Don Dunoon

This article frames leadership as emphasizing in-the-moment interventions, whether by formal leaders or others, toward building shared understandings to enable change with contentious—messy—problems. This is a departure from established approaches that tend to be grounded in concerns about who exercises leadership and the relationships between the actors, whether in conventional leader-follower configurations or more contemporary variants. Drawing on 30 years of research by one of us (Langer) into mindfulness – not of the meditation kind – in a variety of settings, the article not only considers leadership action in making headway on contentious problems but also reassesses the subject of leadership itself.

Some back story about the article: Ellen Langer’s work, particularly through her 1989 book, Mindfulness, has been a major influence on my thinking about leadership. I visited Langer at Harvard in 2010 and as an outcome of that visit we decided to write an article together. This piece is the result of that collaboration.