A River Runs Through It: A Metaphor for Teaching

Leadership Theory
John S.

(Jack) Burns
Whitworth

College

Executive

Summary

Leadership educators are some of the best teachers around when it comes to creating exciting, effective experiential learning opportunities, which teach students leadership skills. Where the curriculum and instruction falls short is when we try to teach leadership theory. Some courses and programs even omit theory as part of the This article explores a new instructional metaphor for teaching curriculum. leadership theory. The metaphor has been an effective tool for helping students understand the historical development of leadership theory as a foundation for the leadership skills they are learning.

About the Author: John S. (Jack) Burns is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Whitworth College, in Spokane Washington, where he coordinates the Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Minor in Leadership Studies. He has been teaching leadership studies since 1985, and has developed leadership studies programs at two institutions. He has been a Director of an Eisenhower Leadership Program Grant, and has published several articles on leadership education. He received his Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from Washington State University.

42

To

despise theory is to have the excessively vain pretension to do without knowing what one does, and to speak without knowing what one says.
Fontenelle

Good

leadership is a channel of water controlled by God, he directs it to whatever ends he

chooses.

Proverbs 2 1: The

Message

Theory is
Students who take

not

Four-letter Word!

excited about the various practical skills they are likely to learn, and the experiences both in and out of class they will have to reinforce their learning. Indeed the leadership educators I know are some of the best teachers Ive ever observed, creating experientially based courses which generate incredible energy and motivation for learning. Most students however, do not want to explore the theoretical underpinnings of leadership. Who can blame them? Our culture is geared to the pragmatic. Outcomes are what matter most. Students have little interest in learning about our scholarly debates over definitions of leadership and they similarly discount the importance of theory.

leadership

courses are

It is not just college students who act as if theory is a four-letter word, something to be avoided in pleasant company. Professional development programs and workshops often deliver training in immediately useful and practical leadership skills without placing those skills in a theoretical framework. Theory is not perceived as important or useful.

Leadership educators may be partially responsible for this perception. Many leadership educators have risen to our positions because we have been excellent practitioners who can enthusiastically and effectively communicate about our skills, not because we have demonstrated we have a thorough understanding of leadership theory. Either because we may have little theoretical training ourselves, or because we know students intensely dislike this &dquo;dry&dquo; part of our curriculum, the leadership courses we design often slight instruction about leadership theory.
The challenge then for the leadership educator is to teach not only leadership skills but to inform those skills with leadership theory. When skills are wed to theories that inform them, students have the opportunity to continue to make theory driven refinements to the application of their skills in our constantly changing environment. Indeed theory is not a four-letter word! Knowledge of theory is crucial for those who desire to conduct leadership in a world that is in a constant state of change. Understanding the theoretical context of leadership may be the most important &dquo;skill&dquo; we can offer students, even if it is presently the least glamorous element of our curriculum.
A New Instructional

Metaphor

Throughout history various philosophical, political, and social influences have forged schools of thought or theories about how we think about the interaction between leaders and followers. These schools of thought have each influenced our contemporary definitions of management and leadership. Organizing this literature and helping students make sense of it is a pesky, but rewarding task.

43

Over the

than 15 years I have been teaching leadership studies I have experimented with several different instructional methods to organize and teach students about the historic influences on the evolution of leadership theory. I dabbled with &dquo;great person&dquo; theories, taught about trait theories, and finally settled on teaching about the various leadership &dquo;schools&dquo; of thought that influenced the development of leadership theory. For a number of years I found using a giant timeline from Moses to the present was helpful for placing the key individuals who contributed to the development of a particular school. The timeline had severe drawbacks however, as it was rather confusing, and a timeline makes it difficult to demonstrate the continuous influence of many of these schools. Instead of grasping how each epochs school was influenced and flavored by the preceding schools, students were prone to see each succeeding school as a discrete development, and subsequent wholesale abandonment of earlier ideas.
more

