Statesman or Leader? By © Copyright 2009 Andres Agostini (Andy)

Everything has become so very complicated these days. Complexity, if the leader is to be truly successful and sustainably successful in increasingly amorphous, re-adaptable, uncharted waters, he must understand complexity multidimensionally.  Identifying this fact and verifying its increasingly complex nature, take us to great depth and breadth of reflection. For a long while, all-walks-of life people has made some inappropriate jokes on, “…you don’t need a rocket scientists to do that…” Sometimes you do need a prominent scientist handy. Some other times you do need to operate on the breakthrough by such prominent scientist.

You explain how to make a pencil plainly – and in the process – you will miss a whole body of numerical and narrative data. But if you listen up to two manufacturing scientists to speak about the creation of a single and plain pencil, you’ll immediately realize that the great majority of even learned people have taken for granted, for decades, a number of flaw assumptions. Clearly, this is fact but this also a metaphor.

The pencil metaphor applies to any endeavor in life as it is brought about by the marshaling-in-the-entrenched-fields leaders. As people “satirize” the rocket scientists pejoratively, in general people oppose to those who – as per these current times – are against the simple conception (and linearity) of so-called “common sense.” Getting back for a second to rocket scientists, through NASA and for the totality of fields of knowledge, they opened up so many windows of opportunity to accessing to leading knowledge. How?

NASA’s scientists, leading some 400 different contractors for the Apollo Program, conceived and instilled to the Shakespearean lingua franca 20,000 new terms, new terms of universal usage by prominent thought leaders. Shakespeare, at his time, endowed the fascinating and sophisticated English language with 10,000 new words. Both efforts are highly appreciated by those who are always challenging Cambrian “common sense.” Who would dare to satirize the Apollo Program and its zillion of by-products and by-services, remembering that a “product” is a service waiting to happen?

I am a strong believer of perpetual education, perennial mind-shaping, eternal global sophistication, as well as extremely instituted preparation way before undertaking any responsibility. In preparing – having done your prior homework by thinking unthinkably – it is absolutely crucial to have a bold and broad contingency planning not for the sake of theory but for the sake of pragmatic and accelerated resolution of problems. “Theory” has been caricaturized heavily by some alleged leaders. Einstein, on the subject matter, reminds us: “I do not know of anything more practical than theory.”

A prominent Danish physicist, Dr. Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962), offered some words of wisdom to countermeasure the ridicule validity of “common sense.” His actual words were “One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.” No more are these the times of Thomas Paine.

I need to add something important to the great intellect of Dr. Bohrs’ quotation. There are two additional dimensions of “truth” very much in use these days. One is the “adversarial truth” that is sentenced by a judge. The other – extremely important to me and without undermining the crucial value of due process jurisprudence – is the “scientific truth,” chiefly that as per the applied omniscience. Since in science the insidious “over- politicization” does not make an entrance, depth is much more profound and much less subjective.