Imagine a chief learning officer who must explain the selection of next year’s leadership program for company executives to a skeptical finance director. The sums are large, and while participants speak warmly of their cohorts and facilitators, the evidence of any measurable change in how the company is led is thin. Whether the program works matters to her and her colleagues who participate, and whether she can defend choosing and paying for it matters as well.

Her dilemma sits inside a larger puzzle, because despite sustained criticism from prominent scholars, leadership development continues to command billions in annual spending. Since the 2010s, critics have found scant objective evidence that teaching leadership works and have charged that the industry serves money more than evidence (Kellerman, 2012; Pfeffer, 2015). A special September 2026 issue of Academy of Management Learning & Education (AOMLE) has more recently widened the chorus of questioning voices across disciplines, conceding that money is poured into programs with questionable theoretical grounding and therefore probably little practical benefit (Leroy et al., 2026, p. 305). Few executives strongly endorse the results of their own programs, according to a McKinsey survey, and organizations keep buying anyway (Feser et al., 2017).

In this series, I will argue that the puzzle of leadership development’s persistence, and of buying that seems indifferent to whether a given program works, largely dissolves once we recognize that a leadership program sells more than the capabilities and impacts promised in its brochure. Among the additional goods a program sells, the one that carries the most weight in this series is what I call the defensible purchase, one that its buyer, whoever commissions or funds the program, can justify to a finance office, a CEO, or a board regardless of what the program delivers. Defensibility carries value of its own. Participants receive belonging and reassurance, buyers receive defensibility, and the surrounding institutions receive revenue, authority, and standing, which I use to mean the recognized authority that lets a choice or a claim count as legitimate. None of these benefits requires that leaders actually improve, which is why buying can persist even when a program achieves little.

The research community that studies development, with the Academy of Management prominent among its institutions, takes part in this arrangement as well as analyzing it, as do I, a longtime leadership development program director, professor, and executive coach whose roles this series will examine. Five positional figures, scholars among them, each defined by the place it holds in the purchase, operate that arrangement, and the questioning voice that each position provokes, its shadow of dissent, helps give the industry its shape and move it forward by increments.

Money gives the puzzle its edge, since companies worldwide spent an estimated $394.5 billion on training in 2025, against roughly $356 billion in 2015, the year before a Harvard Business Review analysis by Michael Beer and colleagues judged the return on much of it disappointing (Training Industry, n.d.; Beer et al., 2016). That amounts to roughly 11 percent nominal growth in a decade, likely a decline in real expenditures, and because the totals cover all training and come from different sources for each year, leadership development’s own share and trajectory remain nearly impossible to pinpoint.

Estimates for the whole enterprise diverge widely, from $14 billion to $366 billion a year across the sources that one analysis of the industry in the AOMLE special issue reviews, while other articles in that issue cite figures from almost $60 billion to hundreds of billions (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 432; Ashford et al., 2026, p. 313; Detert & McKee, 2026, p. 452). Much of the spread reflects disagreement over what counts as leadership development, and that vagueness itself matters, because a product whose boundaries its sellers can redraw at will escapes meaningful accountability. Even spending that merely holds flat at this scale gives real consequences to what buyers believe they are purchasing.

The phrase “organizations keep buying” therefore needs careful reading across a field that has widened and whose boundaries have grown more jagged. Alongside business schools and large consultancies, buyers now choose from among online course libraries, platform catalogs, independent coaches, and small-shop advisories, each with its own pricing and evidence standards. That variety makes aggregate buying harder to count, since a modest decline in spending on traditional programs could coexist with growth in cheaper or less visible purchases that conventional surveys do not capture. The expanding range of providers and programs also complicates any claim about how buyers respond to the critics. I therefore treat the totals above as rough indications of continuing substantial demand and look to buyers’ conduct, discussed at the end of this article, for firmer evidence.

Readers short on time can take three points from this opening installment of the series. First, the bleakest verdict, that programs deliver nothing, overreaches, since the research shows that well-designed development can work, which turns the original puzzle into a sharper one about why buying seems indifferent to whether a given program was well designed. Second, buyers seldom see rigorous evidence of effects, and the field’s growing variety makes the market harder to read than trends in spending totals suggest. Third, programs also deliver belonging, reassurance, and a defensible decision for participants and organizations alike, which lets purchasing persist despite weak results, and executives who want development to work should ask what their own purchase is doing for them, a question that grows more pressing as AI becomes the urgent subject that nearly every program promises to address.

I. Institutions, Ventures, and the Series Ahead

Behind the massive sums of money stand established institutions that set the standards within which the spending occurs, with business schools supplying brands and accreditation. Primary examples include the more than a thousand schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the annual Financial Times rankings of business schools that provide open and custom executive education (AACSB, 2023; Financial Times, 2026). Rankings matter partly because they feed a self-reinforcing loop in which graduate placement lifts ranking, ranking lifts applications and tuition, and alumni gifts fund the programs and buildings that raise status further, as a recent and much-discussed New York Times essay by Cambridge business school professor Christopher Marquis describes for degree programs (Marquis, 2026). The same loop plausibly extends to open and custom executive education, which carries the same brands.

Publishers and consultancies turn scholarship into prescription and diagnoses of failure into redesigns for sale as corporate learning, as Harvard Business Impact and McKinsey do (Harvard Business Publishing, 2025; Gurdjian et al., 2014). Other professional associations certify skills, with the International Coaching Federation (ICF) defining coaching credentials (International Coaching Federation, n.d.). Scholarly societies such as the Academy of Management publish the journals that supply the research from which most other institutions draw their claims to evidence, and their members teach in the programs, advise the consultancies, and take the conference stages to circulate these ideas and standards (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 442-443). Together these institutions shape and legitimate what counts as leadership development, who may supply it, and how a respectable buyer behaves, requiring every newer entrant to earn their approval or borrow their legitimacy.

Entrepreneurial ventures and platforms change who sells what to whom, borrowing the legitimacy of established institutions and the ideas they generate while competing on reach and price. Among many examples, Strategyzer and the Disruptive Leadership Institute package frameworks and books as masterclasses, coaching, and “solution” packages (Strategyzer, n.d.; Disruptive Leadership Institute, n.d.). MasterClass, LinkedIn Learning, and Coursera for Business sell celebrity-taught and partner-taught catalogs to employers, in a market that increasingly consolidates online offerings (MasterClass, n.d.; LinkedIn Learning, n.d.; Coursera, n.d.; Coursera, 2025).

Generative AI now enters every part of these arrangements, confronting an enterprise long criticized for modest results with a technology that changes how its products are made, sold, and evaluated. The pressure on leaders to learn how to manage AI and to lead its integration into their organizations has quickly become the lead selling point of programs and coaching packages, and that urgency may displace the attention to efficacy these offerings might otherwise attract, since a buyer who needs leaders ready for AI this year has little patience for asking whether the program works, a possibility that I’ll examine in Part IV.

The discourse that circulates around these institutions and ventures shapes what buyers think leadership development is and the value it potentially offers and, in turn, what they want. In my reading, much of that discourse, from daily business-media newsletters to the endless slurry of LinkedIn posts, reinforces shared assumptions about the value of programs and tools and rarely questions their efficacy or return on investment, a pattern consistent with the wider culture of belief in leaders and leadership that the next section here describes. As generative AI multiplies the volume of leadership commentary, it also reproduces and reinforces the same predominant ideas about leadership, echoing what the existing corpus already says and leaving unexamined the programs, coaching, and assessments built around them (Slocum, 2025c).

Popular leadership discourse rewards visibility and certainty over judgment, algorithmic systems pull leaders toward an aspirational average, and zombie ideas in leadership and coaching alike keep circulating after the evidence for them thins, as several of my recent essays have traced (Slocum, 2025a, 2025b, 2026). Those arguments left open a question that this series takes up in five parts, namely what else a program sells beyond its stated promises of leadership transformation and impact.

In this opening installment, I examine the evidence on effectiveness, which reframes the puzzle as purchasing that seems indifferent to whether a program works, draw on sociological thinking about the functions that practices serve beyond their stated purposes to ask what else a program sells, and turn to a cultural-industries analysis of the field to ask who helps produce the demand for it. In Part II, I will explain why buyers inspect so little and will introduce the five positional figures who operate the arrangement. Next, in Part III, I will follow three kinds of standing as they travel through channels of recognition, procurement, and trust among those figures, and will ask how feeds, platforms, and machines speed that circulation and absorb the dissent that the figures breed. In Part IV, I will consider what generative AI changes for the figures and their shadows and how buyers can make defensibility serve evidence. Finally, in Part V, I will state what the evidence supports, ask which of the five shadows can move the field, and show how the field can move forward with buyers by practicing what it teaches.

II. A Puzzle About Evidence

Three diagnoses locate the failure in different places, namely the results, the market, and the buyer’s own organization. The first diagnosis holds that decades of expansion in the “leadership industry” have produced no evident gains in the quality of leadership (Kellerman, 2016). The second locates the problem in a market where hope outweighs data. The third, which Beer’s earlier Harvard Business Review analysis develops at length, traces the disappointing return to the buyer’s own organization, where six barriers, among them unclear strategy and values, senior teams that do not work as teams, and employees’ fear of telling the top what stands in the way, block any meaningful application of the takeaways and let capable, motivated people soon revert to old habits. This third diagnosis is essential because it implicates the buyer. An organization that sends capable people to learn while leaving its strategy, top team, and candor unexamined purchases something other than better leadership, and the possibility that buyers prefer the purchase to the resulting examination anticipates the argument of this series.

Although the three arguments differ in emphasis, they converge on one troubling conclusion, that the industry fails at its stated purpose. Executives who experience the programs concur, which matters greatly for our efforts to make sense of the puzzle. Only 11 percent of the more than 500 executives in the McKinsey survey strongly agreed that their leadership development interventions achieve and sustain the desired results, a top-box (strongest-agreement) self-report from a firm that itself sells redesigns. The figure dates from 2017 and rests on a respondent pool that may mix participants and purchasers, which means it signals disappointment among those closest to programs without isolating the people who sign the purchase orders.

Perhaps predictably, the research community’s diagnosis differs, holding that seventy-five years of research have accumulated compelling evidence that leadership is both important and developable, and that the failure lies in the absence of theoretical clarity about how development should proceed (Leroy et al., 2026, p. 305). The special AOMLE issue, which I will examine more closely in Part III, works within the same premise by building or extending theory around leadership as a proven good. Here, we will accept that premise as far as the meta-analyses summarized below reach.

The premise also coincides with the industry’s own coordinating logic, which holds together competing providers by affirming “the power, authority, and crucial need for leaders, leadership, and leadership development” (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 428). Reform that begins from that shared starting point tends to improve individual programs while leaving the larger market for them uninspected. Marquis’s essay about business schools makes the point in its sharpest form, calling for the abolition of such schools on the grounds that an ethics elective, a sustainability center, or a “responsible leadership” badge legitimizes the machine without changing what it produces. Its remedy goes further than this series will, and its argument draws mainly on first-hand experience and selected studies, but its diagnosis, that an institution can function as designed while its stated aims serve to legitimize the design, anticipates the functional analysis in Section IV, below, and the essay itself insists that abolition cannot mean abandoning the people inside the schools. The larger market for programs is the subject of this series.

III. What the Meta-Analyses Show, and What Buyers See

The evidence proves less bleak than the charge, common among critics, that development programs deliver little or no benefit, and it consequently warrants a closer look. As a reminder, a meta-analysis pools the results of many separate studies into a single estimate, and its effect size, written as δ, expresses the average gain in standard deviations, so that a δ of .5 means participants gain half a standard deviation, measured against a control group or their own earlier performance depending on the study design. Executives must decide whether a program’s benefits justify its costs, and the standard deviation figures below serve as a common yardstick, one that lets a CEO or CHRO compare the size of an effect across studies and then express that effect in the units of performance the organization already tracks, such as sales, retention, or promotion readiness, which allows the gain to be priced against what the program would cost.

A meta-analysis by American organizational psychologists that pooled 335 independent samples found that leadership development improved participants’ reactions, learning, transfer to the job, and organizational results, with average effects between δ = .63 and δ = .82 (Lacerenza et al., 2017). The same analysis showed that design shaped outcomes, with stronger results from programs that began with a needs analysis, supplied feedback and practice, spaced their sessions over time, ran on-site, and relied on face-to-face instruction that was not self-administered.

Workplace coaching shows a similar pattern, though a meta-analysis of seventeen studies by British researchers rests on a much thinner literature (Jones et al., 2016). Coaching improved organizational outcomes by δ = .36 overall, with larger gains in affective outcomes (δ = .51), which concern attitudes and feelings, than in skill-based outcomes (δ = .28), a gap I read as suggestive only, and with a much larger gain in individual-level results (δ = 1.24) that the thin literature warrants treating cautiously. Read together, the two analyses complicate the verdict on program effectiveness by showing that development can work and by identifying the conditions under which it does. The coaching analysis also found internal coaches outperforming external ones, an awkward result for a market that rests largely on external credentials, and its gap between feeling and skill will matter when I turn to what buyers and participants actually receive.

These findings answer the charge that programs deliver nothing but leave untouched the broader observation that decades of industry expansion have produced no evident gains in the quality of leadership at large, since average program effects need not aggregate into improvement across firms or societies. They also sharpen a rival explanation, that buyers act sensibly on decent average evidence, which the gaps in evaluation below put to the test. To be precise, these samples span many settings and populations, and the estimates describe leadership training in general more than executive education in particular. Both meta-analyses also predate generative AI, so neither speaks to programs built around it or to the offerings that now claim buyers’ attention.

Several considerations keep the finding in proportion and shift the puzzle from what the evidence shows to what buyers can see of it. For one, evaluations that reach publication probably come from organizations able to conduct them, which means the market average sits below the meta-analytic mean by an unknown margin. Another is that rigorous evaluation remains scarce, since leading providers estimate, off the record, that fewer than one in ten programs undergo it and that most evaluations capture only immediate participant reactions (Kaiser & Curphy, 2013). A 2025 survey of 277 practitioners by the Association for Talent Development (ATD), which covers training generally, points the same way, with 93 percent collecting participant satisfaction data, 29 percent neither measuring nor evaluating their programs, and only 15 percent feeling ready to isolate a program’s effect on results (Association for Talent Development, 2025).

A further consideration is that effect sizes describe what happens when programs work while saying nothing of whether what works is what buyers purchase, a gap that the leadership-training meta-analysis underscores in observing that leadership training absorbs much of training budgets while few organizations rate their programs highly effective. Scarce evaluation alone would explain continued buying through ignorance, so the puzzle holds only for buyers who see disconfirming signals, as the McKinsey respondents do, and buy anyway.

IV. From Efficacy to Function: Terms and the Rain Ceremonial

Taken together, the meta-analyses and the gaps in evaluation turn the initial puzzle into a second and sharper one. In the first, we asked why organizations keep buying programs that critics say do not work, and the evidence shows that well-designed programs can work, so the harder question becomes why purchasing stays indifferent to whether a given program was well designed, a pattern that the critics’ focus on efficacy leaves largely unexamined. A rival explanation holds that buyers simply act on decent average evidence, and the scarcity of rigorous evaluation bears on it, because a buyer who cannot see whether a program was built to the right design cannot be responding to its quality. Buyers who evaluate rigorously and change course doubtless exist and show where evidence does constrain purchasing; the puzzle concerns those who do not.

The existing evidence spans cohort programs and coaching, and I treat the two here as an increasingly convergent enterprise. That working assumption is based on my own professional observation and direct experience that many programs now bundle individual coaching, that coaches contribute to cohort workshops, and that the same assessments, vendors, and buyers serve both, although no purchasing data so far isolate the bundles. I use leadership development as broadly as many in the industry do, for everything from one-to-one coaching of a single executive to programs meant to build capacity across a whole organization, and I reserve the industry for that commercial enterprise, the research community for the scholars who study it, and the field for the two together.

A common distinction separates leader development, which builds the individual, from leadership development, which builds capacity across an organization, and the practical constraint noted in that literature, that the individual is often the only client a developer can reach, matters below (Palanski & Barclay, 2026, p. 332). A market that selects weakly for effectiveness may be selecting for something else, and the distinction between manifest and latent functions supplies concepts for finding out what. Foundational American sociologist Robert Merton developed that distinction in Social Theory and Social Structure, where it guards against a confusion common in his discipline, the habit of equating the motives people give for an action with the consequences the action actually has (Merton, 1968, pp. 73-138).

The Hopi rain ceremonial, a ritual performed to bring rain to an arid land, provided the central illustration for Merton. Because the ceremony does not produce rain, an analysis that stops at its avowed purpose would ordinarily classify it as superstition, a condescending verdict that the functional analysis sets out to correct. When attention turns to the ceremony’s consequences for the group, a function that nobody advertised comes into view, since the ritual gives scattered members of a community a periodic occasion to assemble and reaffirm a shared identity. The manifest function, rain, goes unmet, while the latent function, cohesion, succeeds. I use “rain ceremonial” to name, by analogy, any practice whose stated purpose and actual consequences diverge (Merton, 1968, pp. 118-122).

Under the distinction between manifest and latent functions, a consequence counts as latent when participants neither intend nor recognize it and as manifest when they do both, a distinction that redirects analysis from whether a practice attains its avowed purpose to what else it accomplishes. That shift explains why practices that fail their stated aims can persist with considerable stability and import, provided they perform some other function that someone values, although the mechanism usually depends on participants continuing to believe in the stated aim. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) illustrates the pattern, since its use has persisted through accumulating doubts about its validity (Stein & Swan, 2019).

