A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix

by Edwin H. Friedman

For whenever a “family” is driven by anxiety, what will also always be present is a failure of nerve among its leaders.

The emphasis here will be on strength, not pathology; on challenge, not comfort; on self-differentiation, not herding for togetherness. This is a difficult perspective to maintain in a “seatbelt society” more oriented toward safety than adventure. This book is not, therefore, for those who prefer peace to progress. It is not for those who mistake another’s well-defined stand for coercion.

It will be the thesis of this work that leadership in America is stuck in the rut of trying harder and harder without obtaining significantly new results.

Or, to put the problem another way, when we say something has gone into remission, where do we think it has gone?

as I began to focus on emotional process rather than cultural background, it eventually became obvious to me that whatever the nature of a family’s customs and ceremonies, the universal problem for all partnerships, marital or otherwise, was not getting closer; it was preserving self in a close relationship, something that no one made of flesh and blood seems to do well. (I eventually came to define my marriage counseling, no matter what the cultural mix, as trying to help people “separate” so that they would not have to separate.)

Parents cannot produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed up with their child’s behavior.

After all, the denial of emotional process is evident in society at large. If, for example, we succeed in reducing the number of cigarettes smoked by our nation’s youth but do nothing to reduce the level of chronic anxiety throughout the nation, then the addiction will just take another form, and the same children who were vulnerable to one kind of addiction will become easy prey for the as-yet unimagined new temptation.

Sabotage is not merely something to be avoided or wished away; instead, it comes with the territory of leading, whether the “territory” is a family or an organization. And a leader’s capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is—that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution’s specific issues, makeup, or goals—is the key to the kingdom.

The type of leadership that was required for the Old World to go in new directions is the same kind of leadership that is necessary for reorienting any relationship system in any age.

Europe’s imaginative capacity was unleashed not by the discovery of learning, as those with a vested interest in learning would have it, but by the discovery of the New World, while the enormous awakening of European civilization’s inventiveness was a direct result of the effect those new horizons had on an Old World.

There are three major, interlocking characteristics common to any relationship system that has become imaginatively gridlocked: an unending treadmill of trying harder; looking for answers rather than reframing questions; and either/or thinking that creates false dichotomies.

The treadmill of trying harder is driven by the assumption that failure is due to the fact that one did not try hard enough, use the right technique, or get enough information. This assumption overlooks the possibility that thinking processes themselves are stuck and imagination gridlocked, not because of cognitive strictures in the minds of those trying to solve a problem, but because of emotional processes within the wider relationship system. The failure to recognize those emotional processes, if not the outright denial of their existence, is what often initiates and ultimately perpetuates the treadmill effect.

In fact, it took European civilization almost three centuries to grasp fully that what it had found—North America—might be more important than what it was looking for.

Innovations are new answers to old questions; paradigm shifts reframe the question, change the information that is important, and generally eliminate previous dichotomies.

Similarly, the understanding that one can get more change in a family or organization by working with the motivated members (the strengths) in the system than by focusing on the symptomatic or recalcitrant members totally obliterates the search for answers to the question of how to motivate the unmotivated.

Perpetually seeking new answers to established questions rather than reframing the basic question itself not only betrays lack of distance on the part of the searcher; it also prevents obtaining the distance necessary for being able even to think, much less go, in new directions. Seeking answers can be its own tread-mill. Changing the question enables one to step off.

As every schoolchild knows, the belief that the equator defined the end of the world limited the spirit necessary to produce reality. The equator served as an emotional barrier, by which I mean a belief born of mythology and kept in place by anxiety. Such beliefs exist in every society and take hold to the extent that society is driven by anxiety rather than adventure.

The attempt to run a mile in less than four minutes serves as an excellent illustration of the power such emotional barriers can have. Back when the great Swedish runners Gunder Haag and Arnie Anderson kept failing to run a “four-minute mile,” despite prodigious efforts, sports pages would actually ask the question whether it was physically possible for a man (not to mention a woman) to run a mile faster than four minutes. The goal seemed so beyond their endeavors that the four-minute mile took on the character of a constant, like the speed of light, a natural barrier. But when Roger Bannister finally broke that barrier in 1957, the following year three men broke it in the same race. We tend to attribute Bannister’s feat to new training techniques rather than a capacity to get outside the emotional processes of running. But in 1994 an African runner understood. When asked how he thought his colleague was able to lower the mile record by one of the largest amounts ever accomplished in one race, he replied, “He is not caught up in the mythology of Western runners.”

