Great leadership starts with listening, even when you don’t like what you’re hearing

To that end, we have been exploring what happens when good people stop shouting from the sidelines and listen harder in the middle; when we choose language that aids connection and understanding.

That exploration became The Radical Moderate, a collection of 20 essays that ask how courage, listening, evidence, empathy and nuance can co-exist in leadership, journalism, education, aid and beyond, and how they can produce sustainable social change.

By “radical moderation” the contributors do not mean standing still. They conceive of the centre or of pluralism not as a safe or neutral middle ground but as a place of connection – where change is driven by inclusion and purpose, not division or blame. Similarly, those who explore civic discourse invite disagreement without cruelty. Civic discourse takes stamina because it takes time, the willingness to listen, learn, and hold tension. Those who seek a different way of thinking in journalism, for example, break from the clickbait economy of despair and seek a balance between exposing problems and exploring solutions.

Never in my lifetime have I heard as much chat about polarisation and the idea of what the centre can represent as I have in the past few years. In Australia we have witnessed our own social divide over the issue of the Voice to Parliament. We have also seen gender, climate and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East become polarising topics. The issues move in and out of the spotlight, but over the past few years, many of us have become accustomed to jumping straight from what we believe or value to what we think the solution is, without discussing the in-between.

Concern about polarisation pops up everywhere, from park picnics to workplace lunches and even intergenerational dinner table discussions about taxes, whether it’s inheritance taxes, negatively geared property or marginal tax rates, and their effects on societal inequality.

Speaking of taxes, staff from the Australian Taxation Office contacted me recently to talk about social cohesion. They wanted to know whether I thought Australia today is less socially cohesive than it was in the past because young people care more about social issues today.

I remember being a young child sitting on my parents’ shoulders in a huge nuclear disarmament march in the mid-1980s. I also recall seeing photos of marches against conscription and the Vietnam War decades earlier. I had a pet rabbit named Gough in honour of the prime minister who was dismissed by the governor general in 1975 – the event has its 50^th anniversary this month, and it’s still remembered for the great social and generational division it caused at the time.

So, though I have a lot of hope thanks to today’s youth (after all, they are my children), and I recognise that they care greatly about society, I do not grant them the medal for Most Caring Generation. They are indeed caring, as they should be – but no medals for doing the right thing!

At the same time, I do not blame young people for a decline in social cohesion. They do not carry that burden alone. It takes work by all of us to drive ourselves apart, to make others feel attacked, defensive, their values undermined, their beliefs discounted.

Similarly, it will take work by all of us to behave in ways that create cohesion. Blaming social media for all our problems tends to be code for blaming young people. But adults, including Boomer-generation adults, are glued to their phones too, and maybe need even more protection from AI slop.

Don’t get me wrong, social media plays its part in creating and stoking division. We all need to think criticially about who we want to be and whose approval we seek. We can choose to look and listen beyond our own immediate environments and apply ourselves to learning.

The Radical Moderate argues that the centre does not ask anyone to abandon their values or identity – you can be left of centre, right of centre, up or down, in the bullseye or on the edges. The centre moves as our society does. In fact, we can move it. The centre is an ambition, and not a new one – Yeats wrote about it in 1918. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

The edges are populated with accusations, punishments, bias and social pressure used to categorise ideas and people into this or that. The centre is populated by those who try to remove barricades, reduce diatribes, and decrease binary thinking. It can be painful and exhilarating all at once.

Each writer who courageously contributed to The Radical Moderate may have put their head above the parapet in their own tribe. This shows inspiring leadership and it should be acknowledged as such. Among these essays you will find more hope than cynicism and more nuance than black-and-white. They are clear and confusing all at once.

At the back of the book, you’ll find a toolkit to help bring radical moderate ideas to life in boardrooms and executive meetings. It includes advice on making decisions based on evidence, a guide for chairs on facilitating fair discussions, a checklist on thoughtful media engagement, ways to keep meetings calm and constructive, ideas for separating values from solutions, and a guide to radical moderate language that encourages more conversation and less outrage.

Radical moderation represents both a centrist approach, grounded in balance and evidence, and also a civic discourse, grounded in listening, respect and dialogue. Radical moderation holds with it the promise of hope, change, possibility, inclusivity, creativity, respect, humanity, listening, visibility, reality, nuance and complexity. The 20 writers have brought these promises to life.

This labour of love has taken the Community Directors team many months to create and I look forward to working with many more radical moderates in our community in the future.

More information

Explore the Radical Moderate project