Institutional theory has long observed that organizations adopt practices to win legitimacy from their environments, often with loose coupling to technical results, a lineage that Part II takes up (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). My use of the “rain ceremonial” in the title here thus carries a qualified meaning, because development programs built to the right design can produce some rain; the power of the analogy derives from calling attention to how weakly the buying depends on whether rain falls.

V. What a Program Delivers Beyond Its Brochure

A leadership program delivers different things to different people, and only the advertised skills depend on leaders actually improving. The organization receives those skills, participants receive private comforts, and the buyer receives a defensible decision. Merton’s distinction sorts these deliveries once we ask two questions of each, the first being whether the seller announces it and the second who receives it. Functions that sellers announce and buyers expect, I call manifest, and they include the capabilities that a brochure or website promises and, as firms often state, a signal of investment in senior, high-potential, or other talented employees. Functions that sellers leave unadvertised I call undeclared, and the second question divides them into private functions, which benefit participants, and institutional functions, which benefit organizations and the buyers who act for them.

Among the private functions, anxiety relief and belonging stand out, and both reach participants whether or not the program improves their leadership. A program can ease the anxiety of uncertainty by converting it into a framework, and it can offer belonging, which research on business schools as identity workspaces, where people revise their professional identities during career transitions, helps explain (Petriglieri & Petriglieri, 2010). The uncertainty that AI creates for leaders may heighten the demand for relief, because a program that turns an unsettling technology into a framework of readiness, roles, and questions to ask can ease worry long before it changes anyone’s practice. In Part IV of this series, I will consider whether the use of generative AI, as a shared subject, also supplies belonging.

The most consequential institutional function is defensibility, the advantage that a credentialed program gives a purchaser who can point to a visible action when performance disappoints. A buyer who chose a recognized provider can say that the organization followed accepted practice, and that statement protects the buyer whether or not anyone evaluated the program. Boards and chief executives who now ask what the organization is doing about AI make a program on leading with AI an especially easy purchase to defend, since a buyer who declines one may invite more scrutiny than a buyer who purchases one that no one evaluates. Defensibility therefore carries the most weight in this series, as the function that most directly explains buying that stays indifferent to whether a program works.

Compliance forms a separate category because a rule generates the demand, and the program’s benefits play no part in it. It arises where an association or regulator ties continuing education to a license or designation. The American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) illustrates the pattern, since its Fellow credential (FACHE) rests on accredited continuing education and often appears as a hard requirement in senior executive job descriptions, hospital-system advancement, and board appointments (ACHE, n.d.). Such demand holds regardless of the value the buyer assigns to the content, and it reaches leadership development only where the content qualifies for credit. I treat compliance as a boundary case, since most leadership purchases face no comparable requirement, and look to private and institutional functions to explain persistence across the wider market.

The label undeclared warrants a word of justification, because Merton’s latent covers only consequences that participants neither intend nor recognize. Many buyers do recognize that defensibility forms part of what they purchase, even though no brochure says so, and a term that turned on recognition would misdescribe it. Undeclared therefore means only that sellers do not advertise a function, whether or not buyers see it. Latent remains available for the narrower set of undeclared consequences that escape everyone involved, as the Hopi ceremonial’s reaffirmation of group identity escaped its participants, and some private comforts, such as relief from anxiety, may qualify. The vocabulary thus narrows in steps, with manifest functions advertised, undeclared functions unadvertised, and latent functions the undeclared ones that no one recognizes, a gradation of recognition that the next section uses to ask who shapes what buyers and participants see.

VI. Co-producing the Purchase

Merton’s Hopi participants inherited their understanding of the ceremonial from a community that shared it, whereas buyers and participants in leadership programs form theirs inside a crowded market, and a functional analysis of the latter cannot alone say who shapes what they come to believe. The sociology of cultural industries, which reaches a neighboring conclusion from a different tradition, supplies the missing producers. Copenhagen Business School’s Eric Guthey and Nicole Ferry argue that leadership development sells goods consumed as much for their symbolic and emotional associations as for their use in preparing leaders, and that critics who hastily dismiss the industry assume its proper function is to produce better leaders while ignoring its cultural, symbolic, and humanizing work (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 428-429). Their account adds that the industry coproduces the demand it serves, because a program is never fully produced until participants consume and interpret it (427).

Guthey and Ferry’s account of assessment, coaching, and executive education shows these producers at work, as the following summary of their sector analyses indicates (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 433-436). In assessment, slogans of scientific objectivity accompany scores that function as symbolic markers independent of their predictive efficacy, and both need constant mediation from administrators, consultants, content creators, and sales staff to carry authority. In coaching, low barriers to entry have multiplied certification routes, from two-day online courses to thirty-month master’s programs, and the associations that try to regulate them have multiplied alongside. In executive education, business schools tailor offerings around executive hot topics such as leading with AI, frame development as an inner journey, and signal through selection that a participant has leadership potential or executive stature. Each intermediary has a stake in how a program is described, and those descriptions become the language that a buyer later uses to explain the purchase.

Drawing together the accounts presented by Merton and by Guthey and Ferry suggests that latency in this market may be partly manufactured, because the parties who sell programs also shape how buyers understand them. Guthey and Ferry trace the root to the difficulty of showing that organizational outcomes flow from leadership at all, a difficulty that leaves meaning to do much of the work and leads programs to socialize participants into attributing causal power to leaders. For private functions such as relief from anxiety, a program presented as an inner journey toward leadership invites participants to credit the journey, and that framing can keep them from recognizing what they receive.

For defensibility, which many buyers do recognize, coproduction supplies the plausible story of effectiveness that buyers need to keep citing the purchase, whether the story arrives as personal transformation or as a claim to scientific objectivity. The chief learning officer meets this vocabulary as common sense, in a field where 82 percent of her counterparts rank leadership the top learning priority for executives (Jack, 2021, as cited in Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 433).

The research community stands inside this arrangement as well. Scholars who distance themselves from commercialized development claim the authority to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge, and many of them also sell fee-based services to commercial organizations, in part to shore up their relevance (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 437). Coproduction remains an inference from theory and adjacent evidence, because no significant survey of buyers has measured these functions, and Guthey and Ferry themselves caution against reading the industry’s logic as purely instrumental or calculating (439). The inference can fail, and I’ll show how in the next section, since buyers who change providers after credible evidence of no effect would count against it. A way to say which undeclared functions buyers value and where inspection threatens them therefore matters more than any verdict on motives.

VII. Two Buyers and a Test

Returning to the chief learning officer, whom I will call the Gatekeeper in Part II, and her skeptical finance director, whose questions will become the Gatekeeper’s shadow of dissent, we can see that the preceding sections have changed what her question means. The research gives her reason to believe that a program built around a needs analysis, feedback and practice, and spaced sessions can produce average gains between δ = .63 and δ = .82. She has little means of knowing whether the program in front of her was built that way, since leading providers estimate off the record that fewer than one in ten programs undergo rigorous evaluation. And the functional lens shows her that the purchase can deliver belonging for her executives and an explainable decision for herself, even if the quality of leadership in her company never changes.

That last benefit falls differently on different parties, since functions are always relative to a unit of analysis. Defensibility protects the buyer who can cite a visible action when results disappoint, though it can undermine the participant whose program was chosen for its brand, and the straightforward framework that allays a leader’s anxiety may cost the situational attention that good judgment requires. Even the academy’s constructive turn toward context, included in the AOMLE issue, follows the pattern, since proposals to teach leaders to read the systems around them acknowledge that the individual is usually the only client a developer can reach, which leaves the organization’s own design as uninspected as before (Palanski & Barclay, 2026, pp. 332, 335; Guthey & Ferry, 2026, p. 438).

The finance director’s meeting can therefore go in two ways, and the difference between them is the test that this series proposes. In the first version, the chief learning officer asks the provider for a needs analysis, a schedule of feedback and practice, a comparison group, and a fee partly tied to measured change in how the executives lead. In the second, she accepts attendance figures and satisfaction scores, which 93 percent of the surveyed practitioners already collect.

Buyers who want behavior to change will hold the first meeting, while those who want belonging, reassurance, and cover will find the second entirely sufficient. Were behavior change the goal, buyers would demand evidence of it, yet the thin evaluation described above suggests few do. The test also answers the charge that functional explanations run in circles. Persistence alone proves nothing, but a buyer who keeps a credentialed provider after seeing credible evidence of no effect, or who passes over a cheaper AI coaching tool offering similar feedback and reassurance, reveals what the purchase was really for.

If a buyer switches in those situations, the rival explanation gains support: ignorance drove the purchase. Generative AI makes this test easier to run and harder to read. Dashboards of usage, engagement, and sentiment arrive automatically and can lend the appearance of measurement to what remains attendance and satisfaction. But those same tools may lower the cost of tracking behavioral change enough to make demanding evaluations practical.

Nothing here is meant to suggest that buyers are cynics or providers charlatans, since producers and consumers alike invest in leadership development out of real aspirations to agency and to more humane organizations (Guthey & Ferry, 2026, pp. 439-440). The research does indicate, though, that executives who want development to work should ask what their own purchase is actually doing for them, and by the end of this series I will propose four signs that those buyers should ask for. Those signs are procurement requests that specify outcomes beyond participant reactions, fees tied to measured change, published evaluations that name a comparison group, and associations and rankings that require behavioral evidence alongside attendance.

Part II will ask why buyers inspect these functions so little, drawing on credence-good economics, which studies goods whose quality buyers cannot judge even after use, institutional theory, and the study of management fashion.

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For close to two decades, I have opened programs for creative business leaders with a book most of them have never read and many have never heard of. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, originally published in 1983 with the wonderfully odd subtitle, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (which alone tends to silence a workshop room), argues that works of art today inhabit both market and “gift” economies at once (Hyde, 1983/2007). Executives tend to bristle at the claim. One film producer told me it sounded like a poet’s alibi for a missing budget, and an agency CFO once asked which economy pays for the servers.

Within an hour, the room usually turns, because people begin naming what no invoice ever captures, such as the mentor who spent an afternoon on a junior’s portfolio, the half-formed idea handed over in a corridor and never claimed, or the introduction made without expectation of return. They come to realize Hyde supplies anthropological language for something these leaders already know, and his language casts light on what they’ve consistently seen in the past but not registered. If management prices and allocates, leadership also recognizes what carries no price and protects the conditions under which teams remain vital and keep producing such value.

Across five major works, the longtime Kenyon College scholar, essayist, and cultural critic describes an economy of creative renewal in which value circulates before anybody captures it. Today, generative AI is straining that economy and exposing a question beneath the familiar debate over whether machines can be genuinely creative. If production becomes abundant and cheap, he suggests, what becomes scarce? Read forward into the present, Hyde’s work suggests that the scarce resource is the human and institutional capacity to govern circulation, receptivity, consequence, reciprocity, and forgetting, so that novelty can still become the vital meaning individuals and cultures value.

A second pattern runs through his oeuvre, and it took me years of teaching to name it: Hyde never resolves the powerful oppositions he sets up. Market and gift, order and mischief, enclosure and commons, memory and oblivion stay alive in his pages, and he treats the ongoing tensions as productive conditions that no solution should dissolve. Management scholarship has a canonical version of a related problem in Stanford social scientist James March’s concept of ambidexterity, which speaks to how organizations must continually allocate the resources required to explore new possibilities and exploit old certainties, an ongoing process of coordination on which survival and prosperity depend (March, 1991). A large literature has since examined how firms combine the two through continuous learning, structural separation, contextual design, or the integrating work of senior teams (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004; Raisch & Birkinshaw, 2008; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1996).

Organizational ambidexterity coordinates competing demands along axes legible enough that structures, roles, or contexts can be designed around them. Contextual ambidexterity complicates that picture, since varying organizational contexts can support alignment and adaptability at once. Approaches like both/and thinking and paradox theory come closer to Hyde’s logic by treating contradictory demands as persistent, interdependent, and dynamically managed (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004; Smith & Lewis, 2011). But Hyde carries the insight even more fully into territory that ambidexterity scholars have only entered partly, and which I name, creative ambidexterity.

Creative ambidexterity makes a narrower and deeper claim, grounded in the collisions that I have argued elsewhere drive a third loop of creative leadership learning. These collisions are moments when incompatible systems or frameworks confront one another so directly that leaders must question the frames through which the problem itself is perceived and understood (Slocum, 2025b). My claim is built on the work of organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris, who explained how double-loop learning taught leaders to question the assumptions beneath their actions (Argyris, 2005). The third loop asks them to examine the frameworks that make some assumptions visible and others hard even to formulate.

In AI-mediated creative work, priorities like authorship, openness, originality, dissent, and organizational memory can change meanings during the very act of managing them, requiring leaders to re-set the poles of exploration and exploitation even as leaders are working to coordinate them. Three signs distinguish this condition from an ordinary trade-off: the poles themselves are unstable, more than one governing logic remains legitimate, and adaptation alters the leader’s or organization’s understanding of what the tension means. Consider a U.S. businessperson forming a partnership with a Chinese counterpart that aims to serve both markets. The collisions between systems are both ongoing and shifting.

Creative ambidexterity names a mode of leading and learning when the boundaries move because evolving frameworks collide in ways that are not immediately resolvable. My contention here is that each of Hyde’s works exposes a version of that condition, and the sections that follow discuss them in the order of their publication.

The Gift, 1983: Circulation Before Capture

A gift must keep traveling, because hoarding kills it in the hands of whoever holds on. Where the transactions governing commodity exchange leave the parties even and unconnected, gift exchange, for Hyde, binds the people involved in a relationship that no price clearly settles (1983/2007). Whereas no one owes anyone anything after buying a hacksaw blade at the hardware store, accepting the saw as a gift enters the recipient into a relationship whose terms no one can concisely capture.

Creative organizations run on this asymmetry more than their formal architecture admits. While a studio may look like a market, with its contracts, rate cards, utilization targets, and intellectual-property clauses, its productive core depends on a persistent gift logic that expresses itself in colleagues teaching one another, making introductions, sharing references, and passing along incomplete thoughts without settling every account. Leaders who mistake the market for the whole system can optimize the measurable layer of relations with clients, partners, and customers and quietly starve the relational layer that generates value. If one considers quarterly development cycles and earnings calls,

Hyde’s description of a labor of gratitude, the period in which a recipient absorbs what was received before passing anything along, offers a helpful illustration of this contrast.

Generative AI performs the outward form of the gift while offering none of its social substance. Asked for help at two o’clock in the morning, an AI model answers tirelessly at negligible marginal cost with something that can confidently resemble generosity. Because the model and its outputs cannot be changed by gratitude in the interpersonal sense Hyde lays out, no obligation passes between giver and receiver. The resulting question for organizations becomes what happens when frictionless service, indeed exchange, replaces the relationships through which craft, standards, and responsibility once traveled and grew.

That concern now sends a potentially telling labor-market signal, even if it falls short of proof. ADP payroll data covering millions of U.S. workers through June 2026 show employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations about 19% below where it would be had it tracked less-exposed peers, while experienced workers show no comparable gap (Brynjolfsson et al., 2026). Some critics – whose affiliation with Google may represent a conflict of interest – respond that a narrow age band reacts mechanically to hiring slowdowns and that hiring in exposed occupations began falling in 2022. That was before generative AI spread widely, when changes were driven in part by the pandemic and amid rising financing costs and economic uncertainty (Iscenko & Curto Millet, 2026).

Evidence from another market cuts against any simple deskilling story as well. In a study of 5,172 customer-support agents, generative-AI assistance raised productivity most for less experienced and lower-skilled workers and coincided with increased signs of worker learning, which suggests that AI can transmit elements of expert practice (Brynjolfsson et al., 2025). Neither body of evidence measures apprenticeship itself, to be clear, and that gap matters for the potential work impacts that could follow.

The leadership question therefore reaches beyond whether AI removes entry-level tasks and puts at risk the individual humans fulfilling them. The deeper question is whether firms redesign those tasks so that novices still have the opportunity to engage ambiguity, feedback, consequence, and expert correction, or, instead, to automate the very experiences through which tacit judgment used to form. While a thinner entry rung need not produce a thinner capability pipeline for workers, it easily can without deliberate apprenticeship and learning design.

“Do it for the love of the work” has supported a great deal of unpaid internship, and anyone with a payroll to shrink can enlist the romance of the gift in bad faith. Hyde is more careful here than many of his single-minded and artistry-embracing popularizers, since he insists that artists must find a way to earn a living at the boundary between gift and market. For leaders, the implications are helpfully concrete: protect the gift core, pay people properly at the market edge, and refuse to redescribe uncompensated extraction as creative devotion. A gift extracted under duress stops being a gift early in the process.

Hyde takes care to explain why the boundary between gift and market matters without telling anyone where to place it, which is precisely the perpetual challenge of creative leaders. The placement moves with every funding round, every change in client economics, and every wave of automation that absorbs or recasts work once given to juniors. As a result, firms that codify a permanent answer convert judgment into a rule that can quickly become obsolete and counterproductive. Creative ambidexterity begins with keeping the boundary visible enough to be revisited and, ultimately, reformulated as conditions change.

Advertising built its own quantitative answer to this tension over the past two decades, and the result has been instructive. Drawing on nearly a thousand cases in the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) Databank, effectiveness researchers Les Binet and Peter Field made a powerful case for balancing long-term brand building with short-term activation, popularizing a roughly 60:40 benchmark while acknowledging that the ideal ratio varies by context (Binet & Field, 2013). In a later review of nearly 600 cases through 2018, Field found that the efficiency advantage of creatively awarded work had fallen from roughly twelve times that of non-awarded work in the twelve years to 2008 to below four times in the twelve years to 2018 (Field, 2019).

