By – Dr Srabani Basu
Associate Professor, Department of Literature and Languages ,SRM University AP, Amaravati.
Leadership literature has given us transformational leaders, transactional leaders, servant leaders, situational leaders, authentic leaders, agile leaders and, presumably, somewhere in an unpublished Harvard case study, a leader who has actually finished reading all the books on leadership. Yet despite this impressive intellectual furniture, workplaces continue to produce meetings that could have been emails, emails that require meetings to explain them, and strategic plans whose chief strategy is surviving until the next strategic plan. Perhaps we have been looking for leadership wisdom in the wrong places. Perhaps we need to leave the boardroom, crawl through a rabbit hole, ignore the White Rabbit shouting about quarterly deadlines and sit down at a tea table with the Mad Hatter. Because beneath the hat, the riddles and the spectacular disregard for conventional sanity lies a leadership philosophy surprisingly suited to an age in which change arrives before the PowerPoint explaining it.
The first thing leaders can learn from the Hatter is that sanity is sometimes merely consensus with good public relations. Organisations adore consensus. If ten people agree that an idea will not work, it is usually declared impossible. If eleven agree, a committee is formed to document its impossibility. The Hatter would be suspicious. He understands instinctively that widespread agreement does not automatically convert an assumption into truth. Leaders desperately need this capacity. Every industry has sentences embalmed by repetition: ‘That’s how we’ve always done it.’ ‘Our customers won’t accept that.’ ‘Management will never approve it.’ ‘It isn’t practical.’ These statements often arrive wearing the solemn expression of wisdom when they are actually assumptions that have managed to survive several appraisal cycles. A Hatter-like leader lifts them delicately, sniffs them and asks, ‘Why?’ This immediately causes organisational discomfort, which is often the first symptom of thinking.
The Hatter also teaches us the importance of asking questions that refuse to behave themselves. Sensible questions are useful when the world is sensible. Unfortunately, the world appears to have resigned from that position. A conventional leader asks, ‘How can we improve productivity by ten per cent?’ The Hatter asks, ‘Why are we doing this at all?’ One improves the machine. The other checks whether the machine should be manufacturing inflatable turnips. Organisations often become extremely efficient at doing things nobody needs because questioning the fundamental purpose would interfere with the annual report. The Hatter’s gift is not that he always has the right answer. It is that he makes the existing answer nervous.
Then there is his relationship with time, which should be compulsory study material for anyone who has ever scheduled a three-hour meeting titled ‘Optimising Efficiency’. Wonderland’s relationship with Time is complicated, but perhaps that is precisely the lesson. Modern leadership worships the clock. Calendars are packed so tightly that breathing occasionally requires prior approval. Leaders race from meeting to meeting discussing innovation while having absolutely no time to think. Someone proposes a ‘brainstorming session’ between 3:15 and 3:35, because apparently imagination now operates by appointment. The Hatter would regard this as evidence that civilisation has gone badly wrong. Creativity requires stretches of apparently unproductive time: staring, wandering, wondering, doodling and asking why ravens resemble writing desks. The leader who cannot tolerate an employee occasionally looking out of a window may eventually discover that the employee looking out of the window was the only person looking far enough ahead.
Another Hatter lesson concerns hierarchy. At the tea table, nobody seems particularly impressed by titles. There is no Executive Vice President of Tea Consumption. No Senior Associate Dormouse. No Chief Biscuit Officer announcing that biscuits will henceforth be aligned with organisational values. People occupy space because they are there, not because their designation requires three lines on a visiting card. Leadership could use some of this irreverence. Hierarchy is useful for accountability, but dangerous when it becomes a substitute for intelligence. The person with the highest salary does not automatically possess the highest-quality idea. Sometimes the intern sees what the CEO cannot because the intern has not yet attended enough meetings to become blind.
