Climate change and the end of cheap oil mean old certainties are gone and societies need a new type of leader, wrties Tony Kinsella.
OUR BRAINS don't work in words. Words are terms we learn, in all our different languages, to try and describe much broader sensory pulses. Memories, as Proust illustrated with his famous madeleines, can involve taste, smell, touch, sound and images, which we then struggle to describe in words.
Words develop and evolve to express ideas, concepts and descriptions we find necessary to organise our lives, our relationships and our world. Management and leadership are two such terms, and our differing uses of them speak volumes about the challenges we face.
The word management comes to us from the Latin "manus" or hand. The origin suggests the concept of management as a hands-on exercise primarily concerned with the optimum operation of a current reality.
The word leadership has chillier roots, either the Old Norse or the Old English verb "lithan", meaning to go or travel, and thus the function of being led on that voyage.
Management primarily concerns itself today with, in the best of cases, an occasional glance at the morrow. Leadership essentially focuses on where it would be good to arrive next week. In leadership terms, the main relevance of knowing where we are today is to define the point of departure.
Like most theoretical distinctions, this becomes a little blurred in the real world. Good managers need a sense of where they are heading for, while truly successful leaders benefit from a sense of organisation. In times of relative calm and continuity, management skills are the more highly prized. When things are going along quite nicely, we look for people who can keep the systems ticking over and, in the best of cases, make minor improvements along the way.
When the going gets a little rougher and above all when things which just yesterday seemed fixed and permanent suddenly start to seem fragile and transient, we seek out leaders, people who can suggest a coherent direction in which to travel and inspire a modicum of confidence that we might actually one day arrive.
This holds true across all human organisations from families, through companies, armies and right up to the nation state and beyond.
Successful peacetime officers are often promoted because of their administrative talents. If all the guns are correctly stacked and polished for inspection, the commander gets a brownie point - even if they no longer work.
Wartime success often calls for rule books to be ignored, for solutions to be found quickly, and the paperwork left for later. Abraham Lincoln famously lashed out at his over-cautious ex-peacetime generals at the beginning of the US Civil War for "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory".
We are emerging from what has been in historical terms one of the longest periods of relative calm our species has ever known. One during which major shifts in geopolitical realities and major scientific, technological and economic transformations have certainly occurred, but rarely caused more than ripples on the surface.
The Depression of the 1930s and the second World War helped create an enormously stable political consensus across the developed world and beyond. The social market economy, or states where democratic governments sought to regulate and balance economies based on free enterprise, became the norm.
The death of Josef Stalin in 1953 is probably the point at which the possibility of the Cold War becoming a hot one began to recede. Colonial empires, a form of political organisation which had endured for millennia, disappeared in just two decades, 1945-1965.
Universal air travel, television, contraception allowing women to control their fertility, the arrival of personal computers, the internet and mobile telephony are among the dramatic shifts which marked, but never threatened, this period of stability.
Our early steps into space offered us the first-ever pictures of our blue and white planet, profoundly transforming human consciousness from the parochial to the global, and yet our systems kept ticking over.
Through all this tumult, the relatively comfortable managerial political consensus not only survived in Europe and the developed world, it actually spread to most of the planet.
The managerial consensus was so solid that those who tried to place dramatic challenges on the global agenda, from climate change to an agricultural crisis or the inevitable end of cheap oil, were politely listened to but largely ignored.
Two centuries of ever-cheaper, consequence-free, fossil energy now lie behind us. We understand that our climate is in full mutation, and as the Mississippi drowns US maize and soya crops, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that food and fuel prices are going to continue rising.
Suddenly, and with extraordinary speed, that decades-old political/managerial consensus lies shattered in the face of multiple universal challenges. Managers are no longer quite good enough. We now look for leaders.
Hillary Clinton's campaign was an early casualty. She was an unbeatable managerial candidate with a magisterial command of issues and detail. Barack Obama won by offering the opposite, leadership not management.
In the blink-of-an-eye change, Gordon Brown's insistence on UK ratification of Lisbon demonstrated a rarely seen leadership steel. David Cameron's more attractive management appeal may no longer be quite enough.
You have to feel a little sorry for Brian Cowen, the perfect managerial "safe pair of hands" successor. His first challenge was a referendum on a particularly unexciting European treaty which would have sailed through on a managerial debate.
The calm managerial Yes campaign was completely outmanoeuvred by the passionate negative "We don't want to go there" cries from the No side.
We are in a new global political ball game where we can just about grasp the size of the pitch. Only those political forces capable of adapting will survive, which only adds to all our uncertainties.