He attributes much of the decline to short-termism, including that involving juries who have increasingly favored short-term campaigns, and his empirical account is compelling. Hyde nevertheless points toward another, more fundamental mechanism at play: a gift metered closely enough, he explains, starts behaving like a transaction, and the relational surplus that made the gift generative in the first place becomes harder to identify and evaluate. Since the IPA archive is a selected population of effectiveness cases, and creative awards themselves changed across the period, the figures describe a consequential trend and fall short of a natural experiment. The broader irony is that the business case for creativity can grow so efficient at defending creativity that it teaches organizations to value only the parts that convert creative work into a business case or whatever metrics are being used to track effectiveness.

“Two Accidents,” 1996: The Discipline of Chance

If The Gift explains how creative value circulates, Hyde’s “Two Accidents” essay in the Kenyon Review explains how some of the value arrives. It may therefore be among his most straightforwardly useful writing for anyone running a creative team or business. He begins the piece with a discussion of the Greek term hermaion, which refers to the uncanny find – of an idea, a connection, a solution – that belongs to Hermes, the ancient Greek god of messengers. Hyde’s initial insight is that the term already carries the argument that a find differs from a search, a purchase, or a theft (Hyde, 1996).

He explains that the reasons for the difference are dumb luck and smart luck, which for leaders is important because a find made entirely accidentally produces no capability. Smart luck adds craft to what contingency delivers, which makes the lucky find a collaboration between the world and a practiced receiver. Louis Pasteur’s neglected chicken-cholera cultures, which led him to the deliberate, repeatable process of producing vaccines, and Pablo Picasso’s 1942 bull’s head, welded from a bicycle seat and handlebars, give examples of the pattern across science and art. In each case, somebody had spent years learning to recognize what an initial accident made possible. Pasteur’s maxim that “chance favors the prepared mind” becomes more demanding in this light, because the prepared mind must also stay ready for what it was not prepared to see, holding its theories loosely enough to notice an anomaly that could wreck them.

Composer John Cage supplies a harder lesson, because he used chance operations, including coin tosses, not as a celebration of randomness but as a discipline for interrupting the pursuit of his own preferences. That same discipline should be instructive for leaders considering what they should ask of generative systems. Large language and multi-modal models excel at recombination, traversing patterns in existing material and returning forms that no individual could have searched exhaustively. Since a find in Hyde’s sense still needs an environment able to recognize, test, reject, revise, and absorb what appears, leaders need to deliberately guide and contextualize their and their teams’ interactions with AI.

Evidence about how the abundance generated by AI operates in practice relates to the same leadership imperative of close guidance. When British management researchers conducted an experiment on the impact of short story writers’ access to generative AI ideas, the results suggested an increase in the creativity of individual story ideas and better writing at the same time as a narrowing of the scope of novel content produced collectively (compared to the novelty in human-only stories) (Doshi & Hauser, 2024). Put differently, plausible accidents can multiply even as distinctiveness, the property a find requires, grows scarcer. The resulting leadership task therefore becomes building the standards, attention, and selection practices that turn abundance into smart luck.

Hyde also notes a related second trade-off often hidden by the tendency of people to recognize an anomaly only to explain it away in terms of their existing models. For leaders, calibrating how firmly a team operates according to its assumptions or models in a given situation means deciding between holding on loosely enough to notice what they may have failed to anticipate and tightly enough to advance as commitments accumulate and execution risk rises. Creative ambidexterity operates here in miniature, inside a single mind regularly deciding how to coordinate trust in its own taste, preferences, and frames and commitment to escaping those preferences and allowing the frame to be disturbed.

Trickster Makes This World, 1998: Boundary Work and Its Costs

Preparation carries a firm only so far, because the more entrenched problem often concerns the difficulty of challenging tightly-held assumptions that constrain thinking differently – or the development of alternative assumptions that nobody inside the organization considers. Hyde’s trickster embodies the ambiguity, ambivalence, and paradox that can offer such different thinking or alternative ways of seeing situations (1998, p. 7). Hermes, Coyote, Loki, Eshu, and their cousins steal, lie, cross boundaries, and get caught, and cultures keep telling their stories because the disruptions they embody do the necessary, ongoing work of helping a culture test what it holds sacrosanct.

Hyde argues that cultures need space for these figures whose function is to “uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on” (1998, p. 9). The word space does a great deal of work here: grant too little and the culture ossifies around assumptions nobody can name; granting too much weakens shared rules until coordination becomes difficult. Psychological safety, a familiar frame for shaping questions and dissent in organizations, asks whether that dissent and those who voice it are welcomed (Edmondson, 2018). Hyde’s bargain pushes one level further, to where forms of dissent that the organization can absorb without domesticating them and to where boundaries must stay firm enough for collective action to continue.

Many creative businesses have half-absorbed the trickster and, in the process, often made him decorative. Innovation labs, hackathons, and disruption titles can institutionalize the role while stripping out the impact, because dissent becomes safer once it is scheduled, budgeted, and expected to end on a given schedule. That domestication mirrors the longer historical arc of creative leadership that’s moved over the last sixty years from insurgent practice toward a marketable commodity administered by a leadership-industrial complex (Slocum, 2025b). Real trickster energy appears when an account director tells a profitable client that their strategy is wrong or when a junior challenges the metric around which everybody’s incentives (and compensation) have aligned, and leaders reveal their culture in what happens to those people afterward. Netflix’s practice of “farming for dissent” formalizes the invitation, although its value ultimately depends on whether leaders reward the dissenter after the meeting (Hastings & Meyer, 2020).

The trickster also pays a price for these disruptions of business as usual, and anyone tempted to cast AI as the new organizational disruptor should look more closely at that part of the founding myth. Hermes stands trial before Zeus, Coyote dies repeatedly and comically, and the community watches the boundary-crosser absorb consequences. The more recent case of Mata v. Avianca shows the modern asymmetry cleanly. In it, lawyers filed a brief citing nonexistent judicial decisions generated through ChatGPT, and in June 2023 Judge P. Kevin Castel sanctioned the lawyers and their firm $5,000 after finding that they had abandoned their responsibilities and then stood by the fake opinions once the court questioned them (Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 2023).

A crucial takeaway from the case is that after an AI model generated the false material, the people still nevertheless had to carry the responsibility. For organizations, that asymmetry of action and ownership is not a temporary defect awaiting better models or agents. Instead, it is a reminder that, even amidst the rapid integration of AI, accountability stays attached to actors who can authorize, verify, explain, and provide governance as well as question and disrupt.

Common as Air, 2010: Stewardship of What We Inherit

Where The Gift works largely at the scale of the artist and the exchange, Common as Air moves to the scale of the polity, which makes it especially useful for considerations of AI. To take that step, Hyde returns to the American founders to recover an older understanding of ideas like commonwealth. Benjamin Franklin, when declining a patent on his open stove, reasoned that people who enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others should serve others with their own inventions “freely and generously” (Franklin, n.d., p. 55). Thomas Jefferson’s 1813 letter to Isaac McPherson supplies a parallel depiction of one person lighting a taper at another’s stove without darkening it (Jefferson, 1813).

Hyde’s invocation of the wider values of exchange turns on the observation that a commons has never meant a free-for-all. Many historical commons carried stinting rules and enforcement governing who could graze how many animals, in which places, and for how long (Ostrom, 1990). Cultural commons also require particular forms and standards of governance, because unqualified openness without reciprocity can become another form of extraction. As Hyde notes, the rules designed to protect creative property can fence off the very resources from which more widespread and shared future creation must draw.

Published in 2010, Common as Air anticipates a dispute that generative AI has since made urgent. Current copyright disputes with AI companies around training data ask who owes whom a licensing or usage fee. Yet this necessary legal and market question leaves a second question open. What obligations of replenishment, attribution, or reciprocity arise when firms build private advantage by drawing at scale on collectively produced language, images, code, and knowledge? Though Hyde does not settle the legal question, and a commons argument does not erase the rights of individual creators, he succeeds in exposing the institutional arithmetic that many licensing debates alone miss. Whereas lighting your taper at my stove costs me nothing when we are two people in a room, lighting several billion tapers and selling access to the resulting light changes the system even where the costs of access or copying remain cheap.

In a sign that the online realm is already responding, a global group of fifty leading researchers conducted an audit of roughly 14,000 web domains between 2023 and 2024 and found that more than 5% of all tokens in the widely used C4 corpus, and more than 28% of its most actively maintained sources, became fully restricted from crawling (Longpre et al., 2024). Though the audit does not establish a single motive for this move among publishers, creators, and site owners, it documents a growing withdrawal of permission, and the resulting weakening of the commons when participation becomes more and more structurally one-way.

Whether they name it or not, creative leaders sit inside this problem because decisions about what to train models on, license, attribute, share, or release under open terms are acts of commons governance. The choice extends well beyond open versus closed models or systems. Historically, commoners revised sparing rules as herds grew and soil thinned, and firms today should likewise vary what they ringfence according to the fragility of the resource, the distinctiveness of the advantage, and the reciprocity of the exchange. A blanket position taken by leaders in the direction of being either fully open or closed access to data usually signals that ideology has replaced attention to active deliberation of the specific case at hand.

A Primer for Forgetting, 2019: The Creative Work of Letting Go

Hyde’s most recent book turns memory inside out. Assembled in fragments that draw on Greek myth, instances of political reconciliation, and intimate family experiences, A Primer for Forgetting argues that forgetting deserves fuller standing in our individual and social lives alongside remembrance. Why? The logic is that every act of remembering also necessarily entails forgetting because attention to one thing requires letting countless others go, which makes forgetting an active condition of living in time (Hyde, 2019).

The creative core of his argument arrives through the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, who observed that, “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration” (quoted in Hyde, 2019, p. 15). Anyone who has made something difficult recognizes the state in which the self recedes as attention moves toward the work. Organizations now make that state unusually hard to sustain, because dashboards, notifications, quarterly attribution, searchable archives, and personal-brand maintenance keep both past performance and present identity continuously available even as the creative work highlighted by Bishop and Hyde often requires temporary release from each.

Digital systems do not literally possess human memory, and they can lose, overwrite, or fail to retrieve information. The more consequential shift, though, is that cheap storage and retrieval make organizational remembering the default, reversing a historical condition in which forgetting happened without explicit design (Mayer-Schönberger, 2009). Hyde’s discussion therefore connects unexpectedly to occasional efforts among management researchers to understand the dynamics of organizational forgetting (de Holan & Phillips, 2004). A challenge today exists because cheap and instant digital recall can produce an authority problem in which homogenized information can keep shaping choices simply by remaining searchable. Part of the work of creative leadership today must consequently include deciding which precedents deserve continued priority, which should become harder to retrieve, and which must be preserved because accountability depends on them.

This approach to forgetting also connects to the third loop of learning that I’ve previously discussed orients our current era of creative leadership (Slocum, 2025b). It is in that third loop that I locate collisions between the frameworks and assumptions of systems that cannot be straightforwardly revised or reconciled by simple integration or better execution into a single coherent and consistent model. If relearning must often wait on selective unlearning, Hyde’s forgetting supplies an essential missing verb for the process of learning and leadership today.

To engage in such forgetting nevertheless carries a double risk, since an organization that cannot release obsolete categories becomes captive to past precedent, while one that too easily forgets safety failures, ethical breaches, or hard-won craft knowledge condemns itself to repetition. Besides learning through the collisions of frameworks and assumptions without resolving them prematurely, Hyde thus helps us to understand that creative ambidexterity also involves intentional forgetting. The opportunity for leaders is to preserve what protects people and institutional integrity while loosening the past’s constraints on what those people and the organization can become.

The Practice Ahead: What Hyde Gives Us, and What He Does Not

Five trade-offs thread through Hyde’s writings, and none of them remains resolved for long when circumstances change. Leaders must decide how much of the enterprise remains unpriced, how loosely a team holds its theories, how much boundary-crossing a culture can absorb, what gets fenced and what stays open, and what an organization carries forward and what it lets go. While all leadership involves ongoing trade-offs, creative work under our current technological conditions is distinguished by terms that keep moving as the systems defining them collide. A leader weighing openness against enclosure in 2026 faces a question rewritten several times since 2022 by tools, business models, legal disputes, and cultural expectations that share no single governing logic.

Organizational ambidexterity research and paradox theory illuminate some of these persistent tensions, and Hyde adds a more granular provocation about circulation, consequence, commons, and forgetting. His writing also highlights the practice of resetting those boundaries while the work continues and, more importantly, learning from the collisions that make prior categories insufficient. The third-loop test is demanding, because leaders must recognize when a familiar trade-off has itself become a conflict between frameworks, kept more than one logic in view without forcing false coherence, and altered their own understanding of what the problem requires (Slocum, 2025b). Cast in this way, the concept of creative ambidexterity generates observable questions and makes no claim to empirical validation, which only future evidence can supply.

To be sure, Hyde’s writings also have their limits, and treating him as a management theorist, even of creative leadership, would flatten the very insights that make him original and provocative. His “cases” involve poets, artists, myths, gift societies, founders, and political memory, mostly considered at human scale, and he says little about capital allocation, regulatory governance, global supply chains, or how a listed company with twenty thousand employees might operationalize any of this. Even so, I am convinced that the claims drawn from his work need not remain metaphorical, because leaders can look for concrete effects on behavior and resource flows by asking some of the central questions that he poses in other contexts. For instance, whether unpriced exchange generates learning, whether protected dissent changes decisions, whether tighter enclosure reduces replenishment, and whether selective forgetting expands the option set without erasing safeguards.

As a result, Hyde’s categories become useful since they generate propositions that can be observed, compared, and revised in leadership practice. The required discipline for leaders wanting to benefit from his thinking lies in asking where a metaphor illuminates a mechanism and where it merely makes the speaker sound profound, a distinction central to leadership understood as ongoing craft development and set against framework consumption (Slocum, 2025a).

To contribute to leaders’ disciplined embrace of Hyde’s ideas, I’ve summarized five diagnostic questions from the five works being discussed here. What valuable thing moved through your organization last quarter without an invoice attached, and did your systems make such movement easier or harder? What happened to the last person who told a client or senior leader something unwelcome? What does your firm take from a cultural or knowledge commons, and what does it return? Which inherited category would open options by disappearing, and which piece of institutional memory would create danger by disappearing? Finally, what preparation lets someone in your firm recognize a lucky accident, and did it survive the last structural reorganization? Behind all these questions sits the same governance problem, which is who has the authority, incentives, and judgment to keep resetting the boundaries before efficiency or legacy assumptions set them by default.

The executives who called the gift economy a poet’s alibi mostly stop saying so after reflecting on their own work. Still, admittedly, Hyde solves none of their problems directly. In fact, an honest reading of his writings removes the comforting hope that any framework, policy, or AI model will provide simple resolution to leaders’ complex challenges. The value of his thinking nevertheless persists by making visible the conditions under which creative value circulates, surprises, disrupts, replenishes, and renews itself.

As the generation of ideas, solutions, alternatives, and finally value becomes more and more abundant, creative leadership acquires a different center of gravity in the judgment about which conditions deserve protection, which boundaries need moving, and which outputs merit becoming consequential. The greatest insight of Hyde’s writings may be that technology, markets, and habit will keep striking those organizational boundaries and balances automatically until leadership takes account of their dynamics and employs creative ambidexterity to choose and act differently.

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Doshi, A. R., & Hauser, O. P. (2024). Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content. Science Advances, 10(28), Article eadn5290. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adn5290

Edmondson, A. (2018). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.

Field, P. (2019). The crisis in creative effectiveness. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. https://ipa.co.uk/media/7699/ipa_crisis_in_creative_effectiveness_2019.pdf

Franklin, B. (n.d.). The autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. USHistory.org. https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page55.htm

Gibson, C. B., & Birkinshaw, J. (2004). The antecedents, consequences, and mediating role of organizational ambidexterity. Academy of Management Journal, 47(2), 209-226. https://doi.org/10.5465/20159573

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Among the more revealing workshop exercises I’ve run with creative leaders is a simple one: I ask them to draw a visual metaphor of their organization. The results are often entertaining and always instructive, for what they show about individual agencies or firms as much as for the range of images that recur across programs, industries, and geographies. Many participants sketch kitchens, theaters, bicycles, or airplanes (often in flight).

A striking number also draw versions of the elaborately reconceived interiors of the human body. The contrasts between bodily and machine-based or instrumental metaphors were captured well by British/Canadian organizational theorist Gareth Morgan, whose Images of Organization helpfully catalogued some of the most persistent and revealing lenses through which leaders understood the firms they ran (Morgan, 2006). Morgan’s inventory was, however, drawn from a world of an earlier generation in which organizations had relatively legible membranes.

Two decades of platform economics, distributed work, and ecosystem-based competition have produced organizational forms that resist any single-body analogy. Many firms today coordinate thousands of contributors without employing them, open-source communities whose participants span continents and legal jurisdictions, and supply networks whose interdependencies more closely resemble ecological webs than anatomical systems. The body metaphor therefore requires rethinking what the metaphor depicts inside (and potentially outside) the formal organizational boundary.