In the fall of 1998, I was team-teaching an introductory leadership course and the theory unit was coming up. At that time, I was also reading David James Duncans The River Why?. No doubt influenced by Duncans book, I began to think of the evolution of leadership theory using a river metaphor. We abandoned the traditional timeline instructional methodology and taught the theory unit experimenting with a river metaphor. I have refined it over subsequent semesters, and it has proven to be a powerful instructional tool in both courses and workshops. A river is

When we casually observe a river, it appears to be a feature of the landscape. Yet, when we really study a river we can fixed, constant, become captivated by its wonderful complexity. Every river has a source, its
an

amazing thing.

headwaters. Beyond the headwaters, rivers move through canyons and channels, growing under the influence enriching tributaries with their own unique origins. We see that the water continuously responds to the influence of the channel in chaotic patterns. The rivers course is constrained by its channel, but the channel itself is constantly changing as the river wears on it. In some places, the current may be forced around obstructing rocks that refuse to erode, or diverted to false channels that lead to swamps, or it may seek tranquillity in deep coves and bays. Tributaries feed into it, become part of its identity, and develop the properties of the river as it continues its journey to where yet another tributary adds its contribution until at last the river escapes its bed and rushes into the sea.
on the bank one can be swept away by a current of questions about the river. Where did all of that water come from? How long did it take for a particular drop of water to get to this place? Where is it going? What will be its purpose? What is going on deep beneath the surface?

Standing

I like this metaphor because it helps to give length, depth and breadth to our thinking about leadership theory. When we study the historical development of leadership theory we can begin to understand its chaotic currents. The river metaphor helps us examine important questions about leadership theory like: Where did it come from? What can we learn from the innumerable influences that give it the properties we observe today? What trends and patterns are emerging now? How will theory influence the implementation of leadership skills?

44

The

Leadership River

We will begin our journey by doing a brief fly-over of the Leadership River System in order to get a general picture of the main features of its course from beginning to end. The first thing we notice is that unlike most rivers that trace their headwaters to tiny springs or snowcapped peaks where an ever growing trickle races down steep drainages into deep valleys that feed and grow the river gradually, the Leadership River has different beginnings. The headwaters of this river are two huge high plateau lakes separated by a very tall but narrow mountain range. Each lakes outlet is a large river, one named the Government Fork and the other the Commerce Fork. Soon after these forks leave their respective headwater lakes they are fed by a couple of invigorating tributaries and then these twin rivers slowly meander through deep channels cut through a vast elevated and desolate plateau. Finally, centuries later, the Government Fork and Commerce Fork merge to form the main channel of the Leadership River. The pace of the river picks up as it leaves the plateau and begins a comparatively rapid run (about 120 years on our timeline) to the sea, gaining strength and force from the contributions of a series of tributaries. Before it reaches the sea, it splits again into two distinct branches. The upper branch flows into a series of deep fjords, which spawn thin waterfalls that cascade into the sea. The lower branch, which is the main channel of the Leadership River tumbles over a great waterfall and appears to become completely transformed. The waters from a deep coastal lake soon enrich it and then it flows gently to the sea. Once in the sea the river takes on a new identity, one that is deeper, more chaotic, and more unfathomable than anything before it was. Its secrets however, could hold a key to profound knowledge about leadership and its purpose. The investigation of this sea is the next great challenge for leadership explorers.

Government Fork

have completed our fly-over, lets examine this river system in detail. Lake is the first of the headwater lakes. It is the source of the Community Government Fork, and it represents the ageless needs humanity has to effectively manage and administer human communities.
Now that
we

Divine

Right and Power Schools

The Government Fork is almost immediately joined by an influential stream, the Divine Right tributary. The Divine Right school posits the theory that society is a hierarchical arrangement whereby certain members, by birthright, and/or because of some innate quality, and/or through some kind of divine mandate, are ordained with the right or responsibility to lead the rest of the society. Leaders are usually replaced either at death, by abdication, or through contest (usually revolution, but sometimes election) where the survival of the fittest ordains the victorious leader.