Chronic anxiety might be compared to the volatile atmosphere of a room filled with gas fumes. Any sparking incident could set off a conflagration, yet rather than trying to disperse the fumes people blame the person who struck the match.

The anxiety that drives the problem simply switches to another focus. Assuming that what a family is worried about is what is “causing” its anxiety is tantamount to blaming a blown-away tree or house for attracting the tornado that uprooted it.

As long as the focus is on technique, the being of the consultant is irrelevant. It is only when the focus is on emotional process that the consultant’s presence can be considered an important variable— which is perhaps why focus on technique is so seductive. Clients can rarely rise above the maturity level of their helpers, however.

When families get fixed on their symptoms—abuse, alcoholism, delinquency, marital conflict, or chronic physical illness— rather than on the emotional processes that keep those symptoms chronic, they will recycle their problems perpetually no matter what technical changes they make, how much advice they receive from experts, or how hard they try to understand their symptoms.

There is no way out of a chronic condition unless one is willing to go through an acute, temporarily more painful, phase. This is another universal principle of emotional process that transcends the social science construction of reality. Whether we are considering a toothache, a tumor, a relational bind, a technical problem, crime, or the economy, most individuals and most social systems, irrespective of their culture, gender, or ethnic background, will “naturally” choose or revert to chronic conditions of bearable pain rather than face the temporarily more intense anguish of acute conditions that are the gateway to becoming free. But what is also universally true is that chronic conditions, precisely because they are more bearable, also tend to be more withering over time.

The most blatant characteristic of chronically anxious families is the vicious cycle of intense reactivity of each member to events and to one another. It is as though the family were contained in a “feeling plasma,” with everyone’s nervous system constantly bombarded by the emissions of everyone else’s. This state is not to be confused with “emotionality”: dogged passivity can also be a reactive response.

many chronically anxious families can be described as “child-focused.”

You can, after all, play with your pet cat, horse, or dog, but it is absolutely impossible to develop a playful relationship with a reptile, whether it is your pet salamander (no matter how cute), or your pet turtle, snake, or alligator. They are deadly serious (that is, purposive) creatures. Chronically anxious families (including institutions and whole societies) tend to mimic the reptilian response: Lacking the capacity to be playful, their perspective is narrow. Lacking perspective, their repertoire of responses is thin. Neither apology nor forgiveness is within their ken. When they try to work things out, their meetings wind up as brain-stem-storming sessions. Indeed, in any family or organization, seriousness is so commonly an attribute of the most anxious (read “difficult”) members that they can quite appropriately be considered to be functioning out of a reptilian regression. Broadening the perspective, the relationship between anxiety and seriousness is so predictable that the absence of playfulness in any institution is almost always a clue to the degree of its emotional regression.

When chronic anxiety reaches systemic proportions, the desire for good feelings rather than progress will on its own promote togetherness over individuality.

In order to be “inclusive,” the herding family will wind up adopting an appeasement strategy toward its most troublesome members while sabotaging those with the most strength to stand up to the troublemakers. The chronically anxious, herding family will be far more willing to risk losing its leadership than to lose those who disturb their togetherness with their immature responses. Always striving for consensus, it will react against any threat to its togetherness by those who stand on principle rather than good feelings.

The word decisive comes from the Latin root cedere, “to cut.” When one makes a decision, one is making choices, which includes the choice of being willing to give something up. When families are in a herding mode, however, the fusion in the togetherness force inhibits the capacity and the willingness to conceptualize solutions in such terms. The resulting indecisiveness of leaders is also reinforced by the herding force’s erosion of self.

Contrary to popular thinking, it does not require two people working on a marriage to change it. Rarely are both partners equally motivated. But changing a marriage fundamentally does require that someone function as a leader in the sense in which I have been using that term. Where one partner can be taught to regulate his or her own reactivity, the other will often begin to imitate that behavior, and adaptation can ultimately be reversed. But for this shift to occur a critical point of departure must be reached: the more motivated partner must also be able to stop shifting blame to the other and to look more at his or her own input. This does not mean that they should look more at their own faults, but rather at how they have been compounding the situation. It requires changing the criterion from “Who has the problem?” to “Who has the motivation to focus on strength, not weakness, and on leadership, not pathology?”