Yet reading a recent feature by Ohio State University educator and physician Avraham Z. Cooper in The New York Times Magazine, “The Astounding Discovery That Could Link Eastern and Western Medicine,” I found myself both recalling those workshop visualizations of culture and reconsidering what body-minded creative leaders may have been reaching for (Cooper, 2026). I also realized how the evolving understanding of bodies has added complexity to the potential parallels between the internal dynamics and ambient conditions of bodies and organizations alike.

The Times Magazine feature describes the interstitium, a fluid-filled, collagen-latticed network permeating the spaces between the human body’s organs, vessels, and connective tissues. Its prominence raises the provocative possibility that it is a ‘third circulatory system’ that may correspond to the meridian channels through which traditional Chinese medicine understood vital energy to flow, well before Western anatomists had identified the relevant connective tissue structures.

Just as the interstitium went unmapped because histologists prepared their slides in ways that collapsed the fluid-filled spaces they contained, management theory has overlooked the connective medium of organizational life by fixing its attention on the pathways through which formal resources move. Correcting that oversight requires replacing the familiar but impoverished nervous-system metaphor with a richer three-part biological triad, and asking what that substitution demands of the leaders who must work within it.

I. Beyond the Nervous System: A Three-System Lens

Management theory has long favored binary biological metaphors to map the firm, typically pairing the cardiovascular (resource or motivational flow) with the nervous system (command and control). Many of the body metaphors I’ve seen drawn default to this binary, with the “cardiovascular system,” driven by the creative heart of the inspirational creative leader, and the “nervous system” standing in for leadership’s capacity to process information and issue directives. Such a framing implicitly privileges a centralized “heart” or “brain” at the expense of the decentralized reality of modern work.

NYU Medical School professor (and student of Zen Buddhism) Neil Theise’s characterization of the interstitium as a body-wide, pre-lymphatic medium (one that drains into but precedes the lymphatic system) suggests a more sophisticated three-system lens that can correct this bias (Theise, 2023). In Theise’s account, which extends research he and others did previously with Rutgers professor of medicine Petros Benias, the interstitium is an active, pressurized matrix whose collagen-lattice architecture and fluid dynamics regulate what crosses tissue boundaries, at what rate, and under what chemical conditions (Benias et al., 2018). Using those words, the bodily structural description immediately invites organizational translation.

Translated into organizational terms, this triad reveals three organizational registers. The cardiovascular system maps onto the formal capital and budgeting architecture, the high-pressure delivery of explicit resources. The lymphatic system corresponds to the governance and compliance apparatus that identifies and purges cultural toxicity. Each system operates on a distinct temporal logic, the cardiovascular responding to quarterly pressure and the lymphatic to accumulated dysfunction, while the interstitium answers to a slower and more continuous rhythm that neither formal measurement nor periodic review reliably captures.

Operating on a still different register, the interstitium is the pervasive medium that underlies both. It forms a contiguous, pressurized space of social capital through which tacit knowledge, emergent norms, and early-warning signals propagate before they ever reach a formal channel. Replacing the centralized nervous-system metaphor with this triad is more than a semantic exercise; it reframes where a leader should actually be paying attention.

II. The Medium and Its Work

The practical consequences of that reframing depend on understanding what the interstitium actually is, grasped less as a conduit and more as a medium, and the distinction matters more than it might initially appear. In the biological sciences, a medium is the substance in which other substances are dissolved or suspended and through which signals propagate. It determines what signals can travel, how far, and with what fidelity; neither signal nor pipe, it is the precondition that makes both possible. Remove or degrade the medium and the signals distort or cease, regardless of how well the formal infrastructure is engineered.

Whereas official channels carry specified content, the interstitium conditions what content can exist and move at all. Distinguishing between the two is essential for any leader who wants to understand what is being communicated in their organization and, more fundamentally, what the organization is actually capable of communicating. When formal communication appears healthy even as morale and informal coordination are quietly deteriorating, the problem typically lies less in the content of the messages than in the degraded medium through which all content must pass.

Generalized to organizational life, this binding substrate is best understood as that which sustains the full range of what moves through an organization. This includes both content, certainly, and also feeling, belief, identity, and capital – in other words, every current that passes between people working together over time.

Biologically, the interstitium sustains the electrochemical conditions of ionic gradients, osmotic pressure, and pH balance that keep cells energized and capable of response; degrade that environment and the cellular machinery fails regardless of what information reaches it. It carries content alongside the animating charge that determines whether content, once received, can actually move people.

In fact, a healthy medium transmits these currents while preserving their integrity across distance and difference, absorbing shocks that would otherwise distort them, and maintaining the conditions under which informal as well as formal exchange remains possible. Neglect it and the pipes, however well engineered, begin carrying diminished, distorted, or simply false signals. Tend to it, and the organization retains a capacity for self-correction and renewal that no formal system can replicate on its own.

The interstitium’s architecture maps with notable precision onto the dimensions of social capital that organizational scholars have long studied. In the body, the collagen lattice is the bridging structure through which signaling molecules cross tissue boundaries without neural impulse or vascular pressure (Theise, 2023). This corresponds neatly to the bridging ties that connect otherwise disconnected groups within a firm, precisely the informal relationships that Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter famously identified as “weak ties,” through which non-redundant information travels fastest (Granovetter, 1973).

The gaps between those bridging ties, what University of Chicago strategy professor Ron Burt called “structural holes,” are the primary source of novel ideas and brokerage advantage within organizations, because whoever spans them commands a uniquely non-redundant view of the firm (Burt, 2004). The interstitial fluid itself represents relational social capital, encompassing the trust, shared norms, and reciprocal obligations that allow critical uncodified knowledge to diffuse through a network before it is ever codified, archived, or formally presented. Taken together, these dimensions constitute the organizational interstitium in its fullest sense, as a living condition of organizational life that is generative as well as supportive.

The legendary organizational form that most completely instantiates this description is W. L. Gore & Associates, whose founder Bill Gore called his non-hierarchical structure a “lattice” deliberately, and capped individual facilities at roughly 150 people to preserve the interstitial density on which the firm’s widely observed capacity for innovation appears to have depended (Shipper and Manz, 1992).

III. Reading and Tending the Interstitium

Because the organizational interstitium is generative as well as supportive, attending to it demands something more than periodic diagnostic scrutiny. The interstitium functions continuously, unconstrained by the calendar of crises or formal reviews, and the leader’s attentiveness to its signals must match that rhythm. That attentiveness needs to become a cultivated habit, practiced in the intervals between formal reviews as much as during them.

Cultural mutations can arrive as brilliant cross-unit innovations or as corrosive behavioral rot. They first appear in interstitial spaces, in hallway conversations, in cross-functional group chats, in the relationship between a project manager and a front-line engineer who may rarely appear together in any org chart. By the time such signals reach the lymphatic nodes of HR or compliance, they have often already crystallized into patterns that formal intervention struggles to reshape.

Sustaining awareness of these interdependencies also means attending to what the interstitium is not. The official knowledge management system, the all-hands memo, and the performance-review cycle are the pipes, not the medium. The effective leader, in this sense, is partly a plumber, someone who must know that the pipes are the right size and properly connected and that the surrounding medium remains clear and pressurized enough for anything to move through them at all.

Unglamorous as that maintenance work is, organizations that lack leaders willing to do it tend to discover the deficit at the worst possible moment, realizing it only when the pipes are carrying diminished or false signals and the damage has already set. When organizations pursue structural efficiency to the point of eliminating slack, they effectively desiccate the medium itself. The sociological analog to fibrosis, the pathological hardening that progressively replaces healthy tissue, is an organization in which trust has evaporated, lateral communication has calcified, and the early-warning capacity of informal networks has gone silent.

Few organizations, in practice, read and tend all three biological systems with anything approaching consistent fluency. To be sure, the cardiovascular flows of formal capital are tracked, debated, and optimized almost obsessively. The lymphatic work of cultural governance, meanwhile, receives periodic attention when dysfunction becomes visible. And while the interstitial fabric of social capital is often acknowledged in the language of values statements and engagement surveys, it is rarely monitored as the living, continuous condition it actually is.

General Motors’ NUMMI joint venture with Toyota in Fremont, California in the 1980s illustrates the dynamic with unusual clarity. GM transferred the physical plant, the job classifications, and Toyota’s training protocols intact. But could not transplant the interstitial layer of trust, nemawashi – the Japanese practice of building informal consensus before formal decisions – and reciprocal problem-solving that gave those formal elements their adaptive capacity (Adler, 1993). When the practices were subsequently reimported to other GM facilities, the pipes traveled, but the medium did not (Shook, 2010).

IV. Crossing Epistemic Registers: The Cross-Cultural Leader

NUMMI was, after all, a cross-cultural story before it was an operational one, and that dimension of the case points toward what the three-system biological triad offers beyond organizational maintenance: a richer framework for the increasingly demanding work of cultural translation. The formal machinery of Toyota’s production system traveled from Japan to Fremont intact; what it could not carry was the medium in which that system had been formed. Understanding why requires attending to how different professional traditions constitute organizational knowledge and how leaders might work, simultaneously, across more than one of them.

Traditional Chinese medicine’s meridian network, a system of pathways through which chi, or vital energy, was understood to flow, long preceded Western anatomy’s articulation of connective tissue and fascial planes. Emerging but still contested research raises the possibility that acupuncture’s meridian pathways may correspond to the interstitial fluid networks that Benias and Theise’s team mapped. Studies at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine found fluorescent dye migrating from one acupoint through interstitial spaces toward a corresponding point, though critics argue that the degree of anatomical alignment remains limited and replication is incomplete (Peeples, 2026; Novella, 2026).

Proceeding from opposite epistemological directions, one empirical and cellular, the other relational and experiential, these two traditions may be orienting toward the same substrate, even if the evidentiary case for their precise convergence has not yet been made. For leaders of distributed and cross-cultural teams, this convergence is more than a satisfying intellectual footnote. It suggests that frameworks for understanding organizational interdependence need not default to a single cultural template.

That Western preference for explicit and codified knowledge, which Japanese management scholars Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi canonically identified in distinguishing explicit from tacit knowing, is itself a cultural artifact, one that systematically undervalues the relational, embodied, and contextually embedded knowing that many East Asian, Middle Eastern, and other non-Western professional traditions cultivate and transmit through proximity and practice (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). Treating the interstitium as a space where these different epistemic registers interact and find common ground opens a more generative frame for leading teams whose members bring genuinely different intuitions about where organizational knowledge lives and how it travels.

Haier’s RenDanHeYi model was developed by founder Zhang Ruimin over two decades of deliberate organizational redesign. With a name that literally encodes the alignment of employee initiative with direct user value, the model offers the most architecturally explicit attempt to institutionalize this convergence of traditions. By dissolving the Chinese appliance firm’s vertical hierarchy into thousands of micro-enterprises linked by market mechanisms and informal reciprocity, Haier drew simultaneously on Western market theory and what Zhang described as relational organizational values rooted in Chinese management philosophy, thereby building an integrative structure whose coordinating tissue is, by design, interstitial (Hamel and Zanini, 2018).

That the firm is Chinese in origin but globally operating makes the example particularly apposite, since the model’s logic is intelligible from either epistemological direction. Practically, this means that the cross-cultural leader’s task includes maintaining the quality of informal exchange across cultural and geographic distance, the equivalent of preserving interstitial pressure in a distributed body. Distributed teams face a structural risk of interstitial dehydration, since asynchronous communication strips out the ambient, pre-linguistic signals (tone, timing, physical co-presence) that high-trust informal networks depend on.

Leaders who invest deliberately in the conditions of informal interaction, shared meals before formal negotiations, unstructured time at the margin of scheduled sessions, sustained mentorship relationships that cross cultural lines, are, in biological terms, maintaining the fluid substrate through which organizational intelligence actually circulates.

V. A Fourth System: Digital Infrastructure and the Extended Organizational Body

The structural bias toward explicit over tacit knowledge, which I’ve just discussed in terms of cross-cultural frames, operates at a different magnitude when digital platforms mediate most organizational exchange. Most organizations do not fully reckon with the implications of this effect. Systems optimized for the legible, the measurable, and the transmissible tend to crowd out the relational and the contextual, and they do so most aggressively in exactly the interstitial spaces where cross-cultural meaning-making depends on something more than the efficient delivery of content.

Over the past decade, organizations have acquired a fourth system running alongside the biological three, a digital and increasingly AI-enabled infrastructure through which a growing share of organizational life now moves. These same infrastructures have also enabled organizational forms that challenge the body analogy at its foundation, among them platform ecosystems and distributed communities for whom the question is less how to tend an internal medium than how to maintain relational coherence across a topology with no clear edge.

For such organizations, the interstitial question shifts from boundary maintenance to something more existentially precarious: how to sustain enough relational coherence across a permeable topology to keep any body in being at all. Sustaining that coherence is a challenge the extended four-system frame can diagnose even as the prosthetic body substantially reshapes it.

Digital platforms have created something that functions, in anatomical terms, as a synthetic interstitium, an always-on connective fabric of platforms, repositories, and feeds that expands the surface area of informal and semi-formal exchange well beyond what physical co-presence alone can sustain. Slack threads carry the lateral, pre-lymphatic signaling that once required proximity; shared documents accumulate the sediment of past human judgment in ways that make it partially legible; cross-functional dashboards surface interdependencies that org charts conceal.

The synthetic interstitium does real work. The risk is that it also introduces a structural rigidity that appears fluid but actually routes knowledge along predetermined paths, a kind of structural scarring at the organizational level, gradually substituting the organization’s own map of itself for the territory the map was meant to represent.

Artificial intelligence complicates this further, and the complication deepens in proportion to how widely AI is deployed. Within the governance apparatus that the lymphatic analogy maps, AI increasingly plays an augmentative role: filtering, pattern-matching, and surfacing anomalies that the formal architecture would otherwise miss. That capability is real and, managed well, augments the leader’s perceptual range in ways that would have been practically impossible a decade ago.

Viewed more critically, AI also operates as a new kind of interstitial pressure system that most organizational leaders do not yet have the instruments to monitor. Large language models and agentic AI systems (those capable of initiating and completing multi-step tasks without continuous human direction) circulate today through organizational bodies in ways that parallel the pre-lymphatic, pre-formal signaling of the biological interstitium.

Increasingly, these technologies shape how documents are drafted before anyone reviews them, influencing which ideas surface in research workflows and shifting the register of communications before they reach a human decision point. Most organizations have neither the instruments to see this influence at work nor, as yet, the vocabulary to describe its cumulative effect on the organizational tissue it traverses.

VI. How Digital Infrastructure Erodes Informal Trust

That invisibility is not incidental; it describes a structural condition in which organizational erosion advances precisely where standard diagnostics are least sensitive. Much of this activity is, like the interstitium itself before the publication of the groundbreaking paper by Petros Benia, Neil Theise, and a team of researchers in 2018, simply not visible on the standard diagnostic slides.

When a large language model shapes the first draft of a strategic memo, or when enterprise search algorithms determine which precedents surface in a policy discussion, the shaping of organizational judgment has already begun before any human reviews, routes, or decides. That pre-decisional influence is structurally interstitial: it operates below the threshold of deliberate scrutiny, at the very juncture where tacit judgment and institutional memory once did their most important work.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s sustained research on device-mediated interaction documents a measurable erosion of the conversational capacity on which informal trust-building depends, as the ambient availability of digital platforms systematically displaces the slower and more generative exchanges of face-to-face life (Turkle, 2015). The structural damage this implies at scale is confirmed by Longqi Yang and Microsoft colleagues’ study of over sixty thousand employees at the company, which found that the shift to remote work rendered collaboration networks significantly more siloed, reducing precisely the cross-group bridging weak ties that Granovetter had identified as the carriers of non-redundant information (Yang et al., 2022).

This erosion of conversational capacity is not exclusively a product of digital platforms; formal performance architectures can operate with the same pre-decisional logic, shaping which informal exchanges are worth attempting before any specific decision demands them.

The Microsoft case offers an instructive illustration from both ends of the problem. Guided by then HR Chief Lisa Brummel, the company dismantled stack ranking in November 2013, several months before Satya Nadella’s appointment as CEO. This move recognized that a formal performance management system had been desiccating the interstitial substrate for over a decade by rewarding employees for undermining lateral colleagues and so deliberately closing the structural holes through which non-redundant information travels (Wingfield, 2013). Yang and his team’s later study of the same organization found significantly siloed post-pandemic collaboration networks, tracing remote work’s structural analog to the same pathology that stack ranking had produced from within. Put simply, the medium, already thinned, thinned further.

These are not marginal effects. The collagen lattice thins as bridging ties weaken, structural holes close, and the interstitial fluid carrying relational trust and situated judgment slows or stops. They describe, in sum, a structural dynamic in which digital infrastructure, optimized for the transmission of specified content, progressively degrades the relational substrate that determines what content is worth transmitting in the first place.

Coordinating four systems when three of the biological ones remain incompletely understood demands both conceptual clarity and genuine organizational humility. The specific risk that warrants emphasis is displacement, since the digital infrastructure is faster, more legible, and more measurable than the social one, and organizations under pressure will predictably migrate toward what they can see and count. Efficiency gains are real. The amplification of the Western epistemic bias noted earlier is also real, because systems built to optimize the transmission of explicit, codified content will, by design, underweight the relational and contextual currents that the living interstitium carries.

What is lost, quietly and cumulatively, is the quality of trust, relational texture, and embodied attunement between people that no algorithmic system can synthesize. The practical injunction is therefore one of deliberate priority. Leaders who understand the interstitial frame will use digital and AI tools to amplify the living medium: deploying AI to surface informal signals that might otherwise go unread, using digital infrastructure to extend the reach of high-trust relationships across distance, and insisting that the velocity and convenience of synthetic networks never become an excuse for the atrophy of the human ones.

