Abstract
“A human life has no pre-established form except the image or narrative we are able to project onto it” (Aristotle)
Being and being
Sounding the Depths of Leadership is an attempt to lay out a process to experience leadership and self-mastery processes as a kind of inward knowing focussed on the quality of being. The author, Kosheek Sewchurran, draws on a tried and tested metaphor of a sailing voyage, that goes back to Homer and the age of sail navigation, to chart the latitude and longitude of the text. The book offers an original approach, given that originality is often about redefining and applying an existing well-tried metaphor for a current age and circumstance.
Sewchurran (2022) pursues the challenge of developing a leadership learning approach to cultivate a reflexive, internal search for self-mastery. He organises the approach using the metaphor of seven navigation charts to guide practical processes of exploring personal development and self-mastery possibilities. He draws on his decade long experience of working as an executive coach whilst also being the Director of an Executive MBA program at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He inter-weaves these insights with contemporary leadership scholarship and philosophy to offer a systematic inquiry process to uncover the being dimension of leading in the ongoing present.
To develop this inward sense of knowing, Sewchurran (2022) draws on a range of philosophers that he has studied over many years. The works of Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, John Shotter and Haridimos Tsoukas are channelled to design the explorations each navigation chart offers. The rich, and at times dense, philosophical discussions are inter-woven with stories of leadership learning which trace the journeys of several characters. The book distinguishes between an understanding of
Three bodies
Whilst each navigation chart is framed using a particular philosopher, the discussions also draw on the other philosophers central to the book. In this way the book accomplishes an integration of the works of these sages with practical exercises, questions and stories that make the philosophy engaging in relation to leadership learning, whilst still being accessible to practitioners.
The navigation charts keep alive a systemic learning process. The book draws an analogy of the self-mastery process that is to be expected, as one of seeking to improve the synergy between three bodies - a physical body which experiences the world, a conceptual body which captures and stores images that enables and constrains the physical body’s experiences of the world, and a body developed by the navigation charts which frames the horizons for the possibilities of
Personhood, Ubuntu and Telos
The book’s stance on personal leadership development is expressed through three arguments. 1. First, the book proposes that leadership gets its 2. Second, Sounding the Depths of Leadership proposes that leadership as a wise ethics practice, is more likely to happen when a person gets to the point of being able to prescribe ‘Ubuntu’ for themselves. ‘ 3. Third, the book proposes that becoming aware of one’s
The book begins with a story of how the author comes to this set of realisations through his personal experience in leadership and working on leadership development pedagogy as director of an Executive MBA program. He shares relevant elements of his evolving personal and professional story. In this he endorses Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan’s coinage, “The medium is the message” (1994).
He follows this with a review of leadership scholarship to highlight the lack of holistic guidance, to allow for the pursuit of personal-transformation in search of more zestful, original life experiences through an internal unfolding process. This sets the scene to begin the exploration via the seven navigation charts.
Seven charts
The first navigation chart begins with the premise that anybody in leadership interested in building character and self-mastery has to first understand ‘what they go on inside of’. Drawing on esteemed management theorist John Shotter (2006, 2016, 2017), the first chart argues that there is a need to cultivate some sense of what a leader is going on inside of, as a narrative or image. The argument is that once this is ascertained, it then becomes possible to have some context for personal transformation through a flexing of this narrative. In addition, apprehending this insight allows for subsequent experiences to be enfolded within this understanding, improving learning and reflexivity.
The second navigation chart is developed using the work of Aristotle (Ingham, Ingham, and Dreyer, 2004; Lear, 1988; Sherman, 1989). The aim is to illuminate how to proceed with, and organise a search for a good life by growing moral character and clarifying purpose. The work of Aristotle is used to illuminate how becoming attuned to one’s telos assists with organising desires in a way that sharpens the aim for goodness. The argument developed with the second navigation chart is that there is a need to put down aims so that there is something to hold you in dialogue, in a dialectically-engaged process of learning and building required virtues, to enable the reach for a particular telos. The work made visible with navigation chart two illuminates the specific processes with framing the search for a good life and pursuing this through specific choices of values and virtues.