A River Runs

Through It

46

The influence of this ancient current in the Leadership River can be seen through historic and biblical examples including Moses leading the Children of Israel; Platos ideas about philosopher kings; the feudal kings and lords of the European dark ages; the ageless laws of primogeniture which ensure the orderly inheritance of birthright; the more recent social Darwinism that reinforces classism; and our contemporary cultural deference to leaders who have been to the &dquo;right&dquo; schools or who come from the &dquo;right&dquo; families, like the Kennedy, Gore, and Bush families in the United States. The Divine Right school would define leadership as anything a leader does as a function of their &dquo;ordained&dquo; position. Just a little further downstream, an angry, raging tributary crashes into the Government Fork and the turmoil it creates produces a reaction in the water that has such a pervasive influence that at times seems to completely overwhelm the rivers character. This angry tributary storms out of the Power Mountains and gives rise to the Power School of Leadership and Management. Power theory insists that the successful utilization of power from any available power base will not only propel a person into a position as a leader, but it will also serve to sustain the person in their position. Machiavelli, writing around 1500 was this theorys most able early observer. In The Prince, Machiavelli advised that the primary job of the

first become and then remain the prince by whatever means it took to do so. It did not matter if the prince had to break the peoples silly &dquo;moral&dquo; laws like murder or perjury. The highest and only moral obligation for the prince was to retain the position as the prince! If the prince could rule by giving the people graces, that was acceptable, as long as the prince killed someone every once in awhile just so the people wouldnt cultivate rebellious thoughts, thinking the prince was too soft. Similarly, the prince was advised not to be too cruel or the people might believe death would be a preferable release from their oppression, and they would thus have nothing to lose and everything to gain if they were to rebel.

prince was

to

Other philosophers have examined power. About a century after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Thomas Hobbes observed the savage wars of Europe and wrote that life was &dquo;solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.&dquo; He believed that peoples desire for power over other people was such that they would simply kill each other off unless they agreed to give up some of their power and allow an all-powerful dictator (Leviathan) to rule over them. In the late 1800s the German Fredrich Nietzsche wrote about mans &dquo;will to power.&dquo; He identified the Hero and the Herd. The Hero class is those very few humans who become rich with power, who can use their power and are not influenced by the herd mentality. The Herd is the masses of humanity who are influenced by and subjected to the rules of society. They are unable to become masters because they do not choose to effectively use their power.
Power theory defines leadership as the effective use of power by the leader. The abusive use of power from this school is the application of power for the express purpose of controlling people-no matter what the cost. Abuse of the power spawned from this influential stream can be observed as the Leadership River runs its course, especially in some of historys darkest moments. Ready contemporary examples abound including dictators, politicians, corporate despots, crime bosses, down to youth gang leaders and playground bullies.

47

The Commerce Fork Trade Lake is the second of the headwater lakes and it is the source of the Commerce Fork. Trade Lake represents the various economic and business needs that have been around since humanity discovered it could engage in the exchange of valued things. As the Commerce Fork begins its long journey through a high plateau it is almost immediately infused by a tiny stream from the melted waters of a glacier peak that caps the mountains that separate the Government Fork from the Commerce Fork. The glacier is the same one that feeds the Divine Right tributary on the Government Fork. Similarly, a few miles downstream a boiling brook cascades into the Commerce Fork originating in the same snowpack that generates the Power School tributary on the Government Fork. Thus, water samples from the Commerce Fork also reveal a significant influence from the Divine Right and Power Schools in the practice of economic activity. For centuries, the Commerce Fork Societies that were plateau.

