True leadership is intertwined with exceptional circumstances. It reveals itself for better or worse whenever there is change, hardship, adversity—even crisis. These circumstances occur no more regularly within the sea services than elsewhere, but often the consequences are more severe, many times quite literally life or death. Consider the young lieutenant who, during a major operation to capture enemy leadership, finds himself in a dark and byzantine network of tunnels. He is in a foreign land, thoroughly within enemy territory and rapidly losing contact with his platoon, many members of which are likely already wounded or dead. He could remain outside the tunnels, biding his time to quarterback a plan of assault or extract, or he could enter the labyrinth to keep faith with his platoon and try to inspire confidence in an increasingly desperate situation:
Nothing was in sight down that hole … Cunha pointed out the direction the second section had gone. It had been seven minutes and forty seconds since the platoon sergeant had gone down, slightly over seven since Brumby had gone after him. I peered into the darkness, gulped and swallowed my stomach. ‘Sergeant, take charge of your section,’ I said, trying to make it sound cheerful …
‘Orders, sir?’”[1]
While some of us may have faced similar decisions, many of us are more familiar with less dire situations. If leadership is the domain of exceptional and trying circumstances, how can it be developed when such circumstances may be few and far between? As you read that vignette, you surely reconstructed it within your mind’s eye, probably even forming a judgment as to the next action the lieutenant should take. Such is the power of narrative to provide leadership context and training, even when actual experiential training is unavailable. Of course, this is no secret to the sea services. The Marine Corps has sought to supplement leadership training through reading even before General Alfred Gray’s 1987 introduction of the Commandant’s Reading List to encourage pursuit of the proverbial “5,000-year-old mind.”[2] Similarly, the Navy has a Professional Reading Program, and the Coast Guard has a Commandant’s Reading List.
Yet these lists, and many aspiring sea service leaders, tend to focus developmental leadership reading on historical texts or analyses, at worst eschewing fiction as distraction or at best considering it mere entertainment. It can be those things, but it also has a more powerful function. Stories are reflections of our society’s values. All good stories make you revisit assumptions to see things a bit differently. Reading fiction can improve leadership skills as it helps develop creativity and moral imagination, supplements and reinforces experiential training, and improves communication skills. Fiction can help you think about and prepare for exceptional circumstances before they manifest.
Leadership is highly contextual and requires imagination for its effective application in new scenarios. Recognizing analogs and perceiving likely outcomes can be improved by historical study, but developing innovative ways to address leadership challenges requires creativity. The best leaders are creative because they not only thoroughly understand problems, but they can also imagine innovative ways to address those problems and envision change. Most importantly, they can translate those ideas into tangible actions while conveying them to others. Such creativity is as much a skill as a trait, and it can be improved accordingly.
There is both anecdotal and scientific evidence that reading fiction stimulates creativity.[3] In reading a story, you mentally populate its world with projections from your past experiences. The benefit is that you now combine those past elements in entirely new ways without any predefined arc. Rather than already knowing the outcome of a historical event and perhaps learning why a figure did or did not take an action, fiction allows you the freedom to explore how you might react to the situation. It develops your creativity by forcing you to assess how the story’s characters are handling conflict, without the aid of hindsight found in historical case studies. Usually, there is no means by which you can judge this assessment; the story keeps moving in the author’s chosen direction. There is evidence that reading fiction increases your comfort with ambiguity.[4] Fiction allows you to react to stories in ways of your own choosing, just as leadership does. There is no singularly correct interpretation of fiction, nor is there ever a singularly correct leadership decision.
Of course, leadership is not just about imagining new ways to achieve objectives, or even the ability to share that vision with others and execute it. It is also about acting in accordance with your values and those of your organizations consistently enough that they become your character. Ethics form the foundation upon which leadership is built. If the pursued objectives or the methods of attaining them are inherently unethical, one has not led, but rather manipulated. They may persuade, but their influence is morally bankrupt. I have heard this line or variations thereof routinely throughout my time in the Corps: “Absent integrity, a leader has no moral authority to lead Marines.”[5]
Fiction may help improve leadership by developing moral imagination. Moral imagination is consideration. It is the ability to project the implications of actions beyond their usual scope while incorporating empathy. [6] It is considering second and third order effects of actions and feeling some sense of ownership for those effects. If we concede that stories can develop in unforeseen ways, then in those stories we are exposed to consequences we may not have seen coming. This leads to new ways of considering the effects of our actions, which expands our moral imagination. In this way, fiction can help us become better ethical decision makers, an absolute prerequisite for true leadership.
Any compelling story, historical or otherwise, features conflict. The protagonist typically must overcome or somehow resolve this conflict, be it externally as in the case of an enemy force, or internally as in the case of an ethical dilemma. In reacting to and analyzing this conflict, you partially codify a response to it. In some respects, it is as if you have experienced the situation and gleaned lessons from it yourself. We typically react more emotionally to a compelling narrative, which leaves a lasting impact. You are free to reject or accept behaviors in the story and consider how you may have reacted differently. In doing so, you subconsciously prepare for analogous situations and further refine your leadership style and philosophy. Third-person preparation is no substitute for actual experiential leadership. But reading fiction to simulate an almost endless array of leadership challenges or ethical issues that might not otherwise be experienced is surely better than dismissing the thought exercise altogether. Leadership has always been and always will be a hands-on social phenomenon with experience as its greatest teacher. Reading is one way to augment that experience and reinforce or reject assumptions about leadership. As retired General James Mattis remarked, “It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.”[7]7
In the modern environment of instant information and perhaps an overreliance on technical solutions, it is tempting to ascribe a scientific quality to everything, including leadership. We know that leadership, like war, is both an art and a science. Leaders in the sea services must remain capable of the scientific aspects of leadership, but also a great deal more. Using fiction to think about leadership, we can refine the artistic aspect by honing our recognition of “the essence of a given problem and the creative ability to devise a practical solution.”[8]
As to the young lieutenant peering into the dark tunnel wondering what to do next, he ultimately took action. While his decision was to enter the fictitious alien tunnel network, the main character of Starship Troopers (which appears on the USMC Commandant’s Reading List) probably at least forced you to consider what an appropriate action might be and why. Even if only subconsciously, your leadership might just be a bit better for the thought experiment.
Endnotes
[1] Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (New York: Putnam, 1959).
[2] Michael W. Hagee, “Marine Corps Professional Reading Program,” ALMARS
007/05, Headquarters USMC, Washington, D.C., 8 February 2005.
[3] Gregory S. Berns et al., “Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on
Connectivity in the Brain,” Brain Connectivity 3.6 (2013): 590-600.
[4] Tom Jacobs, “Want to Learn How to Think? Read Fiction,” Pacific Standard,
12 June 2013.
[5] USMC Martial Arts Center of Excellence, One Mind, Any Weapon: Black
Belt (Quantico: Marine Corps Combat Development Command, 2004).
[6] Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for
Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[7] James Mattis, as quoted in Jill R. Russell’s “With rifle and bibliography:
General Mattis on professional reading,” Strife, 7 May 2013.
[8] Headquarters USMC, MCDP 1, Warfighting (Washington, D.C., 20 June
1997), 86.