VII. Leadership as Stewardship of the Medium

The four-system frame, precisely because it complicates any simple reading of organizational health, shifts the operative question from “How do we build better pipes?” to “How do we sustain the quality of the medium through which everything moves?” A healthy organizational interstitium acts as a shock absorber, allowing the firm to absorb market volatility, strategic pivots, and personnel disruption without the internal organs (the functions, the teams, the customer relationships) suffering mechanical failure.

This means attending to what Harvard public policy professor Robert Putnam called the social infrastructure of trust, reciprocity, and norms of cooperation as a core operating condition (Putnam, 2020), cultivating it with a constancy that neither quarterly reviews nor annual culture surveys can provide.

Ongoing awareness, in this sense, is itself a leadership competency, and one that grows harder to sustain as the synthetic body becomes more elaborate and its signals more insistent. The cardiovascular flows can be read in a spreadsheet; the lymphatic can be audited; the digital-AI layer produces its own dashboards and diagnostics. The interstitial itself resists all of these instruments. The leader capable of reading financial flows, monitoring compliance health, tracking digital network patterns, and still making time for the unscripted conversation preserves a perceptual range that each system, taken alone, cannot provide.

Its condition shows up in the quality of an unscripted conversation, in a junior colleague’s willingness to volunteer a dissenting observation before a mixed group, in the trust that those closest to a problem extend to those with authority over it. These are the signals that matter most and travel least well through prescribed pathways, which is exactly why the leader who neglects them in favor of the measurable will be caught, time and again, by what the medium was carrying all along.

That two traditions so distant in method, time, and cultural orientation could illuminate the same living substrate is itself a model for the cross-cultural leader who must hold multiple registers of knowing, valuing, and relating to others and to oneself simultaneously. Benias and Theise’s science and the traditional knowledge frameworks that the The New York Times Magazine places beside it point toward a common practical imperative whose logic those early classroom drawings were already reaching toward.

That call is for leaders to practice systemic awareness continuously in the spaces that no instrument fully captures, attending to what flows between the structures they can name, sustaining the pressure, and keeping the medium clear. Tending that circulation of energy remains, finally, the work that Eastern and Western traditions alike have mapped but neither has fully mastered.

References

Paul S. Adler (1993) “The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’: New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.,” eds. Barry M. Staw and Larry L. Cummings, Research in Organizational Behavior, Vol. 15, JAI Press, pp. 111-194.

Petros C. Benias, Rebecca G. Wells, Bridget Sackey-Aboagye, Heather Klavan, Jason Reidy, Darren Buonocore, Markus Miranda, Susan Kornacki, Michael Wayne, David L. Carr-Locke, and Neil D. Theise (2018) “Structure and Distribution of an Unanticipated Interstitium in Human Issues,” Scientific Reports, 8(1), 4947; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23062-6

Ronald S. Burt (2004) “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology, 110(2), 349-399; https://doi.org/10.1086/421787

Avraham Z. Cooper (2026, May 11) “The Human Body’s Hidden Pathways,” The New York Times Magazine; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/11/magazine/interstitium-anatomy-acupuncture-medicine.html

Mark S. Granovetter (1973, May) “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380; https://doi.org/10.1086/225469

Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini (2018, November–December) “The End of Bureaucracy,” Harvard Business Review; https://hbr.org/2018/11/the-end-of-bureaucracy

Gareth Morgan (2006) Images of Organization, Updated ed., SAGE Publications.

Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, Oxford University Press.

Steven Novella (2026, May 13) “NYT Epic Fail on Acupuncture,” Science-Based Medicine; https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/nyt-epic-fail-on-acupuncture/

Lynne Peeples (2026, March 4) “What’s the Science Behind Acupuncture?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 123(10), e2605301123; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2605301123

Robert D. Putnam (2020) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Rev. and expanded ed., Simon & Schuster.

Frank Shipper and Charles C. Manz (1992) “Employee Self-Management Without Formally Designated Teams: An Alternative Road to Empowerment,” Organizational Dynamics, 20(3), 48–61; https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(92)90024-H

John Shook (2010) “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI,” MIT Sloan Management Review, 51(2), 63-68; https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-to-change-a-culture-lessons-from-nummi/

Neil D. Theise (2023) Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, Spiegel & Grau.

Sherry Turkle (2015) Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin Press.

Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce, Neha Shah, Kevin Sherman, Brent Hecht, and Jaime Teevan (2022) “The Effects of Remote Work on Collaboration Among Information Workers,” Nature Human Behaviour, 6(1), 43-54; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

Nick Wingfield (2013, November 13) “Microsoft Abolishes its Employee Evaluation System,” The New York Times;https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/microsoft-abolishes-employee-evaluation-system/

“War breeds tyrants.” These words appear in the closing of a carefully written essay by British author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue in the New York Review of Books. The argument leading to the short sentence is historically grounded and emotionally compelling. Put briefly, the US-Israeli campaign against Iran, far from liberating an oppressed population, has delivered the Islamic Republic the gifts of legitimate grievance, nationalist consolidation, and the cover of existential threat to crush dissent that was already being crushed (de Bellaigue, 2026).

Drawing powerfully on the precedent of the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup that toppled the hugely popular Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh on Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s 1956 poem “Winter,” de Bellaigue makes a genuinely important case that external military force can freeze political possibility as surely as it destroys infrastructure.

A sharper question raised by the essay, “Iran’s New Winter,” is whether war breeds tyrants or amplifies what was already latent in a political order or leader. The Islamic Republic’s authoritarianism preceded the recent conflict by four decades; what the current war has supplied is the ultimate authorization for concentrating power embodied in the enemy at the gate. De Bellaigue argues that the attacking powers did not export emergency logic to the country so much as catalysed it.

Moreover, as I’ll claim here, the U.S. and Israel themselves arrived already organized according to many of the structural mechanics of permanent crisis. Their military campaign then produced exactly the renewed adversary that garrison-state democracies structurally require and whose belligerence retroactively validates the permanent-exception apparatus those states had spent decades assembling. While war breeds tyrants, de Bellaigue observes, the deeper pattern we need to recognize is that the states that launched this war had already been breeding tyrannical dynamics of their own.

Nearly a century ago, German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt grasped that pattern’s theoretical structure with uncomfortable clarity. In The Concept of the Political, the argued that the sovereign’s definitive act is the designation of an enemy, the friend/enemy distinction constituting the very essence of politics. When political communities define themselves through existential opposition, pluralism gives way to mobilization and hesitation begins to look like betrayal. Schmitt’s more deeply unsettling claim was that democracies deploy the same logic with greater sophistication and more durable institutional cover (Schmitt, 1932/2007).

In the early 2000s, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception traces the historical process by which that act ceased to be exceptional at all. The temporary suspension of normal legal order, invoked in genuine emergency and retained as convenient technique, had become the dominant paradigm of governance itself in advanced democracies. However, the exception does not resolve back into the norm; it progressively displaces it, maintaining the outward forms of constitutional government while emptying them of the constraints those forms were designed to impose. In other words, the emergency becomes institutionalized (Agamben, 2005).

At a time when the leadership is modeled and exercised across different sectors and institutions, my claim here is that the same structural logic governs the organizations and executives who build their authority around manufactured crises.

I. The Logic of the Permanent Enemy

Invoking Schmitt requires a precision his original admirers did not observe. My turn to his analytical framework here carries no endorsement of his politics, which led him to serve as the Nazi regime’s constitutional theorist. For me, his value is diagnostic, since he named, with greater candor than much of the liberal tradition has provided, the friend/enemy mechanism that constitutional democracies have also proven entirely capable of deploying.

Recent writing about democratic backsliding arrives at a similar structural conclusion through empirical rather than theoretical means. Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die (2018) and Johns Hopkins’ Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy (2018) both document how constitutional democracies erode through the incremental displacement of oversight mechanisms, with each emergency furnishing authorization for the next accumulation of executive power, with no rupture required. Their convergence on a similar structural conclusion itself illuminates the phenomenon they independently describe.

These more recent arguments also push away from a post-World War Two European political culture that defined itself, in large part, against this very calculus. While German and American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s probing analysis of totalitarianism documented how fear dissolves judgment into obedience, her critique reaches further (Arendt, 1951/2025).

Her extension of the concept of natality, of humans being born into this world, drew a connection between the capacity of citizens to initiate genuinely new political beginnings not already scripted by prevailing power arrangements (Arendt, 1958/2018). With it, she identified both the institutional constraints that authoritarian emergency governance systematically destroys and, more importantly, the democratic capacity for origination itself.

French philosopher Raymond Aron approached the same problem from a more strategic vantage. In his memoirs, he famously acknowledged that, in politics, “one chooses one’s enemies, one doesn’t choose one’s allies [“[en politique] on choisit ses adversaires, on ne choisit pas ses alliés”] (Aron, 1983, p. 119). His more probing argument, however, was that once a state defines its identity through permanent existential opposition, proportionality becomes unanswerable from within that identity’s own categories. Every constraint on force appears as a concession to the enemy, and the political community organized around permanent threat cannot reliably distinguish the force that defends it from the force that constitutes it (Aron, 1954/1955; Aron, 1966/2003).

The post-September 11 United States provides a ready real-world example of this theoretical landscape. The USA PATRIOT Act, warrantless surveillance programs, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, prolonged armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan following U.S. invasions, and the dramatic expansion of presidential war powers all emerged from a constitutional democracy invoking an existential enemy (Cole and Lobel, 2007).

The Iraq War Authorization for Use of Military Force, or “AUMF,” passed in 2002, has since authorized military operations across dozens of countries through four successive administrations. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented that expanding jurisdictional sprawl with each administration’s discovery of its convenience, such as when it was used to justify the killing of a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani, in 2020 (Ebright, 2023).

Bush and Cheney did not become tyrants in a traditionally recognizable sense, but they bequeathed their successors a machinery of executive power that each subsequent administration found convenient to inherit and extend. The framing authorizes and the exception accumulates over time.

I am convinced that conversion is not limited to political leaders. Corporate executives have deployed the same logic, framing competitive pressures as existential threats, internal dissent as ideological subversion, and the consolidation of executive authority as the only rational response to permanent emergency. To be clear, by making such a claim, I am not suggesting that all business – or political – emergencies are manufactured. Genuine competitive disruptions, safety failures, and liquidity crises warrant directive and concentrated leadership response.

The question that concerns me is whether that concentration is released once the acute threat passes or retained and extended as a mode of governance. My aim in the following is to pursue that parallel deliberately, moving between political and corporate cases not to draw superficial analogies but to demonstrate that the structural mechanics are shared.

II. Danger as Infrastructure

That view has precedent in the permanent mobilization extending beyond the state that French philosopher Paul Virilio originally theorized, in part with Sylvère Lotringer, a half-century ago (Virilio, 1977/2006). Virilio’s central argument was that modern societies have reorganized themselves around the permanent anticipation of war rather than war as a discrete event, military logic colonizing economic, technological, and civic life from within.

His concept of pure war, developed in sustained dialogue with Lotringer, describes not a conflict but a persisting condition. The total mobilization of social institutions around a threat can never fully be resolved (think of an enemy having the capacity to launch nuclear weapons) because the threat itself never fully arrives or materializes (Virilio and Lotringer, 1983/2008). Contemporary corporate life absorbed its mechanics with remarkable efficiency, and the absorption has proven so complete that its most prominent practitioners now openly advocate for it.

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, argues in The Technological Republic that Western liberal democracies have compromised their security by allowing technology sectors to become indifferent to national defense (Karp and Zamiska, 2025). Whatever one makes of the policy prescription, the book is a remarkable cultural document: here is a leading Silicon Valley executive calling, without apparent irony, for precisely the security-technology integration that political scientist and communications theorist Harold D. Lasswell had identified, eight decades earlier, as the structural signature of “garrison state” governance.

The garrison state, proposed by Lasswell in 1941, is a developmental construct” that operates through a specific mechanism. His formulation was that modern states could shift from the dominance of “specialists on bargaining” to the supremacy of “specialists on violence” through a gradual, fear-driven reordering of priorities, with no rupture required (Lasswell, 1941). “The socialization of danger” by states was the key mechanism by which threat becomes ambient and populations come to accept, and eventually demand, the prioritization of security over other competing values.

A fuller explanation of the institutional mechanisms that sustain this process emerged in the late-Cold War 1980s and has continued since. As historian Andrew Bacevich writes, the U.S. military posture throughout this era reflects a structural commitment to ongoing intervention – predominantly in the Middle East – that serve insitutional interests, including defense contractors, career officers, and congressional constituencies, far more reliably than any coherent strategic objective (Bacevich, 2016). The war does not end, put bluntly, because too many actors benefit from its continuation.

Corporate leaders who restructured their organizations around threat-response architectures during these same years, frequently relying on the rhetoric of downsizing as the basis of competitive survival, were drawing on the same institutional logic, applied to market position rather than national security.

Many business leaders now follow an analogous logic through which the instability that justified an executive’s consolidation of authority becomes the instability that authority requires in order to persist. As I’ve explored elsewhere, digital platforms have in recent decades since thoroughly socialized anxiety and danger, making ordinary citizens active participants in their own securitization (Slocum, 2026). Platform architectures designed to maximize engagement discovered that threat, outrage, and the perception of existential danger generate the strongest and most durable user responses, producing an attention economy structurally biased toward the amplification of emergency.

Meta’s own internal research, spotlighted during whistleblower Frances Haugen’s later congressional testimony, documented that posts receiving angry-emoji reactions were shown in feeds at five times the rate of less emotionally charged content, a design dynamic that the company’s engineers had identified and that leadership declined to correct because the engagement it generated was too commercially valuable (Horwitz and Seetharaman, 2020). The platforms require no ideological commitment to securitization; fear generates engagement, and engagement is what the business model requires.

These algorithmic systems now reward content that heightens threat perception, and users sorted into self-reinforcing informational enclaves circulate and intensify narratives of danger that would previously have required coordinated state resources to sustain. The socialization of danger has been outsourced, at algorithmic speed and scale, to citizens who experience the process as autonomous expression. In democratic systems, the result is populations who actively demand the emergency measures Schmitt’s sovereign was once required to impose. Surveillance architectures, exceptional legal powers, and the identification of enemies, all emerge as responses to threats that citizens themselves have helped construct and amplify.

Today’s digital garrison state no longer requires a garrison mentality handed down from above. It is crowdsourced from below, through billions of micro-interactions on platforms whose business model depends on the continuous renewal of anxiety.

III. Crisis as Episode

Understanding what happens when leaders internalize that dynamic requires distinguishing between two fundamentally different relationships to crisis. Conditions framed as survival-level threats reliably produce leaders who centralize authority and suppress internal dissent. Total industrial-era mobilization tends to concentrate authority at the apex of command hierarchies, suppresses dissent as incompatible with organizational survival, and derives its institutional coherence from the clarity of a total threat. That model is, in Lasswell’s terms, the organizational form that garrison-state logic most naturally generates, and its structural mechanics, as de Bellaigue observes, have historically proven compatible with the breeding of tyrants.

West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s management of the 1977 “German Autumn” illustrates the contrasting episodic model at political scale. When the Red Army Faction simultaneously kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer and hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181, Schmidt assembled a crisis committee, imposed tight information controls, and made the consequential decision to deploy the GSG 9 counterterrorism unit to Mogadishu, securing the passengers’ safe release.

Once the acute threat passed, Schmidt explicitly rejected calls to institutionalize expanded emergency powers as a permanent counter-terrorism posture. Instead, he argued that constitutional democracy’s proper response to terrorism was to stabilize and strengthen its institutions rather than suspend them. The enemy was definable in this case, the tactics employed by authority were directive and bounded, and the emergency remained an episode. Afterwards, he returned to longer-term work of economic management and NATO strategy (Hanshew, 2012).

More recent emergencies, distributed and ambiguous by nature, have likewise rewarded leaders who distribute authority rather than concentrate it. Former U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal’s reconstruction of Joint Special Operations Command after 2004, documented in Team of Teams, is a revealing organizational case study of its time (McChrystal, et al., 2015). It begins with an elite military force discovering that traditional command concentration was actively degrading the adaptive response the environment required, and details the systematic dismantling of it in favor of networked, distributed decision-making.

The question for any leader operating under genuine crisis conditions is whether the emergency is real, the concentration of authority temporary, and the organization’s capacity for distributed judgment rebuilt once the acute threat passes. Consider examples from leadership in the corporate realm.

Johnson & Johnson’s 1982 Tylenol crisis is the commercial archetype. When cyanide-laced capsules killed seven people in Chicago, CEO James Burke withdrew 31 million bottles from the marketplace voluntarily, accepted short-term costs estimated at $100 million, and communicated with regulators and the public with complete transparency. The authority was directive and the mandate explicitly bounded. Once tamper-proof packaging was deployed and consumer trust restored, Burke returned the company to its normal governance structures (Schulz and Schultz, 1990). The emergency remained an episode.

As further illustration of the wider pattern, Andy Grove’s management of Intel’s DRAM collapse under Japanese competition in the mid-1980s is likewise clear. Grove drove the company’s pivot to microprocessors with near-unilateral authority, explicitly intolerant of internal dissent when survival was at stake (Grove, 1996). Once the strategic pivot was secured, Intel returned to more distributed decision-making and built the organizational capacity that outlasted Grove’s own tenure. The emergency served transformation and then subsided.