slowly meandered through an unchanging high arranged around hunter/gatherer economic arrangements gradually gave way to agricultural societies. These early societies were rigidly hierarchical and there was very little social mobility. The rigid social order was unquestioned and was assumed to have been divinely mandated. To ensure the stability of these societies power was concentrated at the top of the hierarchy. As agricultural societies evolved, most people were peasants bound generation after generation to a powerful feudal lords land. Often, the tiny middle class, those who were in the non-agricultural trades, would also hold the same occupations generation after generation. Masters of particular crafts controlled entry into the trades. In this system, the job of the master was to teach a skill or a craft to handful of apprentices (often younger relatives). The job of the apprentice was to obey the master, learn all that could be learned, and eventually &dquo;hang out their own shingle&dquo; by opening their own shop, or taking over the masters operation. In this system with a limited span of control between masters and apprentices, there was no need for professional management to handle productivity issues. Indeed, until about two hundred years ago most economic activity was still dominated by the system of masters and apprentices and lords of the manor and peasants who
worked the lords estates. The

Management Canal

The gradual rise in the economic influence of the middle class ignited a wholesale shift in societies as well as the way commerce was conducted. The creation and exchange of capital, banking, expansion of trade beyond national/feudal borders and the radical change in the means of production of goods provided a mighty catalyst for change in societies of Europe and North America. The industrial revolution,
which began slowly in the late 1 with century, quietly shifted the production of goods from the small shops of master craftsmen to ever-larger factories. Eventually huge industrial complexes were built in growing industrial cities and large numbers of laborers moved from rural areas and across national borders to live near the urban factories. Labor now performed new kinds of jobs like &dquo;feeding&dquo; raw materials into processing machines, or they joined the multitudes on the assembly lines of the emerging mass production era of manufacturing. The increased span of control in manufacturing also generated a critical demand for a new kind and class of worker, the professional manager. The industrial revolution is the source of the Management Canal, the single most important tributary of the Commerce Fork.

48

The

Management Canal is such a huge tributary it totally Fork, radically changing the entire character of that river.

subsumes the Commerce

The Confluence of the Government and Commerce Forks-The River

Leadership

Shortly after the industrial revolution,

the Government and Commerce Forks merge and their confluence forms the main channel of the Leadership River. Because of the huge augmentation from the Management Canal, the Commerce Fork is much larger when the Government and Commerce forks unite. The management influence on the newly formed Leadership River is profound from the 1800s until the late 20th century. The management tide overwhelms the entire river, including the deeply submerged government current. Terms like statesman and servant of the people are pushed deep below the surface as new mainstream terms like political boss and campaign manager are invented. Scientific
Near the

Management School

beginning of the 20th century, the Scientific Management tributary can be observed as it makes a controlled descent from the glaciers on Science Mountain. It becomes a catalyst for a major chemical reaction as it merges with the Leadership River. Much as Aristotle had taught in ancient Greece, scientists believed nature could be observed and understood, and more importantly, man might even tame nature. During 1800s scientists and engineers increasingly produced &dquo;miracles&dquo; in their laboratories discovering the sources of diseases and medicine to cure them, increasing human understanding about the physical world, and inventing all kinds of technological marvels that increased human efficiency at work by harnessing steam and electricity. Because of all of these astonishing achievements in a relatively short span of time, popular faith in science began to skyrocket.
The industrial revolution was rolling under a full head of steam by the end of the 19th century. Conditions were prime for blending ideas about professional management with the scientific method. Frederick Winslow Taylor is credited with the product of the combination of these two powerful systems: the invention of scientific management.

management, production is dissected into small sub-units of effort. The managers job is to understand the essential components of the production process, develop comprehensive lists of procedures to implement each component, train workers to perform each individual task, monitor the workers performance, and
In scientific

develop

incentives to

improve performance

and

ultimately productivity.

In this

scheme, the management assumption is that workers are analogous to the machines they work with. Good management is simply a matter of continuously fine-tuning the entire system to make it increasingly productive. Tighten a pulley, grease a few

bearings, give

a small reward to a worker for meeting a quota, all of these functions served to make the components of the industrial machine, management including its workers, more efficient. Though more humane at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Scientific management is still with us. Total Quality Management is just one contemporary example of the application of scientific principles to the management process.

