Leadership dreaming

The inspiration for this piece arose with the first Spirituality, Leadership and Management Conference held at the University of Western Sydney in 1999. Having migrated from South Africa five years earlier, I had grown up through the terrible years of apartheid and left just as Mandela was inaugurated as President. With the recent passing of Mandela and the growing understanding of how sharply and remarkably he manifested the overlays of spirituality, leadership and management, it seems apt to use this piece to consider how leadership and management can be imbued with spirituality in a living and embodied way. Leadership Dreaming works with ideas about leadership in an imaginal and psychological way. Like a process of dwelling in the phenomenon, I have attempted to break from analysis of the phenomenon towards an exploration where meaning is found or created. I have tried to use imagination and reverie to bring an aesthetic sensibility to the phenomenon. "Imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality; rather it is the faculty of forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality"(Bachelard 1987, p.15). Bachelard says that reverie enlarges our lives by letting in that which is usually hidden. I have therefore stepped out of a utilitarian consciousness to be drawn into the phenomenon in order to explore it as a witness rather than a critic.