Communication creates consequences.
Words, responses, silences, and patterns of participation do not merely describe social life. They help organize it.
A Dedication
For Leonard C. Hawes.
Long before I had language for Leadership Communication Ecology, Leonard C. Hawes was teaching me to see communication differently.
He taught me that communication is not simply something people use after a problem has already formed. Communication is where relationships, conflict, power, recognition, and social reality continually take shape.
Leonard—Len to those of us who loved him—was my professor and mentor. He also became my friend, and his guidance accompanied me throughout my graduate study. His scholarship on social justice and conflict challenged me to look beneath visible positions and outcomes—to notice the interactional conditions through which people become heard or unheard, dignified or diminished, included or excluded from what can happen next.
That orientation became foundational to my own work. Leadership Communication Ecology is my conceptual framework, but it carries an intellectual inheritance. Its concern with recurring interaction, unequal influence, organizational possibility, and the moral consequences of response was made possible, in part, by what Leonard taught me to see.
What I Carry Forward
Three commitments that continue to shape the work.
These are not claims that Leonard would have expressed in precisely these words. They are the enduring lessons his teaching and scholarship left with me.
Conflict must remain human.
Conflict cannot be understood only through positions or techniques. It must remain connected to dignity, power, history, relationship, and lived experience.
Ideas should enlarge possibility.
The most meaningful ideas help us see more honestly, respond more responsibly, and imagine more just ways of being together.
With Gratitude
To honor a mentor is not only to remember what they taught. It is to let the work continue changing what we notice, what we question, and what we make possible for others.
Leonard’s influence remains present in the questions I ask and in my conviction that communication is inseparable from justice, conflict, and human possibility. This framework, this site, and the work still to come are offered with enduring gratitude for the teacher and friend who helped make them imaginable.
— Marcy