49

Human Relations School

1920s as the river winds past the Folks Mountains, a pleasant hot becomes the source of the Human Relations tributary, which warmly springs enriches the Leadership River. Unfortunately, most scholars do not give Mary Parker Follett credit as the founder of the Human Relations School of management. That honor is, in my opinion, erroneously given to Elton Mayo, a Harvard scholar from Australia who led the team that conducted the famous Hawthorne experiments beginning in the late 1920s. Years before Mayo began to publish the findings of the Hawthorne experiments; Follett was doing wonderful work with groups humanizing both the industrial and civic sectors. She was also an important business consultant up to her death in the early 1930s (Boone, & Bowen, 1987).
In the

early

None-the-less, Mayos Hawthorne Studies provide the commonly acknowledged

initial documentation about the importance of peer influence on production, as well as the human needs of workers. The Hawthorne Studies signify an important turning point in the management literature from treating workers like cogs in a giant machine to treating them like people with very human needs and aspirations. Douglas MacGregor, writing in the 1950s, developed a management notion called Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X managers were found to be more like the scientific managers of old who had minimal regard for employees, didnt trust them, believed they were lazy, poorly motivated etc. MacGregor found that when managers held those kinds of beliefs about employees, their management style was controlling and autocratic. Theory Y managers had different ideas about employees,

believing they were capable, motivated, industrious, curious, and had exceptional ability. Theory Y managers were far more collaborative, far less controlling and autocratic. Theory Y more closely reflects the ideas of the human relations theory of management (Boone, et al., 1987).
If we were to take water samples from the Leadership River in the 1950s, we would find the influence from the Management Canal of the Commerce Fork continuing to dominate the flow. The undercurrent from the Government Fork emerged briefly during World War I, the Great Depression and World War II, but in the 1950s, it once again dropped deep below the surface in a river seeking its course through the rich history of the expansion of the modern industrial world. The Power Stream continues to cause turmoil in the current and thundered to life when the Scientific Management tributary joined the river. The warm waters of the Human Relations tributary however, seem to gradually overtake the Power Stream as it eventually submerged and found more subtle ways to manifest itself
One Best Scientific

Way School

Management, the Human Relations Movement, Theory X and Theory Y caused a great deal of turbulence competing currents boiled their way to the surface trying to

and the paradoxical in the river. These be recognized as the best way to manage. In the midst of this turbulence as the river begins its charge to the sea, part of the river will become lost in a swamp caused by a narrow man-made inlet that is actually a false channel. Some theoreticians proposed that One Best Way of management could be discovered and taught and set about constructing a new channel for the river, attempting to divert the flow to conform it to their theories. Beginning in the 50s and as late as the 80s, people were advocating a &dquo;best&dquo;

50

theory. Robert Blake famous of the One Best Way theorists.

management

style

or

and Jane Mouton

are

perhaps

the most

Blake and Mouton developed the Managerial Grid. On the horizontal axis of the 9X9 cell Managerial Grid they would plot an organizations need to orchestrate the details of production, or task orientation. On the vertical axis they would identify the organizations concern for human relations issues. The objective for Blake and Mouton was to diagnose where the organization stood on the grid and recommend steps to move the organization to the 9,9, &dquo;Team&dquo; position on the grid. Blake and Mouton, and others who developed similar ideas about the best way to manage had significant professional success as authors and business consultants, even while other scholars were busy refuting their claims of a single best way to manage

organizations (Hersey, & Blanchard, 1988).

Situational

Leadership School

The majority of the Leadership River is not diverted into the One Best Way Swamp. It continues its course and especially in the 1970s it picks its way through the Situational Rapids, a series of rocks in the river that separate it into four different channels. Situational theorists assert that in different kinds of circumstances different kinds of management styles are appropriate. Victor Vroom teamed first with Phillip Yettin and later with Arthur Jago. These scholars developed and further refined a decision tree to assist managers as they determined an appropriate management style to employ based on the decision before them. Robert House wrote about Path/Goal theory, a theory that examined the follower job satisfaction in relation to the amount of leader direction based on whether follower tasks were structured or unstructured.

However, Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard gained the

situational theorists.

most

notoriety

as

Hersey and Blanchard indicated there are four leadership styles: Telling, Coaching, Participating and Delegating (Note: Some of Hersey and Blanchards terms have changed with subsequent editions of their book. For our purposes, the terms used above provide a good basic understanding of their theory). Each of Hersey and Blanchards four management styles is appropriate when used in the proper context. An assessment of follower willingness (confidence) and ability determines which management style is appropriate. For example, a busload of army recruits requires a manager who demonstrates low concern for people and high task organization or the &dquo;Telling&dquo; management style because the recruits right off the bus have low willingness (low confidence) and low ability to do the job of soldiering. Similarly, a hospital administrator would use the &dquo;Delegating&dquo; management style for an emergency room trauma team when the victims of a car accident arrive, because a highly trained team of medical professionals have both high willingness (high confidence), and high ability to meet the demands of the situation. In either of the above situations, it would be ineffective to use a different management style.
The Differentiated Currents of Management and

Leadership

Downstream from the situational rapids the surface of the river appears to be orderly and peaceful. The chaos and turbulence seems to have been sorted out in the situational rapids. Looming deep below the surface however, is the beginning of an elongated submerged jetty that eventually makes its way to the surface and rises The Quality Jetty gradually separates the to form the Quality Coastal Range.

51

current into two distinct channels.

The

majority

of the accumulation from the

Commerce Fork, the

Management Canal, the Power tributary, and the Scientific

are mixed with ancillary augmentations from of the other in the river and are diverted into the upper channel. This upper channel currents pours into the Management Fjords, a series of waterways that reflect various theories of management. Flow from the Government Fork, influenced in varying degrees by all of the tributaries upstream, now dominates the lower channel. No longer tainted by the effluent from the Commerce Fork and the Management Canal, the Leadership River becomes completely transformed as it cascades toward the sea.

Management tributary

The

Quality Coastal Range appeared because of a major upheaval in the Japanese Economy after World War II, and in the US economy that began in the 1970s and continued well into the 1980s. The upheaval formed the Management Fjords, which were infused by springs from the Quality Coastal Range. A host of management writers suggested management solutions to the economic crisis. In 1982, Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman published a landmark book In Search of Excellence that examined numbers of companies that had been successful despite the economy in order to identify successful management techniques that could be applied to other organizations (Peters, & Waterman, 1982). About the same time, W. Edwards Deming was gaining an American audience for the principles of Total Quality Management he had been teaching in Japan for thirty years. Excellence and Quality became the mantra of the economy. Various sub-currents of the river settled in different inlets of the Management Fjords. In one large cove the current from the Power tributary effects the implementation of quality theory spawning variations of hierarchical arrangements for businesses and organizations. In another major fjord, the warm waters from the Human Relations tributary nurture numerous applications of collaborative management processes.
Some authors who ply these waters are still confused about terminology, using the word leadership in their writing, when they are really describing management. Leadership scholar Joseph Rost, was not confused about the two terms management and leadership. He conducted extensive research of the major 20th century writings in leadership.

&dquo;After pouring over those notes and doing several cuts in analyzing those materials, I came to a startling conclusion. There is a school of leadership in the literature since 1930 that has been hidden by the obvious confusion and chaos of the literature as it is presented in the books, chapters, and articles. Under the surface, I found a consistent view of leadership in the background assumptions and in the meanings behind the words used in the definitions and models. This school conceptualizes leadership as good management. I will call it the industrial paradigm of leadership...&dquo; (Rost, 1991 p. 10)

comprehensive qualitative analysis of his data demonstrated that most &dquo;leadership&dquo; authors were actually expounding about management theory, equating leadership with good management. To be consistent with our metaphor, these writers have been adrift in the Management Fjords though they believed they were sailing on the main channel of the Leadership River!
Rosts

