Why Moana is an exemplar of paradoxical leadership
What leaders can learn about navigating coincident opposites through the mariner-leader
First of all, I’m going to name a few things: I just changed the name of this blog from “Learning Discourse” to “Leading Dialogue.” I’ve done a lot of reflecting and learning (is there a difference?) since I started this thing maybe a year or so ago, and the further I get into the dissertation process the less I’m drawn to the “discourse” label and the more I’m drawn to the “dialogue” tag. Not to throw shade on “discourse”—I think it has its import; and maybe I started there with a lead from the “teacher collaborative discourse” literature. I may critique that terminology at some point—maybe not.
Second, I know I haven’t blogged in a long time! It’s a goal for me this new year to blog more, and to reconsider what I’m spending my time and personality doing and leveraging. Not satisfied with those words either, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Now to the stuff of this post:
I’m really into paradox. Maybe it’s some years of delving into spirituality and mysticism; probably it’s a lot of my personality that I’m still processing. The yin and yang speaks to me, even in a Manichaean sense. Another way to name it is “coincident opposites” which is a term I believe I gleaned from William Chittick years ago in his Rumi scholarship. For example, what’s the sense of winning without losing, loss without gain, mercy without wrath, positive without negative, etc. Even—in a dialogic sense—what’s the sense of consensus without dissent? Perhaps this is why I’m drawn to concept like allosensus.
The yin and yang as a philosophical concept describes somewhat this reality of coincident opposites: the seed of one side of the dichotomy sits within the other side, so to speak. The winning is born of the losing, might be a poetic way to say this. Or, the dissent is born of the consent—whatever wild interpretation that oblique statement may provide.
Moana is probably my favorite recent Disney movie in my now-parenting experience of films. First of all, the music is totally awesome, there’s some excellent humor, and the two little girlies that share our home also appreciate it; so I’ve seen it plenty times. In one of those recent reviewings the thought crossed my mind that Moana is an example of a paradoxical leader. Let’s look a little at the plot to illustrate the point.
At the beginning of the film, Moana is a child of the leadership of her island. Her father had a terrible experience trying to leave the island, and so is invested in his child not leaving. Part of this is the sorta-selfish, but understandable, impulse to protect one’s child. His point of view, and I believe one of the key songs toward the beginning of the film, is that “all you need” is on the island itself—so why go out there into the sea to find something else?
Yet, Moana is drawn to navigate (quite literally) past the horizon of her father’s (dis)comfort, and ends up leaving the island much to her parents’ dismay. Herein lies the paradox—but let me describe a bit of this theory of paradox that has provoked some of my thinking here.
Wendy Smith and Marianne W. Lewis’s book from 2022 entitled Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems has been more than prominent in my thinking since I gave it a listen over the summer. It spoke to this background in the yin and yang philosophy and Rumi’s coincident opposites. I think about this a lot as my work of the last few year has primarily revolved around teacher professional learning and its intersection with instructional materials. If you’ve followed some of that reform effort, you’ll know a bit about concerns over autonomy and prescription, or even individuality and collectivity.
The debate is often framed as such: reformers, leaders, etc. seek to change student achievement outcomes through use of high quality instructional materials. Teachers receive these directives as an affront to their autonomy as educators, as an offense to what they believe to be part of their work as not only facilitators of student learning but designers of learning experiences. I get this point of view—when you’re so close to the student, when you’re physically and contextually there with the kids every day, how can you separate the delivery of instruction from the design of the experience? In a way, the improvisational performance of teaching in response to students is a kind of design—aren’t musicians “designing” their improvisational lines as they jam and collaborate with one another?
Herein lies the paradox: yes, teachers rightfully ought to exercise their autonomy to respond to student needs in the moment—they know the context, the history, the legacies, and the trajectories of students in the granular as they’re with them moment to meant, day to day, week to week. However, teachers ought to also attend to the prescriptions of learning science and educational research: inventing learning experiences from their imagination can produce incoherence that might not only not affect student learning, but even deter or distract from it.
But back to Moana—so how does the film resolve? We left off with Moana breaking the horizon and frontier of her father’s making and striving out into the world to become who she believes she should become. Where’s the paradox here? She has to leave in order to stay. Her journeys away from the island allow her to find her power as a leader, and, more importantly, the salvation of her community and their island. If she didn’t exercise—intuitively or otherwise—her paradoxical leadership she’d have fell either into consensus with her father (staying at the island because it’s “all [she] needs,” or dissent (leaving for good and abandoning her community and home). Instead she leaves to stay.
What’s the lesson here? Leading is about a dialogue amongst different viewpoints rather than the supremacy of a monologue on either pole of the dichotomy. What do I mean here in simpler language? Picking a side eliminates the possibility and opportunity of the other. Not only that, but we need these alternatives to allow for one another—if we cancel the yin we cancel the yang, if we cancel the prescription we cancel the autonomy. Leadership is about navigating (pun now intended?) that which isn’t prescribed by policy—those cases of nuance and indeterminacy. How can we take Smith and Lewis’s advice to reframe the question, get beyond the dichotomy, and humanely lead—transcending sides?