The Discomfort of Leadership
Responsibility, Correctability, and the Distance Between Authority and Consequence.
Leadership cannot depend on omniscience. It must depend on correctability.
Consequential authority is exercised under incomplete knowledge, while its effects are distributed among people who often possess information the decision-maker does not. The paper develops a relational theory of leadership centered on correctability: the continuing possibility that consequences revealed after a decision can return as meaningful information to authority while sufficient freedom remains to change what happens next.
Six concepts describe this relationship — responsibility distance, observational appropriation, situational maturity, corrective capacity, leadership debt, and narrative survivability — alongside a boundary condition, corrective foreclosure, examined through the case of American slavery and Nat Turner's 1831 revolt as the limit case where an institutional order denies some people bearing consequence any meaningful standing to correct the authority acting on them.
The argument concludes that leadership cannot guarantee correctness under incomplete knowledge. Responsible leadership instead preserves the possibility that consequence can correct power. Where that possibility is deliberately foreclosed, leadership must confront not merely how authority can be improved, but whether its terms remain entitled to acceptance.