Kalle reflects on leaders, where did they all go?

The ultimate test of leaders is the sustaining of trust. Science confirms three criteria for this, all quite intuitive and measurable: Real leaders convincingly demonstrate…

Benevolence; (meaning well)
Competence; (achieving results).
Integrity; (sticking to their inner compass also under temptations not to).

So, how do leaders in general come across these days? Wars, plundering of finite resources, poisoning and detrimental treatment of nature as well as communities. Born a Swede, and living all my life in this country, I have but literature to refer to when it comes to other countries and their leadership stories. But my personal Swedish experience may still be relevant, both regarding many examples of real leadership to learn from, and the opposite. It shows that leaders can create wonders of trans-sector and trans-cultural cooperation, but also the personal risks that may come with it. Calling for skills in combination with boldness.

Destruction, going on everywhere, implyes a “funnel” of declining social-ecological -resources, or in other words ‘degrees-of-freedom’ to sustain civilisation. Many influential leaders from politics and mass media, when addressed with those dire facts, keep reminding us that “there is no evidence that it was any better before”. Really?

More in detail:

“Before” is a term we all recall at different scales of time, from history lessons in schools perhaps, to our own relatively long or short life-experiences. Real estimates of how things were “before” tell us that the power of destruction really was lower before than today, much lower on most important fronts. Obviously not because of destructive changes at the human DNA level, but because the destructive power at disposal of corrupted and/or insufficient leadership and mismanagement creates so much more damage today than before.

Population growth caused by an insufficient care of each other across communities and countries (in a forthcoming reflection I will return to this).
Higher industrial power at service of flawed societal designs, not the least including that of the war industry.
More effective means for imperialistic conquerors of land and resources to dominate mass- and social media while authoring their “winners’ history'” and ensuring cancelling and de-platforming of critics, in ever tighter opinion corridors.

My personal perspective on leadership “before” goes back to the golden ages of my country Sweden. I lived my childhood, and further through my early adulthood, during the fifties until the mid-eighties, when the country peeked in an unprecedented success story amongst all countries in the world. Sweden could then count successes on many essential frontiers. Our leaders had skillfully managed to:

Keep the country out of two world-wars.
Consciously, at very high economic investments, create “the Swedish model”, named “Svenska Folkhemmet”. Something that would, translated, read something like “The Swedish Home for the many”. Its roots go back to a cross-sector political- and union-agreement of 20 December 1938, the “Saltsjöbaden agreement”. It was named after the venue-hotel where the meeting was held. From the agreement itself, and further through effective cross-sector processes during decade after decade, the agreement did not end up in some drawer. On the contrary, its attractiveness deepened in a cross-sector process of “learning by co-creation”. Which was logically named “the Saltsjöbaden spirit”. It was embraced by leaders across various political parties, unions and belief-systems, who all agreed on its basic principles. In the seventies-eighties, it had resulted in…

Schools, hospitals, and other institutions for the common good were all performing at the very top of international standards.
The lowest child-mortality in the world.
The highest level of trust between public and private leaders on the one hand, and the public on the other. Which, in turn, created also the highest interpersonal trust of the world. When people trust their leaders, research shows that they trust each other too.
Creation of an officially resourced, yet non-governmental organization, the “National Labour Market Board” (Arbetsmarknadstyrelsen, AMS). Sufficiently resourced, it was designed to ensure employment throughout the country at times of regional or national economic depressions, when risks of un-employment were high.
The improved trust all of this created, resulted in very effective cooperation across groups of various talents and political standpoints. And, in turn, an unprecedented growth in the number of, and incomes from, powerful companies. Considering the small size of Sweden, the outgrowth of Volvo, Saab, Ikea, Scania, Ericsson, Securitas, Atlas Copco, ASEA…, to eventually take on internationally leading positions, are but a few remarkable examples. Together these large Internationals become a powerful economic engine of society, at the same time as the Saltsjöbaden Spirit’s social/political control of that power, managed to establish a fair sharing of resources amongst the many for the common good. Which was also aligned with the original recipe from the founder of capitalism Adam Smith [1].
Because of all of this, Sweden became the richest country in the world per capita, measured not only by the above successes of important social functions, but also in trust-parameters, and in terms of BNP/Capita (we peaked in the world on the traditional macro-economic parameter as well).