Everything we enjoy as part of our advanced civilization, including the discovery, exploration, and development of our country, came about because previous generations made adventure more important than safety.

Since anxiety is not something one wills away except by numbing drugs or stuck-together relationships, chronically anxious families will seek out those professionals who promise the most comfort, not those who offer the most opportunities for maturation.

Raising our own threshold for the pain another is experiencing can often motivate the other to take more responsibility for his or her life. There is even the possibility that the challenge of having to deal with their pain will, in the most natural way, make their own threshold rise as well. By the same token, to the extent that our threshold for another’s pain is too low, perhaps because we are unable to distinguish theirs from our own, their threshold for their own pain is likely to go down as well, and with it their own motivation for maturing.

The data deluge can distract physicians from focusing on their own healing power. This includes not only their overall objectivity and diagnostic astuteness but also their capacity to regulate their own anxiety with regard to both their patients’ and their attorney’s anxieties. How physicians manage their own anxiety can be a vital component in a patient’s recovery, and it often influences, and is influenced by, how much they rely on or pursue the unending amount of data that modern medical technology is prepared to offer.

The focus on empathy rather than responsibility has contributed to a major misorientation in our society about the nature of what is toxic to life itself and, therefore, the factors that go into survival.

On the one hand, there can be no question that the notion of feeling for others, caring for others, identifying with others, being responsive to others, and perhaps even sharing their pain exquisitely or excruciatingly is heartfelt, humanitarian, highly spiritual, and an essential component in a leader’s response repertoire. But it has rarely been my experience that being sensitive to others will enable those “others” to be more self-aware, that being more “under-standing” of others causes them to mature, or that appreciating the plight of others will make them more responsible for their being, their condition, or their destiny.

As understood today, empathy may be a luxury afforded only to those who do not have to make tough decisions. For “tough decisions” are decisions the consequence of which will be painful to others (although not harmful to others—an important distinction). The focus on “need fulfillment” that so often accompanies an emphasis on empathy leaves out the possibility that what another may really “need” (in order to become more responsible) is not to have their needs fulfilled.

I have found that parents are far better able to sustain a growth-producing attitude toward their children if, instead of seeking new answers and methods, it is the question that is reframed. Instead of trying to mobilize their empathy by showing them what child-rearing techniques will “benefit” their children, I have tried to challenge an immune (that is, self-defined) response in them by demonstrating how their children are viruses that are taking over their host, or even malignant cells that are destroying their “colony.” In order to adopt this perspective, however, parents must be able to concentrate on the preservation of their own integrity (again, an immune phenomenon) rather than on the effort to “mutate” their child.

empathy alone will never promote the self-organization necessary for learning from experience; that can only come about when they are told that if they want to be a part of the community, they have to adapt to it, and not the other way around. I recognize that this approach could sound dictatorial; the emphasis here, however, is not on conformity of thought but on conformity of behavior to the democratic process. It is in this sense that promoting in others the initiative to be accountable is far more critical to the health of an institution than trying to be understanding or insightful.

Moreover, it goes without saying that such institutions are almost never able, or willing, to integrate their experience in a way that enables them to develop a more enriched individuality. They might get larger, but they do not “grow.” Once again, like the undifferentiated mass of tumors, they do not evolve.

Pathogens do not have the power to create pathology on their own. There must also be a lack of self-regulation in the host. Oncogenesis does not always lead to cancer; not everyone gets sick because of what they breathe in from the surrounding air. The fact that some people seem to be untouched by a surrounding epidemic is not due to the fact that they were lucky enough not to “catch” a cold. In fact, it is well known that every human organism contains “opportunistic infections” that are kept in check by their own immune system. In other words, it is not merely the presence of the pathogen that causes pathology, but also the response of the organism that “hosts” it. Imagine that the cells of an organ receive an early warning signal that a rogue cancer cell is coming down the pike. Knowing that metastasis can only occur if the healthy cells allow the malignant cells to puncture their own membranes, they huddle together and agree it’s all for one and one for all; no one is to allow this thing in where it might metastasize into a colony of similarly lethal offspring. But after a while some of the cells at one end of the organ realize that the metastasis has begun. They look at the other cells, now dying, and say, “What’s the matter with you? What have you done? Why did you let it invade our space? We all agreed to keep that troublemaker out.” And the cells that let the cancer cell in say helplessly, “We were watching it swim all alone out there. It just seemed so lonely, and,...

