Your Absence is Requested

The pursuit of a reimagined mode of leadership has, for decades, been suffocated by our global obsession with administrative hygiene. Since the mid-20th century, we have witnessed a stealthy abdication in which the messy, soulful arts of statesmanship and diplomacy were traded for the more sterile, mechanical surrogate of management. This wasn't just a cosmetic shift in organisational charts; it was a fundamental mutation of our collective consciousness. We allowed a managerial priesthood educated in the business schools and consulting firms to take the altar, using a flattened and banal lexicon of metrics and optimisation and mistaking the map for the territory. In doing so, we have been running yesterday's systems a little more efficiently each year, even as those self-same systems accelerate us toward the edge of a cliff. Your Absence is Required outlines the art of NOT FOLLOWING the leader. It examines how managerialism, the structure of the modern nation-state and the myths of the "Great Man" and "heroic leaders" have colonised our imagination to the exclusion of all else. We examine what it will take to install collective stewardship instead of leadership as a role played by individuals across a gamut of contexts from government and corporations to social movements.