Bård Norheim - The Three Fears Every Leader Has to Know: Words to Use in a Crisis

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You can be remembered as the climate president who led humanity away from the cliffs edge. You can transform the worlds energy systems from fossil fuels to clean energy, while also creating an abundance of jobs, reducing harmful pollution, and tackling economic, racial, and health inequality in the process.

The metaphor the cliffs edge indicates that the world is at a point where it may collapse. At a cliffs edge, we are threatened by extinction and death, literally hanging by the tip of our fingernails to avoid falling into the dark abyss. Therefore, people like Amazon boss Jeff Bezos argued that the current decade is the most decisive decade in human history to confront the climate crisis. Unlike, most motivational speeches and inspirational quotes, these leaders used fear to give an adequate account of reality. Given the major challenges ahead, fear is not an illusion, so was the message.

Most of us appeal to fear on many occasions, typically when we sense a threat or a crisis. This book discusses the appeal to fear and what aims it may serve. The purpose of the book is to help leaders identify the fears at play at a certain time and a certain place, and how to speak to that fear in an adequate and perhaps even constructive manner. The book is a study in rhetoric and leadership, arguing that an adequate appeal to fear is decisive for a leader who wants to appear credible during a crisis. Rhetoric concerns the art of persuasion. It gives an assessment of what it means to speak convincingly. In the book we describe and explore three kinds of fearsapocalyptic fear, political fear, and private fear. The focus is set on the leader who needs to communicate when a crisis strikes, and fear is imminent. The book is therefore directed at any leader and speaker who wants to reflect on the art of speaking well when things are not going so well, whether in politics, sports, business, NGO work, civil or community service, or elsewhere. The book builds on insights from our previous book on rhetoric and leadership, The Four Speeches Every Leader Has to Know (2020), where we focused on what it takes for leaders to motivate followers, even in times of hardship and suffering. In that book we argued that there are four speeches every leader needs to knowthe opening speech, the executioner speech, the consolation speech , and the farewell speech.

In this book on the three fears, we offer tools for self-reflection, motifs for critical analysis, and give advice and guidelines on how to craft a powerful and effective address when a minor or major crisis is emerging. Simultaneously, the book also offers an interpretative framework for those who want to reflect on the ongoing energy and climate crisis. What role should the appeal to fear have as we try to address the challenges of global warming? In the first chapter of the book, we discuss the appeal to fear in the light of various conceptions of fear throughout history. We also consider what may characterize bad, or ineffective uses of fear. In the second chapter, we present the reader with two different stories. First, we tell the story of the three kinds of fear, and how they relate to three different placesnature, culture, and the place we call home. Secondly, we contrast the story of the three fears with the history of the ongoing energy crisis and how it has shaped and still shapes our feeling of fear in multiple ways.