Both those who have written about their survival and those who have researched the survivors consistently note a capacity to see beyond the barbed wire. Such vision obviously did not guarantee survival, but it does seem to have maximized the chances for it.

There are always three factors involved in survival, no matter how toxic the environment. One is the physical reality; the second is dumb luck; and the third is the response of the organism, which can often modify the influence of the first two. The relationship of these three factors can be imagined as dials on an amplifier, with survival depending on the overall mix. Whenever the first two dials—physical reality and dumb luck—are turned up to maximum volume, the third dial will not make any difference. That would be true in cases of being held under water, falling out of an airplane, exposure to radiation, and certain end-stage cases of terminal illness, although exceptions to the latter do exist.

If a leader who has sought help can be taught how to stay in touch with the reactive group without taking their issues so seriously that he or she is thrown off course, increased differentiation can become a form of leadership that, if sustained, often will result in the rest getting over what ails them. This can turn the pattern of adaptation toward the one who is becoming better differentiated, thus affecting the evolution of the entire “colony.”

Well-meaning efforts to eliminate the evils of selfishness by eliminating self can have as regressive an effect on a community as taking away self by force. Preserving community by eliminating self is as counterproductive as trying to prevent the scourge of fire by eliminating air. The “cloistered virtue” approach to life will support neither the growth of a society nor the development of the kind of leaders that a society requires in order to evolve.

It is only when leaders value self that they can recognize the importance of making their own self-definition more crucial than feeling for others. It is only when leaders value self that in times of crisis they can emphasize the response of the organism rather than the conditions of the environment.

How can it be good to be both self-sufficient and selfless, self-made and self-effacing, self-respectful and self-denying, self-possessed and self-sacrificing, self-assertive and self-renouncing? Actually, the word self has trouble retaining its self. It is far more likely to be fused into an adjective, as with the above lists, or a pronoun, as in himself, herself, or myself, But suppose we began to think of self as an entity that we possessed, like a book or a car? And then suppose we freed self from the possessive pronoun and began to write my self or her self or his self, as we might say my book or his car or her job?

This point is illustrated by the following tale. A woman found her husband to be passive and recalcitrant about every suggestion she made. Energetic herself, she wanted to have adventures and to meet people, but she wound up in constant conflict precisely because she made her functioning dependent on his. It was suggested to her that instead of trying to coerce her husband or allowing herself to be seduced into arguments about right/wrong or control, she should simply start making her own plans and invite him to join her if he wished, but go in her own direction when he did not. Trying to put this suggestion to work, she said to her husband, “They have invited us to dinner and I have decided to go.” Whereupon he responded, “Why do you force me to do things like this?” It was the inability of either one to differentiate and thus separate from the other that put her into a bind and made him respond as he did. In such a personal relationship, if the wife will take responsibility for herself, often the husband will begin to function in the marriage at a higher level. In fact, the well-differentiated partner will probably always have to be the one to take the initiative to enhance the functioning of the togetherness. Societal regression reinforces the dysfunction of the togetherness or immaturity. To be a leader, one must both have and embody a vision of where one wants to go. It is not a matter of knowing or believing one is right; it is a matter of taking the first step.

differentiation means the capacity to become oneself out of one’s self, with minimum reactivity to the positions or reactivity of others. Differentiation is charting one’s own way by means of one’s own internal guidance system, rather than perpetually eyeing the “scope” to see where others are. Differentiation refers more to a process than a goal that can ever be achieved. When people say, “I differentiated from my wife, my child, my parent,” that proves they do not understand the concept.

The Old World’s process of reorientation could never have come about if that civilization had not produced individuals who were willing to go first. These “captains courageous” were not necessarily brilliant, learned, or noble. Verrazano and Vespucci came from a high social class, and Columbus possessed one of the major libraries of his time. But for the most part what united those who went first was desire, the capacity to be decisive, and just plain “nerve” rather than knowledge of data or technique, despite the fact that such knowledge was also useful. Unlike the astronauts of our time, for example, the navigators of this period did not have the advantage of advanced probes. They had no way of staying in touch with their home port and could never be positive about their position while at sea.