The third navigation chart is developed from the work of Martin Heidegger (Capobianco, 2018; Frede, 1993; Sheehan, 2014). This is a dense chapter. This chart takes navigation chart two forward by making intelligible why the process of personal leadership and character development are intermittent and temporal processes. It provides insight into
The fourth navigation chart is developed to foster closeness to the everyday, mundane experience of
The fifth navigation chart draws from the integrated works of Aristotle and Heidegger to offer a process theory of the emergence of authenticity that is meant to guide and show how the events, experiences of
The sixth navigation chart draws on the work of all these philosophers to propose ways in which directionality can be forged within a world that is emerging co-creatively and concurrently. This chart illustrate ways for how we can foster intentionality and openness in everyday flux. The chart also illustrates how the life of mind can be more integrated with lived experience through a habituation process.
The seventh and final chart draws on the work of John Dewey to illustrate how a more active experience of life is fostered. The chart also explains what typically leads to passive and less aesthetic experience of life. This final chart emphasises the role a
Phronesis Development Program (PDP)
Sewchurran (2022) demonstrates how executive students engage with the leadership charts through a Phronesis Development Program (PDP) which authenticates and integrates abstract thought in a concrete application in their immediate contexts. In his words: The heart of the PDP process involves three 21 day cycles where executive students reflect in their journals. We chose the ancient Greek term, phronesis, for this practice because it connotes prudence, practicality, virtue, wisdom, intelligence, and practical action. […] The PDP invokes five philosophical principles that contribute to the design of the practices aimed at developing moral and intellectual character - the Swell (the pull of “average everydayness”), the Rudder (the emergence of “authentic everydayness”), the Anchor (“mood” as the assessment of the future), the Sails (progress on big tasks in small chunks of time), and the Oars (practices and opportunities for excellence).
Apart from the seven sailing chart metaphors that structure the book, Sewchurran (2022) encourages executive students (leaders) through his teaching and coaching, to discover a valid personal metaphor to anchor them in times of turbulence. In relation to metaphors that students have chosen to depict their circumstances, such as ‘the Gladiator in the Collosseum’, ‘the Willow Tree’ and ‘the Rubik’s Cube That is Broken from the Inside’, he observes: “Images, particularly metaphors, […] open up new conversations. If they fit well with a situation, they act as a bridge between the concrete situation and a new possibility. As such, an image or metaphor offers abstract figurative ways of seeing an actual situation in a way that reverberates meaning, thereby generating newer ways of seeing, believing, and exploring. We can thus say that metaphors connect. As Aristotle noted, a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance”.
I hardly want to quibble with an outstanding book. Yet given my literary bent, I wonder if Sewchurran might have offered further insight into exactly how metaphoric connections enable those leaders who engage and stay with them in the presence of the ongoing present. Language could be defined as dead metaphor where overuse dulls the edge and ends in cliché - ‘leveling playing fields and moving goal posts’, and ‘silos’ are two examples. There is a constant need to discover and employ original metaphors in leadership development.
A narrative is an extended metaphor. While the idea of an organisation telling its story is current common parlance (verging on the clichéic), Sewchurran offers new insights into story and language as he works precisely with intention. Sewchurran’s preface sets this intention: We need nothing less than a capacity for skilful manoeuvring to narrate or re-narrate our distinctive life quest. Perhaps to narrate is to navigate – the words echo each other. We need skills that inspire the development of appropriate excellences to enable a joyful, aesthetic, and meaningful existence; a good life where joy, aesthetic experience, excellence, and purpose are in synergy.
I noticed that the leader reflections that Sewchurran includes in the book, suggest answers to Ladkin’s (2013) question about the felt experience of leadership: ‘What does it feel like to be within different leadership relations?’ It takes a close re-reading to notice that Sewchurran himself skilfully manoeuvres all three bodies he speaks of, in his practice with leaders.
Conclusion
This dense, (mostly) accessible book offers leaders who wish to find orientation and purpose in difficult circumstances, and academics and coaches who wish to guide them, a feast of thought-provoking philosophical ideas, and practical exercises, to return to again and again. Sounding the Depths of Leadership’s aesthetic design, replete with charts, diagrams and figures superimposed on navigation maps and nautical illustrations, akin to a palimpsest with suggestions set out in separate blocks, add to the pleasure of holding such a book in your hands.
