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I take issue with whatever I take issue with today

Musings on words

I take issue with the word “servant leader”. Just the word, not necessarily the concept. Although I have to admit, I don’t really know what that concept is supposed to mean. I hear the term thrown around, and it did not make sense to me, so I looked it up before ranting about it. That did not help. I am slightly more disoriented now. Let me explain.

When we use words, we usually reference. Unless they are direct expressions of affect - like “Dang it!” - words help conjure up an image as similar as possible to our own in the minds of others. That applies to descriptions, but it’s not not true for imperatives. “Go”, as we all know when dealing with pets, requires a related inner image of the action implied. Declarations, in the sense of acts of meaning to a system, require even stronger references. “I declare you king” only relates to the intended meaning in a complicated, specific set of circumstances. You can only “declare” your taxes in a tightly controlled frame of reference.

This is easy, in the case of words like “chair” or “ear”. Less so when it comes to more complex terms, like, well, “servant” or “leader”. The types of situations you need to experience to make sense of them are quite large. You need to know a whole set of behaviours …

“he ran into that issue”

So, the descriptive term “servant leader” runs into a logic issue with me. The term “servant” implies a category related to something served. It implies the lack of will, for lack of a better word, in the servant. The identity of a servant centers around what is served. “Leader” on the other hand is a much broader term. As is painfully obvious in the tons of literature about leadership, that term can imply different ways of organization - and places within said organizations. As the word “servant” is used though, I default mentally to the hierarchical type of system.

I get confused even trying to describe my confusion. To put it simply, a leader gives orders, a servant receives them - that’s the basic categories I have in my mind.

Everything else requires me to start thinking, and that doesn’t make for good descriptions. So - what am I supposed to do now?

Apparently, that confusion might be partly intended. Looking up the concept briefly, I suspect the conundrum might be intentional - to make people stop and think: “Part of the problem is that serve and lead are overused words with negative connotations. But they are also good words and I can find no others that carry as well the meaning I would like to convey.” (Greenleaf 1973)

But I see something else. I see someone grappling with coming to terms with, literally in this case, a vague sensation of something that has no place in their world. They want to describe something that has aspects of one concept and aspects of the other, but is kind of neither and a bit of both, I would assume. However, that tactic requires a lot of effort on part of the listener. You need to figure out what is implied and what is not, and that is prone to errors.

It’s a bit like saying “childless grandmother”. A grandmother is defined by having been a mother first. If you only ever saw women in power though as being grandmothers, that kind of term could happen to you when you see a female CEO. To someone from a culture where the highest achievable rank for a woman is grandmother, the meaning would be obvious. Basically, you’d be saying “honorary professor” and the case could be closed. In modern western culture though, that just doesn’t make any sense. The status of the matriarch to a tribe as occupied by many grandmothers elsewhere, just isn’t a thing any more. You’d wonder why someone would go through the mental gymnastics for defining a simple thing: CEO while happening to be female.

And that’s where my issue lies. If someone requires those mental gymnastics, it’s because they are trying to define an exception to a rule without changing the system of reference. It sounds to me like the concept of “honorary professor”: You want to bestow certain aspects of a role upon someone without going through the work. That would be, and hence the comparison, like saying “I just want some of the perks of becoming a grandmother, not put in the necessary work first or have all the rest of the obligations associated with it”.

I sometimes dream

I live and work in agile teams. It’s my dream job. When I look at my calendar though, I don’t always want to be that agile. When the next big thing hits, making months of work irrelevant; when I don’t have a timeline that stretches further than the next two weeks, I sometimes dream of working in a waterfall model environment.

If you follow your North Star, you’re doing it wrong

In companies, there’s sometimes a mention of the “north star”. A north star metric, for instance, or a group of designers talking about a guiding principle. However, come to think of it, I’ve only ever seen it used slightly, well, wrong. Off, probably. As a metaphor, the word refers to the practice of wayfinding. The north star is always north, so navigators can use it to orient themselves. The phrase I heard, in those ominous meetings, was “something you move towards yet you’ll never reach”. A stretch goal, really, or an ideal, or perhaps a vision. That’s not a north star. If you actually follow a north star, in the practice of wayfinding, it gets really cold. Why would you always m ove north? You just want to know where north is, to find out where you’re going or where you are.

Musings on words

I take issue with the word “servant leader”. Just the word, not necessarily the concept. Although I have to admit, I don’t really know what that concept is supposed to mean. I hear the term thrown around, and it did not make sense to me, so I looked it up before ranting about it. That did not help. I am slightly more disoriented now. Let me explain.

When we use words, we usually reference. Unless they are direct expressions of affect - like “Dang it!” - words help conjure up an image as similar as possible to our own in the minds of others. That applies to descriptions, but it’s not not true for imperatives. “Go”, as we all know when dealing with pets, requires a related inner image of the action implied. Declarations, in the sense of acts of meaning to a system, require even stronger references. “I declare you king” only relates to the intended meaning in a complicated, specific set of circumstances. You can only “declare” your taxes in a tightly controlled frame of reference.

This is easy, in the case of words like “chair” or “ear”. Less so when it comes to more complex terms, like, well, “servant” or “leader”. The types of situations you need to experience to make sense of them are quite large. You need to know a whole set of behaviours …