52

Transforming Leadership School

If we head back upstream out of the Management Fjords and up to the Quality Jetty where the upper and lower channels begin to separate we find the main flow of the Leadership River continues through the lower channel. Immediately past the Quality Jetty, the river spills over a high waterfall. As it cascades down to the turbulent pool below, it begins a transformation process. The high waterfall represents a major event in the development of leadership theory, the 1978 publication of James MacGregor Burnss book Leadership. In this book he defines

leadership:

Leadership over human beings is

motives and purposes

exercised when persons with certain in competition or conflict with others, mobilize, institutional, political, psychological, and other resources so as to arouse, engage, and satisfy the motives of followers. (Burns, 1978, p.

18)
Burns forwards
a

theory

of transforming and transactional

leadership.

He believes

these constructs represent the extremes on a continuum of leadership behavior. I have argued elsewhere that transactional leadership, which is where leaders and followers make contact with one another for the economic, political, or psychological exchange of mutually beneficial things, is actually a description of management, not leadership (Burns, 1996). Transforming leadership occurs when &dquo;one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality&dquo; (Burns, 1978, p. 20).
Just

flowing rivers are able to clean themselves from pollutants, in transforming leadership both leaders and followers come through the conflict, stress, and collaboration of the leadership relationship changed, and changed for the better. As leaders and followers work together on a problem they grow as human beings to a higher level of morality. This is no mere exchange of favors as in transactional leadership. The heart of transforming leadership is the human growth which occurs as we meet the challenges before us, and change for the better as we resolve them. This is the heart of the transforming theory of leadership.
as

turbulent free

praised Burns as an important pioneer in the study of leadership whose work is &dquo;extremely important as a transitional statement that has immense possibilities to lead us toward a new school of leadership&dquo; (Rost, 1991 p. 11). No longer is the discussion of leadership corrupted by the disproportionate attention to the needs of what Rost labels the &dquo;Industrial Paradigm of Leadership&dquo; (1991), the interests of
business and its
waters remain upstream, locked in the Ronald Heifetz in his book Leadership Without Easy Answer Management Fjords. refused to use the word transforming to describe leadership, and instead wrote about adaptive behavior. I have labeled Heifetzs ideas elsewhere as a kind of transforming leadership (Burns, 1996). More recently there has been discussion about replacing the term transforming leadership with charismatic leadership:

Rost

management. Those

Within the last decade and a half, exceptional leaders who infuse ideological values and moral purpose into organizations and who have extraordinary effects on their followers and organizations, have captured attention of leadership scholars (e.g. Bass, 1985; Bennis & Nanus, 1985; Burns, 1978; Conger, & Kanungo, 198; House, 1977;

53

Sashkin, 1988; Shamir, House, & Arthur, 1993; Tichy & Devanna, 1986). Variously labeled charismatic, transformational, inspirational,

visionary, these exceptional leaders are purported to have qualitatively different and quantitatively greater effects on their followers than the effects of exchange leaders (House, Spangler, & Woycke, 1991; Howell, & Frost, 1989), this new genre of leadership will be referred to &dquo;charismatic&dquo; because of its widespread use in past and current writings on this topic. (Howell, 1998).
and

Transforming/Transformational, adaptive, or charismatic leadership reconstructs our thinking about leadership forever. The primary current surfaces to define leadership as what people do together to morally transform themselves and their societies in order to solve the problems before them. As the river surges past the Transforming Waterfalls, the rivers transformation is complete and it now races into a narrow canyon enriched by the outlet of a beautiful coastal lake. The lake is the product of a huge artesian well. The source of the well reaches back over centuries charged with an indomitable spirit that characterizes humans, that is the spirit of service. Robert Greenleaf wrote about this ancient influence (Greenleaf, 1977) which has been modeled well by certain historical figures like Moses, Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa. Servant Leadership infuses purpose into the transforming nature of the Leadership River.
The Leadership River is now is fully developed and its true character, Transforming Servant Leadership, is evident as it flows into the Sea of Chaos. In this vast sea, it may indeed be able to function as a catalyst to bring the seemingly random patterns of chaos into useful, meaningful, sources of creative change. The Sea of Chaos