There were many leaders behind this general success story, characterized by the three qualities of leadership at the top of this reflection, and the Saltsjöbaden spirit, across political parties, thinktanks, labor unions. If I were to choose but one leader behind the success story, it would be Ernst Wigforss (1881–1977). He worked for decades, until the very end of his life, as a proponent of the Swedish model. Though being the finance minister of Sweden for many years and over re-elections, within the Social Democratic party, he called himself “a democrat” rather than belonging to a certain political party. Wigforss managed to navigate Sweden out of the difficult economic depression during the 30-ies, and then played a role as a leading designer of the Swedish Home for the Many, in concrete practical terms and throughout his life.

During the above democratic evolution, Sweden also hatched a growing number of skillful diplomatic forerunners for piece. Some of those also expanded their domestic influence to reach international influence and fame, amongst foreign powerful piece-advocates like Marthin Luther King, Gandi, and JFK. The most influential and well-known Swedes on the international piece-arena would probably be UN Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld (see picture) and Folke Bernadotte (who saved so many Jews from holocaust with his white Red Cross busses), They had their talents and flaws, like all people, but they were generally respected as authentically bold, skillful and following their inner compasses. They needed this to navigate their difficult missions while sustaining a general sense of trust in the Swedish population. But the individual costs where high, some had to pay with their lives.

So, again, where did all the real leaders go? Do we see this real type of leadership anywhere in Sweden right now? The most likely explanation to their relative invisibility is that they ought to still be around, because we are now talking about constitutional elements of human populations. The most likely explanation for their relatively lower visibility is probably simple – the leaders are still around, but not so much at national- and geo-political top-levels. And in the modern rhetoric of media, true leadership probably gets less attention than loud leadership.

Research shows that it is a common human characteristic to end up in a cognitive dissonance when choices are to be made between a sense of belonging to the warm mainstream of ones own community on the one hand, or sticking out in a sense of opposition and whistleblowing to defend facts and truths on the other. The punishment for the latter is likely to be harder and more effective today than before, with ever-tighter opinion corridors.

I know for sure that real leaders are still amongst us, because I have personal experience of this as well. An active group of owners and leaders of influential companies in Sweden is called the “Stepwise group”. They are all putting their respective companies at service of a stepwise progress (FSSD’s ABCD methodology) towards attractive futures for the many, modelled within robust sustainability constraints (A). The leaders meet at regular intervals to share current problems in this context (B), ideas and innovations (C) to be considered as stepping stones, and prioritize actions from those into stepwise planning (D). They all pay witness to how rewarding this is in all respects, and that the cost is to stay on track – year after year – despite various temptations to deviate from the course.

So, the leaders are there, and they need recognition as well as some boldness from all of us to be of support. For this to happen, also we must dare to abandon mainstream and stick to our own inner compasses. Even at the costs of “sticking out”, challenged by the shrinking opinion corridors of the mainstream. Whistle blowers typically love the truth, not only for its own sake but also to protect the system they are critizising.

The FSSD Global platform is designed to help leaders, at all practices and scales, find the right thing to do when it comes to the greatest threat to Civilization since its dawn – un-sustainability. And per design, the FSSD allows this to happen in a step-wise fashion where ROI is generally improved from upfront, making the decision to get going a bit easier.

[1]. To sustain itself, the dynamic power of economic growth, according to Smith, needs a culturing or controlling within social constraints. The combination of economic growth and political measures of control was a “mixed economic model”, the Swedish model. It is the latter element of social/political control of growth our current breed of neo-liberal politics has “forgotten”.