#sunshinemoot

Scoping this talk was hard. There are so many fantastic leaders in the books, shows, and movies I love. I knew from previous experience that I needed to keep the focus narrow to avoid the inevitable sprawl that ultimately results in unfinished works or hectic deletions at the end to fit within allocated time limits. It was a bit easier because I went into this one planning to write a series of talks on leadership, with this one just being the first instance. 

I went with Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard because they are the heroes I grew up with and after whose example I patterned my own leadership style. They come from different story genres (superheroes, fantasy, and science fiction) told in disparate formats (comics, novel, television) which allows us to look at leadership from a few different perspectives. They are skilled leaders and fascinating characters in their own right. I’m not saying my three are the best fictional leaders, just that they resonate deeply with me. 

I realize that they are not a demographically diverse set. This isn’t a problem in itself, but I wanted to acknowledge that reality. Pictured on the left are just a few of the leaders I hope to study in future installments. 

It’s always hard to tell how a presentation is being received in the room when presenting via Zoom but judging by the discussion in the following Q&A portion it seemed like it went over well. The crowd really seemed to respond both to the selected examples (Rogers, Aragorn, and Picard) and to the idea of looking at leaders in the light of their failure moments. This was really a result of my rejecting the notion of a “fatal flaw”. Whether they are historical or fictional, realistic characters seem to me to be more nuanced than that, but everyone experiences failure so I thought that would be a more relatable approach to the prompt. 

Some interesting questions were raised by the audience about an apparent period of dormancy between failure and recovery. I didn’t think of it in the moment, but this actually resonates with one of the ideas in an earlier paper on Disappointing Dualism which Kerra and I presented in our first moot back in 2020 where was observed that recovering heroes seemed to move through a period of solitude and reflection between a fall from grace and a return to active goodness. This question has me thinking and may spawn a future line of research. 

Failed Mythical Leaders

It has been said that good leaders are a force multiplier and that truly great leaders embody the highest virtues, bringing out the best in their people. But no one is perfect, and that is equally true of leaders, whether historical or imagined. Many heroes of myth are described as having a fatal flaw alongside their more admirable qualities, a not-so-hidden vice which holds them back or even leads to their tragic downfall. 

But real people (whether historical or invented) are less cartoonish than that. Real heroes like real people have a variety of strengths and weaknesses, and at times they fall short of the mark. They might even experience failures so significant that their peers and followers (or even they themselves) might question their fitness to command.

This talk will explore how great leaders in speculative fiction stories react to failure and how they recover afterwards. We will explore the leadership qualities of Jean Luc Picard, Steve Rogers, and Aragorn son of Arathorn, fit their behavior to modern leadership models, and discover if we can learn anything from their response to failure which might enhance our own personal resilience. It may be that they, and even we, might be stronger for the experience.

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