Grove’s pivot became the practitioner archetype for what Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz explored, in a widely read 2011 blogpost, as the “wartime CEO.” This is the leader who demands singular focus, tolerates no distraction from the survival priority, and treats procedural dissent as a luxury the organization cannot afford in extremis (Horowitz, 2011). Horowitz’s typology captures the behavioral repertoire that genuine existential threat can legitimately require, and his Grove-centered examples make that case persuasively.

Ironically, his discussion of CEOs leaves largely unaddressed the capacity it most needs to specify. What allows the leader, that is, to recognize when the war has ended and return the organization to the distributed governance that peacetime conditions reward. That transition, from wartime concentration of paranoia, intensity, and authority back to peacetime creativity, distribution, and big, hairy, audacious goals, is precisely the capacity the many leaders appear conspicuously to lack.

Maersk’s response to the NotPetya cyberattack provides a further parallel. The 2017 ransomware destroyed the Danish shipping company’s IT infrastructure across 130 countries overnight. In response, leadership imposed directive emergency control, communicated openly with customers and investors about the scale of the disruption, and rebuilt 45,000 PCs and 4,000 servers within ten days – before returning to distributed governance. While the crisis absorbed an estimated $870 million in losses, Maersk’s institutional integrity remained intact because the emergency was treated as a bounded episode rather than a rationale for lasting centralization (Greenberg, 2018).

In each of these corporate leadership cases – Tylenol’s tainted product, Intel’s price-competitive displacement, Maersk’s ransomware destruction – the enemy was bounded, external, and in principle resolvable. Their defeat could be recognized, the emergency declared over, and the authority used to address it returned or redistributed.

Boeing’s recent history illustrates a related if potentially more long-term failure mode on the brink of becoming permanent. The 737 MAX certification crisis was a genuine engineering emergency that warranted exactly the kind of directive, accountability-focused response Grove exercised at Intel. Yet under CEO Dennis Muilenburg, the company chose perception management over engineering accountability, sustaining the fiction of normalcy through successive earnings calls while the organizational dysfunction underlying the crashes went unaddressed (Robison, 2021).

Mishandling real emergencies can produce institutional and reputational damage as long-lasting as manufactured ones. The difference is that mishandled genuine crises eventually force a reckoning that manufactured ones are specifically designed to defer.

IV. Crisis as Identity

An instructive corporate example is Travis Kalanick’s tenure as CEO at Uber in the 2010s. From its founding, Uber organized its cultural identity around permanent disruption, framing regulatory frameworks not as legitimate public-interest constraints but as the weaponized resistance of entrenched incumbents. Kalanick’s internal culture codified this posture through norms that encouraged corporate infighting and long work hours, deliberately blurring the boundary between genuine competitive threat and manufactured existential emergency.

The permanent-crisis culture had sheltered a deeper organizational dysfunction that was exposed initially in early 2017 by engineer Susan Fowler’s whistleblowing account of systematic harassment at the company (Fowler, 2017). A series of other revelations then precipitated an independent investigation that returned a withering report in June about Uber’s toxic culture. Kalanick took a leave and ultimately resigned, after which it became clear that the grueling “bro culture” he engendered had consumed the company’s capacity to distinguish its actual adversaries from the ones its leadership required in order to govern (Isaac, 2020).

Elon Musk’s trajectory makes that threshold even more visible by crossing it. His account of the 2018 “production hell” for the Tesla Model 3, sleeping on factory floors and publicly dismissing executives who could not sustain the required pace, deployed military registers that were, in that moment, neither unfamiliar nor necessarily inappropriate for a company genuinely at risk (Vance, 2015; Duhigg, 2018).

However, following his 2022 acquisition of Twitter, which was rebranded as X, the deployment of emergency actions metastasized beyond any tethering to operational reality. Mass layoffs were framed as the removal of ideological enemies and wasteful non-contributors. Content moderation changes, in particular, were justified through an explicit friend/enemy discourse in which constraints on speech represented an assault by “the woke mind virus” (Schiffer, 2024).

By 2025, Musk’s role in the U.S. Government heading DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) reproduced the same outcomes at a national scale. Mass terminations framed as the purging of ideological opponents, institutional oversight characterized as hostile capture, and each successive accumulation of authority justified by a permanent emergency posture. Rather than institutional counterweights performing legitimate oversight functions, Inspectors general, career civil servants, and entire federal agencies were characterized as enemy combatants embedded within the state, their procedural resistance treated as evidence of the ideological capture DOGE had been deployed to reverse.

Musk and Trump, a specialist in technology and a specialist in political mobilization, embodied the garrison-state logic theorized decades earlier by Lasswell. To an unsettling degree, each amplified the other’s emergency claims, with an algorithmically primed public as their shared infrastructure. The enemies that sustain such crisis-as-identity are typically different in kind from those that episodic leaders face. They are internal, ideological, and structurally inexhaustible, requiring continuous rediscovery because any single defeat would end the emergency that justifies the authority.

When permanent crisis hardens from phase into fixed identity, leaders concentrate authority and render opposition illegitimate in advance while borrowing from the same Schmittian calculus that authoritarian regimes employ at far greater human cost. Agamben’s analysis further explains the durability of the approach by explaining that once the exception has been institutionalized as technique, the leader who dismantles it loses the authority the exception was generating.

Crisis as the basis of fixed identity marks a form of pure war at the organizational level. The condition is genuinely self-perpetuating by re-building organizations built around permanent emergency cannot function in its absence, and leadership committed to that identity cannot relinquish it without relinquishing the authority the emergency generates. Once the exception is institutionalized as technique, as Agamben’s analysis makes precise, dismantling it requires the leader to acknowledge that the emergency was, at least in part, a governance choice. That acknowledgment is exactly what the identity forecloses.

The organization does not merely sustain the emergency; it becomes incapable of imagining institutional life without it. What began as a leadership posture hardens into an organizational grammar, one that can no longer parse the difference between genuine threat and manufactured necessity – and that renders the board intervention, the regulatory correction, or the electoral defeat the only available exits.

V. The Pattern Confirmed

The political orders that launched the campaign against Iran had already internalized precisely that structural dynamic, which is what made the war, in their terms, an asset to be managed as much as a crisis to be resolved. When corporate emergency identity merges with state power, as in the configuration of Musk and the executive branch that I just described, the distinction between organizational and political emergency manufacturing collapses into a single governing logic.

At the national scale, however, the stakes of that collapse are categorically different: the enemies designated are populations rather than competitors, the exceptions authorized carry lethal institutional and military force, and the oversight mechanisms being dismantled are the ones that mark the boundary between constitutional governance and its authoritarian alternatives.

That structural dynamic is what Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic political posture had embodied long before the first attack on Iranian targets in February 2026. Striking out at existential threats has become a politically self-perpetuating exception for the longtime Israeli Prime Minister, whose authority to take action requires the emergency it claims only to respond to. When he began his push in 2023 to subordinate Israel’s Supreme Court to parliamentary control, for example, he triggered the most serious constitutional crisis in the country’s history (Kershner, 2023).

The reform was framed in terms of sovereign prerogative against a judiciary characterized as an enemy of democratic will, and it proceeded while the Prime Minister faced corruption indictments in three separate criminal cases. The Schmittian calculus was precise, using an electoral majority to neutralize the institutional check most capable of constraining executive emergency power.

Scholarship on Israeli militarism has documented how defense, civil, and technological institutions have become so thoroughly intertwined that military logic organizes civilian economic and political life from within (Ben-Eliezer, 1998; Sheffer and Barak, 2010). In fact, expanding their focus on militarism in Israeli society, political scientists Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak turned to examine the broader category of informal yet deeply-rooted security networks that shape the country’s culture and politics (Sheffer and Barak, 2013). Amidst other specific drivers and motivations, the war with Iran can be viewed as a natural expression of those longstanding networks, not as an interruption of it.

The same structural pattern characterizes Donald Trump’s domestic posture in the U.S. His second administration’s systematic expansion of executive emergency authority through the designation of internal enemies as the constitutive act of governance, and the progressive erosion of the legislative, judicial, and journalistic oversight mechanisms most capable of constraining the accumulation of power (Cole and Lobel, 2007; Esman, 2007).

What arguably distinguishes Trump’s construction of permanent emergency is its procedural sophistication and its reliance on continuous enemy rotation. Whereas an earlier generation of executive overreach remained largely reactive, often responding to identifiable events, Trump’s second administration has systematically converted episodic challenges into an unbroken existential emergency. Consider the framing of immigration flows became an “invasion” authorizing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 or trade imbalances constituing a civilizational competition requiring wartime executive discretion or judicial rulings becoming evidence of hostile institutional capture.

In each instance, the designated enemy was never fixed long enough to be resolved, ensuring the emergency remained perpetually renewable. That rotation is itself an essential aspect of the mechanism. When one category of threat approaches resolution or loses salience, another is identified, each iteration further normalizing the executive’s prerogative to name the emergency and define the adversary, independently of the institutional frameworks designed to constrain exactly that power.

Both leaders arrived at this war already operating according to the Schmittian calculus they shared, albeit in different registers, with the regime they attacked. The amplification thesis which I noted earlier finds its most disturbing expression in these parallels. The United States and Israel, that is, were not democracies reluctantly militarizing in response to genuine external threat.

They were garrison-state democracies, already exhibiting significant authoritarian tendencies domestically, for whom the military campaign produced exactly the outcome most structurally useful to their internal power arrangements. A strengthened Iranian adversary whose renewed belligerence validates the permanent-threat logic allows the the cycle to confirm and perpetuate itself.

This convergence is precisely what Lasswell’s socialization of danger anticipates and Virilio’s permanent mobilization explains. Iran has been delivered a new winter, colder than anything since 1953 and inarguably more difficult for the Iranian people. At the same time, the attacking powers’ own democratic institutions entered this episode already weakened by the same concentrated-authority calculus they claimed to be projecting outward.

As I’ve suggested, the same structural dynamic governs corporate executives who have make permanent crisis the condition of their authority. Each requires an adversary, whether geopolitical, competitive, or internal, credible enough to justify the power the emergency produced.

VI. The Wall Before Our Eyes

De Bellaigue’s closing moral observation in “Iran’s New Winter” stands, pointing to Trump’s and Netanyahu’s genuine responsibility for deepening the suffering of people who had already suffered enormously. His final image, of a society in which the wall of dark cloud before the eyes admits no greeting, no acknowledgment, and no outstretched hand, applies with uncomfortable precision beyond Tehran.

What the essay’s theoretical scaffolding shows is that the image describes the political psychology of the attackers as much as the condition of the attacked. Put simply, leaders who need the emergency to govern have internalized the same structural logic. Once their manufactured threat validates concentrated authority, concentrated authority produces the friction and resistance that justify further emergency measures, and the cycle self-confirms.

Foreclosed by this cycle is the democratic capacity for origination, for political beginnings not already scripted by the emergency’s own terms. Strategic rationality (and the resistance it produces) collapses as survival logic renders every constraint on force a concession to the enemy. The social body becomes colonized by mobilization logic until the declared war cannot be distinguished from the political order it claims to defend.

As I’ve repeatedly suggested, that same political psychology is not confined to geopolitics. The tech executives who build the platforms that socialize danger, and who then leverage the anxieties those platforms amplify to justify their own emergency authority over workforces, public institutions, and the terms of political discourse itself, practice the same logic. Or think of the AI-company leaders who issue civilization-scale warnings about their technologies while, at the same time, they accelerate their efforts to build (and fund) their own companies.

The pattern is recognizable wherever leaders make crisis the foundation of their authority; that is, where instability is cultivated rather than resolved, where opposition is framed as existential threat, and where every constraint on power presents itself as an assault from within. Silicon Valley’s most prominent practitioners have absorbed this lesson as thoroughly as any garrison-state administrator, and in Musk’s case carried it directly into governmental power. Once the organizational emergency hardens into identity, the identity requires the emergency to persist.

Democracies that have spent a generation normalizing emergency as a permanent condition, and business organizations whose leaders have made crisis the foundation of their authority, finally face the same crucial question. The executives who have built that authority as measured in market capitalization, the command of government agencies, or the reach of platforms that amplify emergency at algorithmic scale increasingly preside over organizations that have been trained to perform vigilance rather than exercise judgment and are now structurally dependent on the threat that was supposed to justify their mobilization. At what point, we must ask, does the declared war stop describing circumstances and begin producing them?

References

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https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/28/irans-new-winter-christopher-de-bellaigue/

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In the days following the shooting at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the role of the information environment and, specifically, the “conflict entrepreneurs” helping to shape it, re-entered public discussion (Chazan 2026). Commentators pointed, once again, to actors who amplify division, sharpen binaries, and profit from polarization in an already fragile media environment. The diagnosis felt accurate but incomplete: conflict is indisputably an important and troubling aspect of the current informational economy, but it is not the only one that warrants our attention.

Around the same time, I found myself reading two unusually thoughtful and substantive LinkedIn threads initiated, respectively, by cultural anthropologist Corina Enache and complexity scientist Dave Snowden. These threads generated rich and searching comment exchanges and discussions that drew in practitioners, researchers, and organizational scholars from across the globe. Both take aim at sacred cows of practical management thinking: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s change curve and Bruce Tuckman’s model of team development (Enache, 2026a; Enache, 2026b; Snowden, 2026).

Together, the threaded discussions trace a pattern that recurs throughout popular management thinking and illuminates how descriptive insights endlessly recirculated by media lose their context and too easily become prescriptive dogma. (Enache continued her brief LinkedIn series to critique three other models – MBTI, Amy Edmondson’s idea of psychological safety, and Kurt Lewin’s unfreeze-change-refreeze model – but my focus here is on the first two only.)

Reading these threads alongside the renewed attention to conflict entrepreneurs pointed for me to a parallel phenomenon. If conflict entrepreneurs thrive by intensifying disagreement, another class of actors thrives by distilling and repeating messages to the point of easy resolution. Rather than inflaming their consumers, they reassure by converting ambiguity into certainty and distribute it at scale, elevated by the very conditions that make their product most appealing.

I view these tireless actors as certainty entrepreneurs, and they dominate popular leadership and self-improvement discourse across platforms and channels. Their tone is assured, their frameworks clean, and their advice often appears straightforwardly actionable. In a more stable world, the appetite for such content would already be substantial; in the current one, it has reached something closer to structural demand.

The World Uncertainty Index, developed by economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, reached historic highs during the early 2020s and has remained elevated as geopolitical fracture, economic disruption, technological upheaval, and even active conflicts have compounded (Ahir, Bloom, and Furceri, 2022).

These macro-environmental changes are reshaping energy corridors and global supply chains, renewing trade tensions, and fragmenting the post-1945 economic order, all while generative AI is reshaping labor markets at a pace that outstrips institutional adaptation. As workplaces negotiate the unsettled norms of hybrid and AI-augmented collaboration, leaders at every level face the need to address both genuine uncertainty and calculable risk.

Into this condition, certainty entrepreneurs insert themselves as guides, and their influence rests less on the depth of their insight than on their alignment with platform incentives and with the anxieties of the audiences they serve.

I. From Judgment to Visibility

Understanding why certainty entrepreneurs flourish requires attending to the informational environment that sustains them, an environment whose dynamics I have begin to examine in a series of essays preceding this one. Across four recent essays summarized in “From Judgment to Visibility,” I argue that platforms reorganize leadership discourse around visibility, engagement, and repetition, that is, around content that, by being seen, shared, and continually reinforced – and not via evidence-based outcomes – comes to stand in for what is known, tested, and judged (Slocum, 2026a). Certainty entrepreneurs are not anomalies within such a system but its logical outcome.

Platforms privilege content that is immediately legible, emotionally resonant, and easily transmissible, while complex arguments depending on context, contingency, and genuine trade-offs struggle to travel. Today’s popular leadership discourse therefore increasingly rewards those who can compress responses to ambiguity into clear sound bites, aphorisms, and checklists. The more uncertain the macro-environmental conditions, the greater the demand for those who can render it otherwise, and the greater the rewards in attention, reach, and revenue for those willing to supply it on demand.

We’re all familiar with the easily recognizable forms of the content. For example, the LinkedIn carousel that converts a complex psychological framework into a list of tightly formatted “actionable insights,” or the podcast applying a single model with equal confidence to each week’s most-shared headlines, or the short video that distills years of research into sixty seconds of motivational clarity. These formats are not incidental to the message but constitutive of it, allowing the medium to signal that the subject, however knotty, has already been resolved.

More than a matter of style, this is a shift in epistemology. Leadership knowledge becomes less about understanding situations in their particularity and more about asserting confident positions within them. As management reasearchers may recognize, that pressure and the response to it is not new.

Organizational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s research on leadership selection documents a corresponding and persistent pattern in organizational life. He argues that confidence is routinely mistaken for competence, and the traits that help individuals gain organizational influence – like expressive self-assurance, projected calm, and the appearance of having answers – are largely at variance with those that actually predict effective leadership (Chamorro-Premuzic, 2019).

Algorithmic and digital platforms and channels amplify this distortion at industrial scale. In face-to-face organizational settings, perceptive observers eventually accumulate evidence that relies on demonstrated performance as a basis for building confidence. Yet platforms governed by engagement metrics like shares, follows, and time-on-content have no such mechanism.

The result is a selection environment for leadership ideas in which the most-circulated voices define what leadership knowledge means and can do, and the gap between that definition and what effective leadership actually requires widens with every cycle of recommendation and reach. The machinery for producing, distributing, and monetizing false clarity has never been more efficient, more rewarded, or more actively scaled.

