. With jazz composition/performance and Dave Brubeck the example, Epstein described Brubeck’s mother’s unsuccessful attempt to teach him to play piano by reading notes. The youthful Brubeck chose instead to improvise and didn’t learn to read music until declaring himself a music major as a senior in college. For Brubeck, the complex problem of mixing instruments and performers in the spontaneous act of improvisation was something for which formal training could only provide tools, rather than the genius of creativity.

The challenge of living into Epstein’s thesis of gradual and integrative learning is that we live in a time that incentivizes hyperspecialization that begins as early as possible and narrows quickly before we are mature enough to judge our interests and talents. With three-quarters of American university graduates pursuing careers unrelated to their majors, there is clear evidence that focusing on specialization fails to prepare many for what they will “do” in life. By contrast, education in the modern, complex world we inhabit would perhaps be more meaningful and effective by cultivating playful, exploratory, and reproducible insights in creative learners, attributes that result in “mental meandering and personal experimentation as sources of power” (locator, page 290, Conclusion).