Antigone: On Phronesis and How to Make Good and Timely Leadership Decisions.

In this paper I examine the ancient wisdom on how to make good leadership decisions that Antigone offers. Creon, Antigone's ruler, preconizes the traditionally masculine leadership conduct, with hubristic tyrannical tendencies, that deliver tragic consequences. Antigone schools Creon and the audience, firstly, by identifying the behaviors and circumstances that favor bad and untimely leadership decisions. Then Antigone presents the wisdom of phronesis as the way forward for good and timely leadership decisions. Phronesis is a pragmatic, measured rationality that comprises prudence, and a sensibility to the context, openness to dialogue, and to the other. Phronesis also calls for an open and flexible relation to error, to changing one's mind. The focus is not merely on the leader but on the relations, their differences, and opportunities, and what everyone involved in the specific circumstances of the decision can offer when listening and learning from one another. Phronesis becomes part of a modus operandi that prefigures collaborative leadership. Collaborative leadership is predicated on the collective and individual flourishing central to the dawn of democratic rule and the dilemmas Antigone examines. This essay shows how today we still need Antigone in deepening our democracy and making better leadership decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]