Crisis and Opportunity: How affective is your leadership?

Understanding our civilisation-level crisis as a global affective mood disorder

Civilisation Level Crisis: A Leadership Opportunity

…our Western civilization today, especially at the elite levels, is a cut-flower civilization, and the flowers are dying. Unless there’s a revival and a restoration of the roots, the days of our Western civilization are numbered. ― Os Guinness

I keep waiting for normal to return. For the chaos, unpredictability, and insanity of our cultural moment to abate and return to the rhythms of life I was more comfortable with. But things aren't and won't return to my longed-for quotidian, and they are worsening.

In recent years, our global world has experienced many environmental, social, political, cultural, economic, and psychological crises. We have coined the word 'metacrisis' to describe this accumulation of predicaments. Our 'meta-crises' have continued to mutate and grow into a permanent state of affairs that we now call a 'permacrisis'.

A level of intractability now elevates our 'permacrisis' to the status of a civilisation-level event, where a hypothetical event could significantly impact us, such as a global catastrophe or existential risk.

Amid all this, we face a related leadership crisis with high-profile moral and ethical failures, misaligned and toxic practices, burnout, and apathy. Yet this leadership crisis is also an immense opportunity.

In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.

―Albert Einstein

Now is the time and opportunity for Christian leaders to seize this moment, to innovate, and do what Christian leaders have done in other times of crisis - lead in leading.

History reveals that God loves when his people step forward to say, “Here am I. Send me!” (Is 6:8). In any crisis we turn into, lean into and seek to lead within for the Lord, the Spirit of God responds expansively and generously with the power that raised Christ from the dead.

So, how might the Lord want to breathe resurrection life into our leadership? Let’s start by unpacking the contours of our current leadership crisis.

Leadership Crisis: Burnout, Cynicism and Reluctance

Photo by M.T ElGassier on Unsplash

The current leadership crisis seems clustered into three particular and key manifestations.

1. Leadership burnout

Data reveals that leaders are not only experiencing but suffering from higher levels of burnout, mental health issues, and a sense of inadequacy. More leaders are further away from thriving than ever before. Being a Christian leader carries a high risk of burnout and the potential of abuse by the people they lead. It is not just leaders who abuse members; members regularly abuse their leaders, and increasingly so. Betrayal trauma erupted in COVID and continues unabated. Too many of our leaders are exhausted and constantly looking over their shoulders for those they fear are coming to get them in life-damaging and unnecessary conflicts.

2. Cynicism about leadership

There has always been scepticism about leaders and their organisations. But it seems to be reaching new pathological levels. Cynicism, mistrust, and betrayal combine with consumer apathy, indifference, and a growing inability to commit to anyone or anything other than self-interest and self-preservation.

3. Reluctance and fear about leadership

Anecdotally, when I talk with network and denominational leaders, they see the current toll on their leaders and, most perniciously, the impact on the next generation. In increasing numbers, young people wonder if Christian Leadership is worth the price they see paid by others, not to mention the growing online presence of high-profile leadership failures that impact and deter them.

Responding to these three domains and related issues requires a diagnosis of the global crisis that gave rise to them. What is it about our world that has manifested this leadership crisis? How might we better understand the nature of the crises assailing us so that we can consider a life-giving response?

Identity Crisis: Our Global Affective Mood Disorder

Pandemics, geopolitics, mass migration, and military conflicts continue to impact us all. Closer to home and even more palpable in everyday life are the related crises of cost of living, sexual identity, race and diversity, and identity politics.

At the heart of all these crises is a crisis of identity. At the heart of this identity crisis is the issue of the affective.

The affective dimension of human identity and life concerns moods, feelings, and emotions. This dimension of life has moved from being an underlying experience of human life to capturing and totalising human identity. We have reached a point where people's sense of self is increasingly in toto, about an inner psychological reality that often has to be asserted through dysfunctional emotional actions and behaviours. The affective dimension of life has become so disordered it is akin to a global affective mood disorder. One symptom is seen most readily in the global mental health crisis.¹

Some people are so captive to affective constructions of self that they require constant external revalidation of their sense of self. Self-differentiation, maintaining identity distinct from the feelings and beliefs of others, has collapsed into anxious attachment behaviours with the emergence of extant adult temper tantrums.²

Our globalised world is suffering from an affective mood disorder, and it needs affective leaders.

