Essays, provocation, and thinking — on what actually shapes leadership, performance, and the dynamics beneath organisations.
Most leadership development fails — not because the content is wrong, but because it treats leadership as a noun: a set of individual capabilities to be installed. Leadership is relational. It lives between people, roles, and the systems they inhabit. Until development programmes understand this, they will keep producing well-trained individuals who cannot function in the actual organisations they return to.
Read on Medium ↗When pressure rises in an organisation, it moves. It finds the person with the most authority, the weakest boundaries, or the most anxiety. The leadership task is not to eliminate this pressure — it is to metabolise it. To hold it long enough that thinking can happen.
Read more ↗The language of enablement assumes resistance is a problem to be overcome. But resistance in organisations is usually information — about anxiety, about authority, about what the change actually means to people. Treating it as friction to be removed tends to make it worse.
Read more ↗A case study in what systems psychodynamic thinking looks like in practice. A high-performing team had stopped performing. The presenting problem was conflict. The actual problem was something else entirely — and it wasn't in the room.
Read more ↗Restructuring changes the boxes on the chart. It does not change the dynamics between the people inside them. Until organisations understand what the structure was protecting people from — the anxiety it was managing — the new structure will recreate the same problems with different names.
Read more ↗New essays are published on Medium and distributed directly. If this kind of thinking is useful to you, get in touch — or share it with someone it might provoke.