Not a leader, not a follower: the new category: Communicator

The leader is beholden to lead. You're either at the top of the stairway, or going down. But the world as we know it as at the end of meaningful leadership. They no longer impress. Political leaders are as ordinary as thugs. Business leaders are stress managers rather than economic shapers. Religious leaders are, at best, persuaders, at worst, liars. Military leaders are authorized bandits, educational leaders process managers. The new official lieutenant to the leader is the executive coach, and this shaman is an expensive one because if the so-called leader buys into this, the money and the energy blend into a fascinating prostothetic. We believe each other, because we paid for the feeling. The coach paid a lot, the executive paid a lot, therefore it's valuable.

The staircase is a strange place: it offers perspective. When you are up you are up, and when you are down you are down, and when you're only half-way up, you're neither up nor down.

There's an even better one:
"As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wan't there.
He wasn't there again today,
oh, how I wish he'd go away".

The language of leadership assumes the position. Increasingly, the language fails. The money is still there, but the communication isn't.

I suggest a new category: not the leader, not the follower but the communicator. Not the executive, not the worker: the communicator.

Each step. Not the top, not the bottom, but the connection, the synapse, the transmitter, the avenue of accelerated efficacy of purpose related to the business at hand. The team, the whole, the movement, the meaning, and each part thereof.

The body itself is such an example. It all works, but often the leader is absent by default. The body cannot lead itself for itself: it is part of an ecology. We're going downstairs to open the door, maybe we're going upstairs to the toilet. But we, the decision itself, are going. We're communicating the purpose as one, nothing left out.

The new paradigm bypasses the union's legalism, the leader's proficiency. The communicator has arrived, but has no awareness, because the play of the communicator's language is yet emerging. The leader is authoritative, the follower deferential. The communicator knows the silliness of this differential, but as yet lacks the platform to have an authority of language because the platform is one of play, not of establishment. The leader-provocateur or the follower-provocateur is the closest shadow  of the proper communicator.

Few leaders dare to play, when there's much at stake. But living itself, is a stance, a stare, an attitude, a gamble, a game, a one-life stand.

There's much to be communicated, and few who know how. The Story Clinic is one avenue. Not one story exists until it's enacted by communicators.