Opportunity: Three Practices of Affective Leaders

What if this affective core was the mode and the opportunity for a suitable response? The affective is not something to avoid but enter deeply into; to understand and participate in but also regulate and not negate. In other words, how might we harness the power of the affective for identity and formation to slingshot out of the gravity well of crisis, using the very forces that come against leadership for leadership? What might such affective leaders look like? Leaders who know how to lead in and through the affective dimensions of life.

Such leaders might present and act in three key modes.

1. Thinking Leaders

The unregulated affective dimensions of human experience have undermined and disabled our critical thinking abilities.³ Objective truth has been replaced with subjective reality and captivity to propaganda. Algorithms reward and train us to not read with comprehension, not to carefully process information, and not to make reasoned decisions.

No algorithm can replace human wisdom and analysis. But no algorithm will need to if we have abandoned — wholesale — a millennium of critical reading and thinking skills. ―Joane Westberg

We need leaders who will recover, learn, and lead in critical thinking and be able to engage in all dimensions of thinking. Learning to think well is not about leaving emotions and moods at the door but rather about effectively regulating the affective as an integrated dimension alongside critical thinking.

A particular mode of Christian thinking has feared critical thinking, perceiving it as hostile to faith…

..that rejects critical reflection and enthusiastically embraces simplistic acceptance of an informal tradition of beliefs and practices composed mainly of clichés and legends.⁴

In doing so, it has let the Trojan horse of the affective into its gates and been taken captive by the perpetual generation of superficial entertainment, judgment, and fear to capture attention. Another mode of Christian thinking has been captive to soulless, sterile rationalism, cut off from non-cognitive modes of life and faith, unable to engage with and respond to people being swept away on the tide of the affective.

What we need are leaders who model better holistic modes of thinking. Thinking that engages and integrates the slow and logical of the conscious and, simultaneously, the fast, emotional and affective of the unconscious.⁵ In many regards, this is not a proposal for a new and novel mode of thinking but rather a retrieval. The development of learning to think better has been intrinsic to Christianity in history. Seeking to think well is generated by believing in the intelligibility of a world made by a good God.

It takes work and practice to learn to think well. The reward, amongst many other things, is the ability to make better decisions, navigate conflicts, communicate, self-reflect, resist manipulation, be creative, grow and develop. Thinking well also means integrating mind, emotions, body and soul. To know the place and role of joy and play for faith and formation. Such thinking makes the navigation of all that our world has to throw at us possible. Thinking well and better is not optional for leaders who want to thrive in our current global crises.

2. Healing Leaders

We desperately need more leaders who are committed to courageous, wholehearted leadership and who are self-aware enough to lead from their hearts, rather than unevolved leaders who lead from hurt and fear. ― Brené Brown

The need for resilience in leadership has always been known. But understanding the nature of resilience - psychological, social, behavioural and emotional - and how to cultivate it has come increasingly to the fore in recent years.⁶ The way our world is, the need for resilience will not diminish but will undoubtedly increase.

It is not enough to send leaders off for recovery only to fend for themselves on their return. It is also insufficient to expect leaders to develop ever-increasing herculean capacities for resilience. Abused church leaders often have nowhere safe to turn to to process their trauma. To lead and survive requires fortitude and courage. But getting beyond merely surviving to thriving requires something more. Instead, we need leaders to discover antidotes to the trauma and hurt they and others experience.

This requires healing.

If our world is suffering from an affective mood disorder, one manifestation of that is seen in the conflicts, betrayal, harm and trauma visited upon leaders. Resilience and its cousin, grit, are required in the face of these factors. Leaders also face the growing scale and volume of trauma and hurt carried by those they lead. Developing resilience and grit produces blistering, thick skin and callouses to protect against pain and disappointment. Leaders need something more - to know how to process their pain and find healing to bring healing to others.

There is an antidote available and waiting to be claimed by Christians of participation in the body of Christ to metabolise their pain and trauma and transform it into resurrection life. Leaders can experience healing and deep engagement with God around their desires and wounds. In doing so, they can lead others into healing, and the church and people of God can become the healing environment for our world.

3. Spiritual & Mystical Leaders

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all. ― Karl Rahner

For Christians, ‘spiritual leadership’ is, in some ways, a tautology and the stating of the obvious. To be a Christian leader necessitates the spiritual as core and intrinsic to its nature. Yet Christian leadership, under the assault of the affective, has seen too many leaders either sell their souls for success or have them burned out and worn down from trauma and disappointment.