The certainty entrepreneur is, in this sense, less a rhetorical choice than a structural adaptation, well-fitted to an informational environment that has been deliberately engineered to reward exactly the qualities certainty entrepreneurship supplies.

II. The Mechanics of Certainty

A series of LinkedIn posts by Corina Enache and Dave Snowden from April 2026 and the subsequent discussion threads they generated illuminate the mechanics with unusual clarity. What distinguishes them beyond their specific conclusions is the disposition the threads model as exchanges or even, in places, dialogues.

Both authors proceed from genuine curiosity about why the well-known Kübler-Ross and Tuckman frameworks persist and what they actually do, treating the limits of their own critique as part of the argument rather than as details to be managed away. And both trace the familiar arc of models that each emerged from careful observation within a specific domain, only over time to be simplified, linearized, and generalized, and finally applied prescriptively in contexts far removed from its original conditions.

The posts, for example, recount how Bruce Tuckman’s four-stage team-building framework was drawn from a 1965 review of small-group therapy and training literature, not from organizational teams in the field. That origin of the forming-norming-storming-performing process is typically ignored in subsequent applications of the frameworks. As Enache observes, the stepwise description of how individuals come together to form working teams becomes law when context is stripped away. Despite recognizing how the stages were initially observed in specific, bounded settings, leaders are expected to manage and follow the same inevitable sequences in radically different ones (Enache, 2026b). The leader adopting the framework therefore becomes a guide who “holds the map,” shepherding others through predefined phases rather than investigating what is actually happening in the group.

Enache notes that Tuckman himself added a fifth stage in 1977 and later expressed reservations about the framework’s universality, yet that very contextual heuristic was turned into a kind of managerial legislation. The misuse is not, as several commenters in the Tuckman thread on LinkedIn write, incidental to the model’s success but, rather, integral to it.The simplified, inevitabilized version travels quickly and easily because it is simplified and inevitabilized, not in spite of it.

Snowden extends this critique in the case of the five stages of grief model (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) developed by Swiss and American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and adopted widely in discussions of change and transformation efforts. Building on another initial post by Enache, he argues in both his original re-post and in the exchanges that followed that the model’s durability lies not in its accuracy but in how it serves particular power arrangements. He names the pattern “Augustinian consulting practice,” contending that the change curve has persisted not because practitioners fail to notice its problems but because it actively concentrates interpretive authority in them as the consultant, coach, or leader themself. The logical endpoint of this drift, as Snowden frames it, recasts change management as emotional processing, with the consultant positioned as therapist and the workforce as patients (Snowden, 2026).

Gail Severini, a transformation and change specialist who contributes to the Kübler-Ross thread, offers a complementary diagnosis grounded in decades of organizational experience. She perceptively observes that this processing is precisely how change is often done to employees in organizations carrying industrial-era history and expectations. That imposition without engagement means employees experience challenging announcements as shock and loss rather than as shared purpose-building. The model’s death-and-grief metaphor therefore can be seen to work not because it is accurate but because it mirrors the actual power structure of the transaction (Severini, 2026).

Coach and transformation facilitator Cordula Plassmann, in the Tuckman thread, identifies the systemic consequence with comparable precision. As models come to be treated as law, the system optimizes for prescribed stages, phases, and behaviors, and the model stops serving people and starts serving the machinery (Plassmann, 2026).

Certainty entrepreneurs take precisely these kinds of models and repackage them for continuous circulation. The process is efficient – and this is not accidental. Context is stripped away, caveats removed, sequence and actionability emphasized, and a confident voice attached. The result is an ongoing stream of content that feels both authoritative and accessible, circulating through networks already primed to receive it as such.

In fact, the content enters what has become a highly streamlined distribution machinery. Consider the podcast series revisiting the same frameworks from episode to episode, the weekly newsletter applying familiar insight to the latest headline, the short first-person video clip delivering conviction in sixty seconds, and the carousel or thread recirculating the same ideas to an audience already primed to receive them. Such repetition is not incidental, but is itself the process, and it works precisely because familiarity, amplified by algorithmic recommendation, produces the felt sense of truth.

Lost in the process is the conditionality and context that made the original insight meaningful and the disciplined caution that led the original researcher to acknowledge the limits of generalization. The effect, as Plassmann observed, is that a model originally designed to serve human understanding ends up serving the machinery of content production and distribution instead, and the practitioner who inherits it receives less a tool than a script.

The contrast with how the same frameworks travel through certainty-entrepreneur channels is instructive. Tuckman’s stages, once processed through algorithmic platforms, appear without the 1965 small-group therapy provenance, without his 1977 reservations, and without any of the power-dynamics analysis that Snowden’s reading surfaces. The frameworks are literally restaged as a universal progression with legible waypoints that the confident leader follows and helps others navigate.

Such decontextualization is not acknowledged as a trade-off but presented as the model’s practical value. Enache’s and Snowden’s reminders of the original contexts of the models are, in this view, not supplementary but subversive. It is precisely why their threads stand out from the ongoing flow of LinkedIn and other platform content and inspires the quality of discussion it does, and why certainty-entrepreneur treatments of the same material generate unqualified and ostensibly unreflective shares instead.

III. When Management Models Become Mental Infrastructure

The deeper risk is not only that simplified management models dominate what people read. It is that they come to structure how leaders think before they encounter reality. By the time a team is formed, a change initiative is launched, or a conflict emerges, many leaders are already interpreting what they see through preloaded frameworks. Storming is expected, for instance, resistance is anticipated, and emotional reactions are mapped according to predefined stages.

Importantly, the situation is not first observed and then interpreted. It is instead fitted into an existing template, and the fitting feels natural precisely because the template has been so thoroughly internalized that it no longer presents itself as a frame but as the situation itself.

The mechanism through which this anticipatory framing takes hold is not ordinarily a single encounter with an influential book or seminar. My claim here is about the cumulative effect of daily immersion in exactly this kind of content, that is, across the podcasts, newsletters, carousel slides, and short video clips that recirculate familiar frameworks through digital platforms and professional networks long after their original posting.

Each individual exposure may seems innocuous, even occasionally useful. However, the aggregate effect, compounded by algorithmic amplification and the illusory-truth dynamics that Lisa K. Fazio and a team of psychologists identified, is a gradual pre-stocking of interpretive templates that leaders carry into their organizations and apply, largely unconsciously, at the moments a seemingly recognizable situation appears (Fazio et al., 2015).

The practitioner who has absorbed hundreds of posts about Tuckman’s stages, Kübler-Ross’s curve, or any of the five-step change frameworks that circulate at similar scale and frequency arrives to the situation already primed to recognize it as an instance of the model. That priming is partly cognitive. Crucially, though, it is also motivational, because applying the model confirms competence and applying nothing risks visible uncertainty.

Behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s groundbreaking work on cognitive ease helps explain the dynamic. Fluent, familiar ideas feel more true than unfamiliar or complex ones, and repeated exposure reinforces this effect, making the most circulated frameworks seem not only useful but correct (Kahneman, 2011).

The consequences compound in predictable ways. Signals that do not fit the model are ignored or reinterpreted, alternative explanations are crowded out, and inquiry gives way to confirmation. What leaders may consider the diagnosis of a given situation becomes, in fact, more of a projection. Platform dynamics deepen the problem, because repetition reinforces familiarity and familiarity produces perceived truth, so that the most widely circulated models become the most cognitively available, chosen not because they are most accurate but because they are most readily at hand.

Theo Niessen, a Dutch organizational scholar responding in the Tuckman thread on LinkedIn, locates the practical stakes of this dynamic with helpful precision. He succinctly writes that the conditions allowing trust and genuine conflict-navigation to emerge are not things a leader can install but arise in micro-interactions. To take a familiar example, leaders must account nearly every day whether they genuinely hear and act on dissent or merely politely absorb it without meaningful change. He goes on to note that trust cannot be engineered but only cultivated through active and intentional participation (Niessen, 2026). Certainty entrepreneurs consistently obscure this inconvenient reality by packaging participation as a stage and trust as an inevitable outcome of following the framework.

IV. The Political Economy of Reassurance

The sustained demand for certainty entrepreneurship is, at its root, an anxiety economy, and the current environment has made that anxiety both more intense and more widely distributed. Geopolitical volatility, from disrupted maritime trade routes to the fracturing of multilateral institutions, has elevated strategic uncertainty to a sustained baseline condition for organizations operating globally.

Economic uncertainty has continued to intensify through successive shocks. These include inflationary aftereffects, interest rate volatility, the restructuring of global supply chains, and the accelerating displacement of job categories by artificial intelligence. The industry analysis of successive Edelman Trust Barometer reports has tracked declining public trust in governments, media, and major institutions across successive years (Edelman, 2025), collectively creating a crisis of legitimacy that makes confident, accessible voices all the more compelling to leaders trying to project stability for their teams.

Within organizations, ways of working that navigate hybrid arrangements, generational transitions, and the introduction of AI-powered tools find leaders and employees alike hungry for orientation, and increasingly willing to accept managed clarity as a substitute for genuine presence, communication, and sensemaking.

Into this environment, certainty entrepreneurs insert the consistent message that the situation is understandable, the path is clear, and you are capable of navigating it. This message carries real value when it is grounded in seemingly actual situational knowledge, since it promises to reduce anxiety, support action, and catalyze momentum. Unverified, though, the message displaces the discomfort required for deeper sensemaking, encourages premature closure, and rewards decisiveness over discernment by providing ready-made outcomes over actual, on-the-ground processes.

The implicit promise of certainty entrepreneurship also rests on the misread structural assumption that turbulence is episodic, a disruption to navigate after which stability can be restored, rather than a permanent operating condition within which leadership must learn to function (Slocum, 2026b). Certainty entrepreneurs offer episodic remedies for structurally persistent conditions, and the gap between the remedy and the reality tends to become visible only once the model has already been applied, the resolution declared, and the next disruption arrived.

As psychological and cognitive science research on social media diffusion demonstrates, emotionally charged and morally framed content spreads more rapidly than neutral or deliberative material (Brady, et al., 2017). Especially when coupled with encouragement, such content travels well whereas ambivalence and complexity do not. The result is a constantly reinforced popular leadership discourse that systematically favors resolution over exploration, and that grows more influential precisely as the environment it simplifies becomes more intractable.

V. The Certainty Machine: AI’s Amplifying Role

Generative AI has introduced a qualitatively new dimension to this dynamic, one that deserves critical scrutiny beyond the enthusiasm or other concerns that usually accompany it. The first and most direct effect is one of the production and sheer volume of content. AI tools have lowered the cost of generating polished, confident-sounding leadership content to near zero, and any certainty entrepreneur can now produce frameworks, summaries, reflections, hacks, and how-to lists at industrial scale in the time it once took to draft a single paragraph.

The infrastructure of reassurance has become, quite literally, automated, and the volume of certainty-entrepreneur content circulating through professional networks has increased accordingly. LinkedIn’s own platform data, widely reported by marketing researchers, indicates that content in LinkedIn feeds generates over 30 billion impressions per month, a figure driven in part by the platform’s creator monetization push and the ongoing generative AI content surge (Simmonds, 2026).

Within this never-ending stream, leadership and management content is overwhelmingly represented. LinkedIn’s own multi-year research with Edelman finds that 56% of target B2B decision-makers apply “thought leadership as part of their vetting process” of services and providers, making it a dominant genre of professional engagement (Edelman-LinkedIn, 2025). If the infrastructure of reassurance was already substantial before generative AI emerged, production costs have been drastically reduced while output volume has expanded, and the ratio of content to genuine contextual grounding has shifted accordingly.

The second effect is subtler and arguably more consequential. Large language models are architecturally disposed toward fluency and coherence. Trained predominantly on human-generated text, including the vast corpus of popular leadership content that platforms have already optimized for engagement and emotional resonance, they produce answers that are confident and stylistically smooth by design. Research from teams of multidisciplinary European and North American social scientists has documented a systematic yes-response bias in major language models (Dentella, Günther, and Leivada, 2023) and social desirability effects that mirror human tendencies toward positive, agreeable responses (Salecha et al., 2024).

Another team, composed of computer scientists and linguists led by Emily Bender, identified the core of this risk in their foundational paper. Language models, put simply, produce convincing, fluent text without any grounding in the truth-value of the claims they articulate, making them generators of confident prose rather than verified knowledge (Bender, et al., 2021). Applied to leadership advice, AI does not introduce new knowledge so much as it operationalizes existing platform preferences at scale, allowing speed, positivity, and stylistic coherence to be delivered on demand.

Considered together, these effects mean that AI has become a kind of certainty entrepreneur in its own right. Leaders who consult a language model about a difficult organizational situation receive structured, confident, and actionable advice within seconds. The model does not say “this depends” unless explicitly prompted toward that response. It also does not surface disconfirming evidence or structural trade-offs as a default. Instead, it delivers managed clarity, and it does so reassuringly, at scale, around the clock, and without institutional accountability.

In making these criticisms, I am not negating the potential value of AI in leadership development, but, rather, identifying a specific and deeply problematic distortion. AI accelerates and scales the informational economy of certainty, making the already dominant tendency toward premature closure of critical thinking and consideration harder to resist and easier, intellectually and organizationally, to justify. In combination with the anticipatory framing mechanisms that I described earlier, this creates a compound reinforcement loop in which certainty-entrepreneur content primes the interpretive template, AI confirms and operationalizes it, and the template is applied to situations that required something more nuanced and demanding.

VI. Disciplined Inquiry over Premature Certainty

This is precisely what makes the posts by Enache and Snowden, and the discussions they generated, notable. They do not offer immediate alternatives in the form of new models or frameworks but reopen the space of inquiry, resisting the very impulse toward premature resolution that certainty entrepreneurs package as their core product.

The comment threads that followed the initial posts extend and deepen both arguments, with practitioners adding from their own experience that what distinguishes effective change or team leadership is precisely what the certainty-entrepreneur frameworks typically strip out. The exchanges demonstrated the value of sustained presence with the group, genuine attentiveness to what a given situation is producing, and the willingness to treat conflict and stalemates as information rather than as phases to manage.

In her initial post and numerous responses to comments in the Tuckman thread, Enache essentially cuts to the core of a problem with the existing and widely-known model. Even if the framework works in a given practitioner’s hands, she argues, it is because of what the practitioner brings to the situation. The emphasis is thus on a quality of attention and judgment that no model automatically supplies, and that can only be developed through experience, reflection, communication, and a genuine willingness to question what one already believes one knows.

Put more simply, the model is often doing less work than the deliberate judgment of the person applying it. That differentiation sheds light on the work of certainty entrepreneurs, who package the model as if the judgment is universally and easily transferable, and it is not.

The threads also stand as an important qualification of the broader critique of platforms as inherently inimical to serious thought. Much of the analysis in this piece, and in my previous “From Judgment to Visibility” articles, documents how platform incentives suppress complexity and reward managed clarity. The Enache and Snowden exchanges demonstrate that this tendency, while structural, is not inexorable. They show, encouragingly, how social media can host genuinely substantive discourse when participants bring analytical rigor, disciplined restraint, and a willingness to engage publicly with difficulty and incompleteness.

More than two dozen practitioners, researchers, and organizational scholars engaged across the two threads, and the quality of those exchanges, from Niessen’s analysis of trust as emergent micro-interaction to Severini’s account of industrial-era power arrangements, illustrates what platform discourse is capable of when it is not organized around the production and distribution of prepackaged certainty.

VII. Beyond Model Critique

The possibility revealed in the threads goes beyond questioning any particular model. Their deeper invitation is to examine the mental models that have been extended from these frameworks over years of accumulated exposure. That is, they foreground the assumptions that groups inevitably pass through in predictable developmental phases, that resistance is a stage to be managed rather than learned from, and that change done to people is eventually accepted through emotional processing.

These are not merely incorrect models misapplied in the wrong context. Rather, they are cognitive structures, reinforced by repetition and platform amplification, that shape what leaders notice, what they ignore, and what kinds of interventions they can even imagine. To question them requires the kind of sustained, organizationally supported inquiry that the Enache and Snowden threads briefly and valuably begin to model.

For consultants as well as leaders, the threads register this call with unusual candor. Severini, the transformation and change specialist, acknowledges that consultants are often complicit in the persistence of inadequate frameworks, not through endorsement but through accommodation. Writing from long experience in change management practice, she speaks of working within power structures that make genuine co-creation difficult while trying to incorporate it at the margins (Severini, 2026).

Such a willingness to name that complicity with existing institutional power and practices, rather than to defend the professional toolkit, is precisely the form of intellectual honesty that certainty entrepreneurs structurally cannot afford and that the platform environment rarely rewards. Both Enache and Snowden resist the temptation to resolve complexity too quickly and make clear the limits of abstraction. In doing so, they implicitly reassert a conception of leadership and consulting grounded in ongoing attention, participation, and judgment rather than in a performance of confidence.

Exceptionally, their posts circulate not because they are reassuring but because they are precise. That precision, offered honestly and without the scaffolding of false resolution, functions as a form of relief for practitioners who have long suspected that the received models, and the mental and behavioral habits those models have built up over decades, do not quite account for what they actually observe.

VIII. Practicing Countercultural Leadership

Certainty entrepreneurs are well adapted to current media conditions and will continue to thrive. My question in calling out their activities is less how to eliminate them and more how leaders can better engage with their unavoidable output. More broadly, my hope is that greater awareness of these dynamics might contribute to a reconception of leadership that makes premature certainty less appealing rather than simply less available. To begin that process, I believe four practices can help, with each operating against the grain of the incentive structures described so far.

