Larry D. Lauer

I was planning to offer a new course on the communication dimensions of leadership and wanted to add material on why understanding the impact of media revolutions was especially important today for anyone who aspires to lead. Conveniently, I came upon a brilliant new book on leadership by General Martin Dempsey and Ori Brafman titled, Radical Inclusion, and it happened to contain some compelling new ideas about media.

The media topic is important for leaders for many reasons. The digital revolution is creating a bewildering world of clutter and confusion. Sending out more information is usually only adding to the clutter. Debates today are polarizing more than educating. Television is expanding the leadership advantage of celebrity and entertaining. Repeating lies over and over again is making them sound true. Misusing words is causing them to lose their meaning. Crude language and personal attacks are becoming widely acceptable. And the realization that top experts disagree on most everything is causing average Americans to throw up their hands in confusion.

And just as I was ready to teach my fully revised seminar, the Trump campaign appeared… and the impact of 24/7 news and social media suddenly became much more intense.

Studying the Trump campaign and first year of his presidency was a total immersion in chaos and turmoil. But it helped me see with even more clarity that this digital media revolution is actually creating a new and powerful media “ecosystem,” a system with interacting and interconnecting facts and fictions capable of producing permanent clutter and confusion. As a result the world will never be the same. Leading will be forever changed, And the Dempsey and Brafman book arrived just in time to add very relevant new media insights.

The daily deluge of digital news and social media is actually forming what the Radical Inclusion authors call a permanent  “digital echo,” a state of clutter and confusion that always will be hanging over us. The implications of this for leaders are enormous. “Ways forward” will never again be based on perceived certain truths. That’s because in this digital world there are no reliable truths. As a result, leading may now require imagining and acting out compelling “narratives” more than preparing detailed position papers.

In other words, instead of writing big data-driven strategic plans, to be really effective today aspiring leaders may now need to chart out exciting storyboards and recruit the most talented supporting characters they can find to help tell their stories and act out their dramatic narratives. It’s no longer quiet time in the library. Now, it’s quiet on the set!