Moderate Bravery: Learning through Mundane Experiments and Storytelling

Abstract

Purpose

The ability to act in a purposeful and effective way amid institutional tensions and paradoxes is, right now, a highly prized quality in public leadership. The purpose of this chapter is to qualify moderately brave acts as a learning format that combines the analytical and performative skills implied in this kind of agency.

Design/methodology/approach

The chapter explores the engagement with paradoxes as a narrative praxis. From existing literature, it sums up an understanding of agency as a social process of mediating paradoxes in order to make action possible. Drawing on Northrop Frye’s theory of modes, the chapter explains this praxis as a narrative endeavour balancing the dynamics of tragedy (disintegration) and comedy (integration). Moderately brave acts are formed as a kind of low-mimetic synthesis – very much akin to comedy and realistic fiction. The narrative dynamics of low-mimetic synthesis are pursued in the case story of Christian, a Master of Public Administration (MPA) student from Copenhagen.

Findings

Moderately brave acts appear as a learning format that can inspire a less idealised, but not entirely ironic approach to the paradoxes of management. In this way, they can foster a nuanced and pragmatic agency that combines analytical reflexivity with the ability to take practical action in problematic situations.

Practical implication

The chapter may inspire teachers to use narrative techniques to allow students to deal with real problems of daily praxis in a way that embraces the tension between idealisation and deconstructive irony.

Citation

Majgaard, K. (2016), "Moderate Bravery: Learning through Mundane Experiments and Storytelling", Developing Public Managers for a Changing World (Critical Perspectives on International Public Sector Management, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 205-229. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2045-794420160000005011