In our globalised consumer society, desire is rampant, and the pursuit of all we want at any cost is legitimised. Jesus has become a means to those ends. He is not life itself but something we expect to give us the life we desire and dream about. And in the world of the affective, in addition to lifestyle provision, God is there to make us feel better. This is the moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD) that sociologists noted the emergence of twenty years ago, which has metastasised unabated to today.⁷ MTD reduces Christianity to a belief that God made us, wants us to be happy and free from pain and suffering, and is there to make us feel better, resolve our problems, and provide us with what we desire and want.

This bastardised gospel has become an extant measure for Christian life, practice and commitments. And it is destroying faith and intensifying the affective mood disorder of our world. And Christian leaders are being ground down and decimated by this disposition and infected by it themselves. In our global crisis of endless change, complexity, and trauma, we have reached more and more for the bromides and sedatives of consumer culture and become more stunted in our resilience and fortitude. Christians have doubled down on expecting God to comfort them and get their lives back on track for the plans they had for themselves.

Karl Rahner's prognostications made in 1967 were prescient for today. By ‘mystic’, Rahner meant a direct, immediate, dynamic, and experiential relationship with God, ‘a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence’.⁸ This is a relationship with God, where faith is not solely sustained by intellectual beliefs nor material and emotional provision. Instead, it is a location where God is the ground of our being, the source of our identity, and the sole measure for our lives. It is a form of faith where desire is not to be feared or avoided but to be entered into honestly with God to discover what is on the other side. God made us as desiring beings, and he knows how unfettered desire has taken us captive and longs to meet us in those desires. In a world torn apart by misplaced desire, He asks us, ‘What do you desire?’

The God who loves us is waiting for us at the end of and underneath our deepest affectations— our feelings, longings, and needs. The way to God is not the abnegation of our desires but to walk all the way into them to encounter a God that those desires point to. We need leaders who will encounter God in their deepest affectations so they can offer help to others in theirs. Leaders who have not escaped the world nor collapsed into it but discovered a different reality amidst it. Leaders who have not learned to live immured from the vicissitudes of others or become masters of toxic vulnerability for faux accountability and simulation of life with others.

Conclusion

So, we face a world that will continue to become complex, chaotic, and in crisis. Trauma, loss, and upheaval will continue to trigger our global affective mood disorder. Leaders who can think well, bring healing and model affective encounters with God might become the mood stabilisers our world needs. Such leadership makes possible the unpacking and remedy to our significant symptoms of global identity crises—race, gender, and politics.

Our world is crying out for more and better leadership. Leaders who can cultivate the purposeful and powerful of the affective rather than being captive to the reactive and destructive. Leadership that cultivates deep relationships and the development of others and is differentiated, passionate and creative.

What does this look like in practice on the ground? In many ways, it is not complicated. It starts with practising lifelong learning and engaging with primary affective tools, integrating the therapeutic, coaching, and spiritual direction. All these things are known to us and within our grasp. Let’s take hold of them, lean into and lead in them.

1. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared our mental health crisis to be a pandemic, with record levels of anger, stress, worry, sadness, fear and anxiety.

2. We have the emergence of ‘neo-toddlers’, who scream, shout, cancel, and disrupt with shock factors.

3. See Dwyer, C. P. 2017. Critical Thinking: Conceptual Perspectives and Practical Guidelines. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Dwyer, C. P., Hogan, M. J., and Stewart, I. 2014. "An Integrated Critical Thinking Framework for the 21st Century." Thinking Skills and Creativity 12: 43–52 and Dwyer, C. P., Hogan, M. J., and Stewart, I. 2015. "The Evaluation of Argument Mapping-Infused Critical Thinking Instruction to Enhance Reflective Judgment Performance." Thinking Skills and Creativity 16: 11–26.

4. Roger E. Olson Stanley J Grenz, Who Needs Theology? Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996.

5. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman described how human beings all have two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

6. We have seen the emergence and growth in awareness of emotionally healthy intelligence and spirituality. Yet further and deeper engagement in healing is needed, with an understanding of integrating into leadership.

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism

8. ‘The Spirituality of the Church of the Future’, TI 20, 143-153, here 145. Theological Investigations (London/New York: Darton, Longman and Todd/Crossroad: 1961-1992), 149.