The Hatter would also insist that leaders recover their muchness. Somewhere between induction and retirement, many professionals undergo a mysterious shrinking. They enter organisations curious, eccentric, imaginative and opinionated. Then come policies, protocols, performance metrics, competency matrices and seventeen mandatory webinars on ‘Thinking Outside the Box’, all of which must be completed inside the box before Friday. Gradually people learn which questions not to ask, which ideas not to suggest and which parts of themselves are considered insufficiently corporate. Eventually they become wonderfully employable and almost completely unrecognisable. Leadership should reverse this process. The best leaders do not manufacture obedient replicas of themselves. They create enough psychological space for people to become more distinctly themselves.
This requires another profoundly Hatterish quality: comfort with ambiguity. Many leaders believe their job is to know. Therefore, when they do not know, they occasionally perform the ancient executive ritual known as Pretending To Know While Looking At A Graph. This usually involves phrases such as ‘going forward’, ‘leveraging synergies’, ‘strategic alignment’ and ‘value creation’, after which everyone nods because admitting confusion would extend the meeting. The Hatter offers an alternative: bewilderment without embarrassment. ‘I don’t know’ is not a leadership failure. Sometimes it is the doorway to discovery. A leader who can say, ‘I don’t know; what do you think?’ suddenly releases intelligence that hierarchy has been sitting on.
The Hatter is equally valuable as a teacher of constructive disruption. Innovation departments often announce that they want disruptive ideas and then become deeply distressed when somebody disrupts something. What they usually mean is: ‘Please innovate, but ensure the innovation resembles everything we already do, fits the existing budget, offends nobody, requires no behavioural change and can be demonstrated on PowerPoint.’ This is not disruption. This is rearranging the cucumber sandwiches. Genuine innovation creates temporary disorder because something must stop making sense before something new can begin making sense. Leaders who demand innovation while punishing uncertainty are essentially shouting, ‘Be spontaneous!’ through a compliance manual.
There is also something wonderfully instructive about the Hatter’s playfulness. Corporate life often mistakes seriousness for competence. The more important the meeting, the more everyone attempts to resemble portraits of deceased accountants. Humour becomes suspicious. Laughter must be postponed until the annual retreat, where employees are officially instructed to ‘have fun’ between 4:30 and 5:15. Yet play is not the enemy of serious work. Play loosens cognitive rigidity. Humour changes perspective. Absurdity allows us to examine assumptions without immediately defending them. A leader capable of laughing at themselves performs a small organisational miracle: they make power less frightening. And when power becomes less frightening, truth travels upward faster.
The Hatter would therefore be deeply suspicious of leaders surrounded entirely by people who agree with them. If every person in the room thinks the leader is brilliant, one of two things has happened: either humanity has finally produced perfection, or someone has tampered with the recruitment process. Good leadership needs dissent. It needs a Cheshire Cat appearing unexpectedly to point out that the strategy has no body attached to it. It needs an Alice asking inconveniently reasonable questions. It may even need a Dormouse waking briefly to say something devastating before returning to sleep. Leaders do not need followers who echo. They need people who add notes the leader cannot sing.
Most importantly, the Hatter teaches leaders that being unconventional is not the same as being irresponsible. Madness, in the Wonderland sense, is not incompetence. It is freedom from the tyranny of the obvious. It is the willingness to tilt the familiar object until a hidden side becomes visible. The Hatter does not ask us to abandon reason. He asks us to notice when reason has quietly become rigidity. There is an enormous difference between having a structure and becoming imprisoned by it. The finest leaders know the rules, understand why the rules exist and occasionally recognise the precise moment when the rules need to be invited to tea and questioned rather severely.
Perhaps leadership, then, needs fewer heroic poses and more Hatterish curiosity. Fewer declarations and more questions. Fewer people desperately protecting their authority and more people secure enough to laugh at it. Fewer innovation committees and more intellectual mischief. Fewer calendars bursting with activity and more spaces where thought is allowed to wander without producing a measurable KPI before lunch.
So perhaps the next leadership development programme should abandon the ballroom, cancel the seventeen-slide presentation on ‘Driving Excellence’ and place a teapot in the middle of the room. Around it we shall seat the CEO, the intern, the rebel, the sceptic, the dreamer, the employee who keeps asking ‘why’, and one thoroughly unimpressed cat.
The Hatter will chair the meeting.
There will be no agenda.
Someone from Administration will object.
Excellent.
We have already begun.