is an ocean that has only begun to be explored, and it represents the next great adventure of discovery for leadership theorists as we tumble into the 21st Century. Historically, social science has been influenced by physical science paradigms. For most of the 20th century and indeed since the Renaissance/Enlightenment, linear models have driven the &dquo;hard&dquo; and social sciences. Linear models suggest that things can be determined by discovering the path of causes for them. This path can be determined through careful scientific observation and by developing mathematic equations to plot and predict past and future events. The essential element here is that if the laws of Physics reflect a fundamental reality, human beings are simply a bit more complex &dquo;things&dquo; and they ought to obey in some general and predictable ways the laws associated with that reality, i.e. gravity seems to hold both rocks and people to the earth. Chaos

theory

Thus,

in the linear inferences of linear

paradigm, rocks are the result of an understandable set of geologic processes. Human behavior can be understood by examining psychological and environmental processes that influence human development. Chaos Theory questions both sets of assumptions. At the subatomic level the distinction between organic and inorganic matter is lost. Linear explanations of cause and effect are inadequate. While social scientists have believed their science was inadequate because it is impossible to control all of the variables, the recent discoveries of physical scientists suggest that it is not a matter of controlling variables at all. Both physical scientists and social scientists have been

54

operating under a paradigm that is the nature of all things.

Chaos

too

limiting with regard to our understanding of

Theory emerged in the physical sciences in the early 1970s as a new paradigm. Essentially, chaos theory challenged the highly predictable but not always accurate linear models of physics. Through high-speed computers, standard linear equations were proven to &dquo;break down&dquo; into chaotic (not predictable) patterns. In linear equations this variation and patterning used to be dismissed as
&dquo;noise.&dquo; But now, this noise has been studied and has been discovered to be reflective of a chaotic reality (Gleick, 1987). Some social scientists
more

(who tumbled into the Sea of Chaos from the business and management fjords) have begun to examine chaos with regard to human systems and organizations and employ chaotic models for understanding their behavior, just as linear models have been used in the past. In Chaos, leadership might be defined as the activity of holding in dynamic tension the tendency of organizations to implode (by &dquo;managing&dquo; themselves so closely that they are no longer responsive to environmental influences) and to explode into total chaos (by being so responsive to the environment that they cant focus or settle on a direction) (Stacey, 1996).
Conclusion The Leadership River metaphor is useful as an instructional tool. Students use the river to understand the context of the theories they learn. Instructors have the opportunity to emphasize various sections of the river, bringing in theorists, historical figures, and historical events in order to help students understand the various theories in a comprehensive context.

instruction I have had students &dquo;explore&dquo; areas of the river, and they with the metaphor. We have had discussions about pollutants, they have readily suggested dams, and thought about obstructions in the river as they test their knowledge of history and philosophy with the rivers course. The Leadership River metaphor has generated more discussion about leadership theory than any instructional methodology I have ever employed.
In my
own run

the most important point about this metaphor is that it sticks with the I introduce the river early in the first course in the Leadership Studies curriculum, and we revisit it throughout the course and refer to it in subsequent courses. Students refer to it in class discussions, exam questions, and in their papers. They also frame the skills they are learning in the context of theories they are beginning to understand. Advanced students are able to develop sophisticated theory based critiques of the leadership literature because they have become so familiar with leadership theory by using this river system metaphor.

Perhaps

students.

Theory is not a four-letter word. Theory is a dynamic foundation for the instruction of leadership, and leadership educators need to continuously experiment with methodologies to engage students in this important part of the curriculum.

55

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