Julia Romanowska offers astonishing accounts of how managers are exposed to the subversive world of art. With wonder, I read a book I had been searching for. It addresses the most humanistic research question I have encountered in a long time: How do I develop through seeing you? Although the book is dense with facts, it is beautifully and clearly written. Those who hold power should throw themselves into it.
Suzanne Osten
theatre director and professor
At times, the book places considerable demands on the reader, as some passages are deeply affecting while others seem to sketch a profound critique of civilisation. It is unique and urgent in education, because the focus is not on educational content but on ‘the human being behind it’ — a neglected perspective relevant not only to leaders but also to the caring professions, where the relationship to the Other is central, particularly in an age when ‘core values’ risk becoming an empty catchphrase, while ‘tools’ has become the watchword of methodological development.
Björn Wrangsjö
Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
The result is astonishing and should be reason enough to read the book. Every page opens onto invaluable insights and lays the foundation for genuine and profound change. The book critically examines our longing for simplification, our instrumental way of viewing others, our manipulations and narcissism, our avoidance of difficult emotions and our reluctance to understand others.
Stella Cizinsky
Senior Consultant, cardiologist and Head of Department, Örebro University Hospital
Leadership, Art, and Responsibility
The Shibboleth Effect
Leadership is often described as a set of capacities that can be trained, measured and improved. The Shibboleth Effect begins elsewhere: in the human being who holds power.
What happens when a leader encounters experiences that cannot be mastered through theories, models or ready-made answers?
Can leadership be measured in blood?
The question sounds metaphorical. It is literal.
The Shibboleth Effect is not a handbook for becoming a better leader. It offers no recipes, no steps and no promises of control. It presents no model to which one is expected to conform, and no ready-made image of the desirable leader.
At a time when leadership development has become a global billion-dollar industry, the book asks what this enterprise actually teaches and what is lost when leadership is reduced to technique, performance, strategy and measurable skills.
The book leads the reader into a more demanding landscape: one in which habitual assumptions break down and one is compelled to face oneself, the Other and the consequences of one’s actions. It argues for a form of leadership that allows itself to be tested and changed by reality rather than seeking to master it — leadership grounded in responsibility.
At the centre of the book is the Shibboleth Experiment: a randomised study at Karolinska Institutet, conducted in collaboration with the Swedish Defence University — blood samples and hormone levels, but also poetry, music and around fifty managers randomly assigned to two entirely different programmes.
But the book does not stop at the experiment. Its question reaches far beyond the study: What does power do to the human being — and what does responsibility demand when another human being’s dignity is at stake?
Between the Measurable and the Lived
The findings are never left to stand alone.
What could be measured is woven together with the participants’ own words: their confusion, their resistance and their changed ways of seeing themselves, others and the world. The development within the established comparison programme is also examined.
The book thus follows the change both from the outside and from within: through the measures of research and through the experience of those affected. Reflections written ten years later offer a rare insight into what remains when a programme has long since ended.
Through the shock and beauty of art, the managers were confronted with the grandeur of existence and the vulnerability of the Other — and reconsidered both their self-image and their view of others.
One participant summed up the shift:
“I sought a manager and found a human being.”
One leads as one lives. The way one exercises power cannot be separated from the way one lives in the world.
Aestemethics — From the Self to the Other
Julia Romanowska uses the term aestemethics for the interplay between the aesthetic, emotional and ethical dimensions of artistic experience.
Drawing on the participants’ experiences, she develops an aestemethical transformation model and the idea of an aestemethical stance: a receptiveness to what disturbs and moves us, and a readiness to allow what is revealed to matter for how one lives and acts. The book also formulates an aestemethical anti-pedagogy: an approach in which art is not used to bring about predetermined outcomes, but is allowed to retain its foreignness and disturbing force.
The decisive movement is not towards a more perfected self, but away from the self as the taken-for-granted centre — towards the Other.
The Other is not merely the one towards whom my responsibility is directed. The Other is the very condition for my emergence as a responsible subject. Responsibility arises when another human being appears in their singularity and vulnerability and can no longer be reduced to a mirror image of myself.
The book formulates this movement as follows:
“For a leader to take a mature place in the world, the first teaching is the face of the Other. Not self-contemplation, but an awakening from the illusion of a self-made solidity, a disturbing of self-certainty and self-centredness; a turning of the gaze outward so that the Other is not effaced. The Other must come to dwell within me if I am to stand answerable.” (p. 229)
In dialogue with thinkers including Aristotle, Emmanuel Levinas, Martha Nussbaum and Baruch Spinoza, the book deepens its inquiry into responsibility, emotion, the body, the imagination and the human capacity for change.
A Word That Bears Seed
The word shibboleth comes from Hebrew. It means an ear of grain — the part of the plant that bears seed — but can also denote a stream or a current.
In the biblical story, the pronunciation of the word became a test of belonging. It revealed who belonged and who stood outside. Over time, the word has come to mean a password, a sign of recognition or a touchstone.
In the book, that which bears seed is joined to the image of an inner threshold. Something tests the human being and cannot be reduced to knowledge about the world. It must be lived through and embodied in order to open a new relation to oneself, to the Other and to what is taking place around us.
The Shibboleth Effect denotes the change that may become possible when an experience does not stop at understanding, but changes how a human being sees, feels and acts. It is this testing that gives the book its name.
The Great Sorrow Is the Great Care
The Shibboleth Effect refuses simple answers.
The book examines our longing for simplifications, our instrumental way of viewing others, our self-absorption and our reluctance to remain with difficult emotions. Nor does it turn away from the destructive possibilities within the human being, or from the suffering that arises when power is separated from responsibility.
But the unillusioned gaze is not grounded in despair. To see the darkness more clearly may be the beginning of a more serious responsibility — and of the courage to act when a human being’s dignity is at stake.
The book asks a question that no model and no other human being can answer in our place:
What human being would I wish to meet in the mirror each morning?
When the vulnerability of the Other can no longer be held at a distance, an obligation towards the shared world also arises. In the end, leadership is called not to master the world, but to tend the world’s mending.
The great sorrow is the great care.
About the Book
Schibboleteffekten – ledarskap, konsten och människans ansvar was published in 2021 by Appell Förlag.
The book received literature support from the Swedish Arts Council, was distributed to 286 libraries and is used as course literature at several universities and higher education institutions.
The podcast Lära från lärda named Schibboleteffekten one of its twelve book highlights of 2024, and the episode devoted to the book became the podcast’s second most listened-to episode that year.
Demand has led to several reprints since the book's publication. It is also available in Swedish as a talking book through Legimus, the Swedish digital library for accessible reading.
The revised English edition, Leadership, Art, and Responsibility: The Shibboleth Effect, is forthcoming from Edward Elgar Publishing.