The first practice is diagnostic. Leaders need to better and more consistently recognize the difference between insight and the presentation of insight. A compelling or imaginative formulation is not sufficient evidence of its applicability, and a widely shared framework is not proof of its validity. Psychologist Philip Tetlock and consultant Dan Gardner’s research on expert prediction provides a sobering reminder on this point. They argue that calibration, not confidence, is the mark of genuine predictive skill, and expert forecasters who project the most certainty are often among the least accurate (Tetlock and Gardner, 2015). Similarly, a model’s rate of circulation says considerably more about platform incentives than about the model’s own contextual utility, and heavily trafficked frameworks warrant the careful scrutiny rather than immediate acceptance owing to familiarity.

The second practice is temporal, which requires a commitment to active unlearning that entails more than patience. If suspending judgment is an initial step, genuinely interrogating the frameworks that feel most natural needs to follow. In fact, this means that familiarity itself can be seen as evidence of how thoroughly frameworks can be intenralized by those practitioners immersed in platform content, often without their awareness or consent.

Effective leadership often demands slowing the moment between encountering an idea and applying it, approaching each situation with genuine curiosity rather than pattern-matching, and remaining open to the possibility that what looks familiar may be something else entirely. Adaptive leadership, as Ronald Heifetz and his Harvard Kennedy School colleagues argue, involves sustaining productive discomfort rather than resolving it prematurely, and it is precisely that productive discomfort that managed certainty, however attractively packaged, limits by design (Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky, 2009).

The third practice is relational. Meaningful understanding emerges, as Snowden observes in his LinkedIn comments, from direct engagement with people before exisiting models frame decisions and impose solutions. He helpfully warns against the “first conversation bias” that shapes everything that follows once a change is announced or a direction is set. While this may not be as simple as applying a model, it is more reliable, and it is where the quality of judgment that Enache also identifies as the practitioner’s own contribution actually develops.

To these three, we now need to add a critical posture toward AI-generated advice that interrogates not only its accuracy but its structural tendency to deliver confidence where calibrated uncertainty would better serve the situation. The fluency of AI-generated prose compounds the challenge. An ill-grounded argument delivered with stylistic confidence (not to mention speed and precision) by an AI model is harder to detect than a human expert’s comparably ill-grounded because the absence of hesitation in the AI output actively suppresses the reader’s own impulse to question it.

I write this not to suggest that certainty has no legitimate place in leadership. Reassurance is a genuine human need, and leaders who communicate clearly, act decisively under pressure, and project confidence grounded in real situational understanding often serve their people and organizations well. The problem is not certainty itself but confidence detached from context, resolution packaged without engagement, and reassurance delivered at scale without the judgment that makes it trustworthy.

The current environment makes that distinction harder than ever to sustain. Platforms today reward the appearance of certainty regardless of its grounding, generative AI automates confident-sounding prose on demand, and the genuine pressure to project stability makes it difficult for leaders to resist supplying managed clarity precisely when the situation requires something more specialized, local, and thoughtful.

IX. Earning Certainty

What the platform environment actually requires is a deeper awareness operating across three distinct domains simultaneously: the external context, with its genuine volatility and its patterns that reward close reading; the management tools and frameworks that leaders rely on, each carrying embedded assumptions and contextual limits that their popular presentations suppress; and the mental models through which leaders interpret what they see, often shaped by years of immersion in exactly the kind of platform content this essay has examined. In each of these domains, some things are known, some are genuinely uncertain, and some are uncertain but routinely treated as known. My contention is that the failure to distinguish among them is where most leadership misfires originate.

Psychologists Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe’s analysis of organizations managing the unexpected identifies the relevant habits required for such work are not crisis-activation responses so much as continuous baseline disciplines that include a preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, and deference to expertise (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2015).

Each of these habits also requires holding one’s existing interpretations more lightly. That posture allows leaders to remain genuinely curious about what a situation is producing, actively seek evidence that may challenge or disconfirmthe prevailing frame rather than confirming what one already expected to find, and treat the discomfort of not-yet-knowing as the necessary precondition for learning something true. These are precisely the dispositions that certainty entrepreneurs erode by conditioning leaders to expect resolution rather than to attend to the variability that situations are actually producing.

None of this should appear new as aspiration for leaders. The novelty lies in the intensity and breadth of the contemporary environment in which these practices must now be sustained. Rather than serving as neutral hosts of leadership discourse, platforms actively shape its form, its pace, and its perceived authority. Likewise, rather than merely supporting leadership learning and development, Generative AI increasingly automates the production of managed certainty at a scale that makes the disposition toward coming to conclusions and closures of issues too soon harder to resist and easier to rationalize.

Certainty, in other words, must be earned by leaders again and again. It must be tested. In an environment engineered to supply it effortlessly and at industrial scale, maintaining the distinction between certainty that is grounded and certainty that is performed – and then acting on that distinction – is among today’s most consequential leadership practices. That maintenance is not a simplistic, stepwise method. It is a disposition requiring sustained humility about what one already believes, curiosity about what is actually happening in a given situation, and an ongoing willingness to unlearn templates offered through popular leadership discourse that can be ill-fitting and obscure more productive and considered solutions.

*With great thanks to Amy Grace Loyd for her support and generous input on the final version of this article.

References

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Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, A., and Shmargaret Shmitchell (2021) “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” in Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’21), pp. 610–623; https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922

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Corina Enache (2026a, April 26) Untitled Critique of Kübler-Ross’s model, LinkedIn post; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7453864910670979072/

---------- (2026b, April 27) Critique of Tuckman’s team development model. LinkedIn post; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7454381262468997120/

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Re-reading the late Italian economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi two decades after his landmark New Left Review essays and Adam Smith in Beijing, the concluding book of his trilogy on global capitalism, is no longer an academic indulgence. These texts have become illuminating bases for developing a practical leadership discipline in today’s uncertain geopolitical and economic environment (2005a; 2005b; 2007).

The current US-Iran-Israel conflict and the wider military and economic standoff in the Persian Gulf sharpen the very dynamics Arrighi identified, including the overextension of US military power, the erosion of its legitimacy, and the emergence of alternative centers of coordination. For firms such as ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies, disruptions to shipping routes, sanctions exposure, and price volatility are no longer peripheral or occasional risks but, increasingly, structuring conditions of strategy.

In 2005, Arrighi argued that the Iraq War had already “jeopardized the credibility of US military might,” “further undermined the centrality of the United States and the dollar in the global political economy,” and “strengthened the tendency towards the emergence of China as an alternative to U.S. leadership while accelerating shifts in the global political economy” (Arrighi, 2005b, p. 83). Developments across two passing decades, now punctuated by another U.S. military intervention, have confirmed the pattern rather than reversed it.

The parallels carry real weight, but so do the contrasts. When Arrighi was writing his hegemony essays in 2005, China’s GDP was roughly $2.3 trillion (less than one-fifth of America’s, at the time) and its global institutional footprint was embryonic. Today, China is the world’s second-largest economy, the principal trading partner of more than 140 countries, and the architect of the Belt and Road Initiative, which has embedded Chinese finance, standards, and long-term relationships across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. In his time, Arrighi observed an emerging alternative, while leaders today face one that is structurally consolidated.

The military situations also differ in kind. Whereas the Iraq War was a large-scale land occupation premised on uncontested coercive reach, the current confrontation involving Iran is a more diffuse, proxy-inflected standoff in which no single power controls the tempo of escalation. What the two interventions share is the willingness to absorb the reputational and economic costs of projecting force in the Gulf region – and those costs, as Arrighi anticipated, have compounded rather than dissipated.

As the same Middle Eastern region now concentrates military escalation, energy dependency, and geopolitical realignment, China deepens its economic and diplomatic presence. China’s mediation between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023 was not, in itself, decisive, but it signaled that coordination no longer flows through a single center in Washington, D.C. The capitalist world-system, meanwhile, shows no sign of imminent collapse while becoming at once more plural and unstable.

For leaders, both in politics and business, this unavoidably alters the terrain. It is no longer enough to position oneself within a hierarchy, or even to navigate rivalry between blocs. Leadership now demands operating amidst multiple systems that overlap without converging. These are exactly the conditions I explored in “Creative Leadership Today” that require third-loop learning; that is, the capacity to act when frameworks collide and coherence across systems cannot be assumed or assured (Slocum, 2025).

I. Beyond Succession: China as Systemic Anomaly

Among Arrighi’s most valuable arguments is to refuse a straightforward succession narrative. China does not simply replace the United States as global hegemon, he contends, nor does it stand cleanly against it. China has, in fact, emerged within the existing capitalist world-system – meant here as the structural architecture of global trade, finance, and production – while quietly reworking its organizing logic. Companies such as Huawei and BYD illustrate this duality as they compete globally, using established market mechanisms, while nevertheless still drawing on state coordination, domestic scale, and ecosystem integration that do not fit Western regulatory, finance, and management templates.

In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi revisits the foundational work on capitalism of Smith to distinguish between “natural” and “unnatural” paths of development. China’s trajectory, he finds, aligns more closely with internally driven market expansion than with the externally oriented, militarized expansion that characterized much of European capitalism (Arrighi, 2007). The point is not that China is benign or harmonious, but that it is different in kind. Its political economy embeds markets within social and state structures rather than subordinating those structures to markets.

The distinction sharpens the analytical challenge confronting leaders today. If China is not converging toward Western capitalism, it appears to be extending a hybrid formation in which state capacity, relational coordination, and market dynamism coexist. The prominence of firms such as Alibaba Group alongside state-owned enterprises captures this dual structure, which is neither fully liberal nor centrally planned, but a system with its own internal coherence.

That particular logic, however, does not translate readily across contexts. Western systems ordinarily privilege capital markets, formal governance, and individual firm competition. In contrast, Chinese systems operate through networks, long-term positioning, and state alignment. While each approach makes sense internally, their interaction produces deep-seated friction. For example, while the U.S. export control measures affecting NVIDIA provide the makings of a policy dispute, they also represent incompatible assumptions about technology, security, and economic order.

Framing such an example with the familiar question of hegemonic succession, and therefore asking which power will prevail in the dispute and potentially “lead next,” Arrighi believes obscures more than it reveals. What is actually underway is mutation, not handover or – as American sociologist and political scientist Ho-fung Hung writes later – a reorganization of the global capitalist system around multiple, partially incompatible logics (Hung, 2022). Importantly, within China itself, the mutation has been ongoing over the past two decades since Arrighi published his work.

In complementary research, a trio of U.S.-based political economy scholars recently argues that reform-era state capitalism has given way to a more explicitly political formation in which the party governs firm behavior directly, a shift that alters the terms of engagement for any leader whose understanding of China was formed under an earlier institutional regime (Pearson, Rithmire, and Tsai, 2023). Taken together, these shifts mean that the systemic differences Arrighi identified in the mid-2000s have not only persisted but deepened and internally diversified – a reality that sharpens rather than complicates the leadership challenge his analysis poses.

II. From Systemic Difference to Leadership Challenge

My return to Arrighi’s thinking sheds valuable light on the development of leadership practice. In writing about creative leadership today, the value of third-loop learning begins precisely where contradictions cannot be resolved within a single system or by a particular logic. The China-West interface is exactly such a case in which leaders are not navigating difference within a shared system. They are required to navigate differences between distinct if overlapping systems, a practice that requires capabilities beyond competitive or cross-cultural intelligence alone.

Three domains cast these systemic differences in relief. In finance, U.S. dominance rests on deep capital markets, shareholder primacy, and market-priced risk. China’s system allocates capital through state priorities, policy banks, and guided credit flows, often privileging long-term industrial capacity or geopolitical positioning over short-term return. As a result, China operates by a distinct investment logic: infrastructure projects, advanced manufacturing, and strategic technologies receive sustained state funding despite weak immediate profitability, as China’s support for electric vehicles and semiconductors has demonstrated.

For firms that originated in the West, such as Goldman Sachs operating in China, this logic raises barriers that are not merely regulatory. They reflect a system in which capital is an instrument of coordinated development rather than a market-clearing mechanism.

Media scholar Lin Zhang and economic geographer Tu Lan offer a grounded understanding of this system in their framework for the “Local Venture State” that emerged in China after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (Zhang and Lan, 2025). Whereas Western regulatory regimes manage markets after the fact, Chinese state actors take equity positions and absorb early-stage risk before commercial viability is established, acting less like referees than co-investors with sectoral agendas. That difference in who bears developmental risk, and on whose terms, shapes every partnership, joint venture, or competitive entry a foreign firm attempts in China’s strategic industries.

In the domain of innovation, Western models emphasize proprietary advantage, intellectual property protection, and venture-backed scaling, typically defining competitive success through building defensible moats. Chinese ecosystems pursue alternative pathways that combine rapid iteration, open-source adaptation, platform integration, and state-supported scaling within large domestic markets. In AI, for instance, Chinese actors have blended open models, public-private research collaboration, and application-layer innovation in ways that challenge the capital-intensive, closed approaches of U.S. organizations such as OpenAI or the AI initiatives of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

Importantly, we need to view this divergence as structural rather than tactical. Taiwanese sociologist and legal scholar Ya-Wen Lei’s analysis of China’s “techno-developmental regime” clarifies why the Chinese state fuses nationalist ambition, instrumental control, and tech capital into a formation (Lei, 2023). While the regime has its own internal coherence, it also has internal contradictions, such as those between efficiency and surveillance, between state direction and entrepreneurial energy, between domestic consolidation and global reach.

For business leaders negotiating AI partnerships, standards bodies, or data-governance arrangements across this divide, the pressing question is not which innovation model is superior but which logic is actually governing the specific institutional moment or setting they face. To stake its legitimacy, the United States historically framed its global leadership as serving a general interest underpinned by globally open markets and institutional stability. Across divergent innovation regimes and competing systemic logics, that claim is now broadly contested.

In fact, China’s counter-narrative, grounded in development delivery and non-interference, has found particular resonance across emerging markets, with the Belt and Road Initiative embedding not only infrastructure but Chinese standards, financing practices, and long-term relationships in regions that Western capital has underserved. Put simply, the difficulty for leaders seeking to navigate these systems is less misunderstanding one side or the other and more that both sides are often internally correct. Stalled partnerships, misaligned expectations, and strategic ambiguity all arise from this structural reality rather than from failures of analysis, communication, or goodwill.

III. Actionable Third-loop Learning as Strategic Necessity

Grounded in genuine structural complexity, the third loop is a practical leadership response, not an abstract extension of learning theory. Arrighi’s analysis suggests that leaders must resist the impulse to resolve contradiction too quickly; their task, he presciently insists, is to operate within it. To do so, several capabilities become essential.

Signal awareness and contextual intelligence rank first, requiring leaders to triage structural shifts from ambient noise. Across the fragmented and multi-systemic environments I’ve been discussing here, structural shifts appear initially as weak signals, such as regulatory changes, diplomatic gestures, standards debates at technical bodies. Leaders who develop the habit of reading these signals early and consistently, particularly in periods of geopolitical tension, gain disproportionate advantage. Those who treated the early signs of US-China decoupling in the late 2010s as noise found themselves exposed when decoupling accelerated in the pandemic years.

Operating across systems also requires dual intelligibility, which entails understanding each system on its own terms, not as a deviation from a single familiar norm. This deep understanding demands historical and institutional literacy alongside market analysis. Success in Chinese markets typically depends less on contractual precision than on sustained relational engagement, a difference that is cultural on the surface but structural at its root.

Alongside this engagement, the drive toward convergence must be deliberately deferred or even abandoned. Attempts to force integration across systems tend to intensify differences rather producing superficial alignment. Firms need increasingly to operate with parallel strategies, governance models, and even value propositions across regions. Their challenge is consequently to maintain organizational coherence without forcing uniformity, which requires a tolerance for internal complexity that traditional management models do not easily accommodate (Arrighi & Silver, 1999).

Most demanding of all is the reorganization of individual (and group) character that the third loop requires. With learning, leaders shift from an identity rooted in one system to a capacity to inhabit several, holding competing logics without collapsing them into a single narrative. More than situational adaptability, it is a deeper transformation in how judgment is formed and exercised, one that cannot be produced by training programs but must be cultivated through sustained, reflective engagement with actual complexity.

Third-loop awareness, to be precise, is interdependent with the first two loops. It earns its strategic value only when recognition flows back into revised assumptions and improved operational practice. Here, the substantive content of the China-West interface yields concrete and uncomfortable lessons. China’s comparative strengths – like sustained industrial policy, far-sighted infrastructure investment, and coordinated long-horizon national planning – represent genuine strategic capabilities that Western firms and their home institutional environments have largely underweighted.

These become second-loop challenges to governing assumptions about the appropriate time horizon for investment decisions, about the legitimate role of state coordination in economic development, and about the relationship between industrial capacity and strategic resilience. The third-loop awareness should also generate first-loop operational consequences. These might include longer supply chain timelines, more deliberate public-private coordination, capital allocation that tolerates slower payback in strategically critical areas. While the third loop makes such learning visible and comprehensible, that is, acting on it is the work of the other two.

IV. Hegemony Reconsidered

Arrighi also invites a reconsideration of hegemony itself. Following Gramsci, Arrighi distinguishes hegemony from empire: hegemony is leadership by consent, in which a dominant power is recognized as providing legitimate order that broadly serves the system as a whole; empire is rule by coercion, sustained through military or administrative compulsion rather than shared legitimacy. Both operate within what the world-systems tradition – from Immanuel Wallerstein to Arrighi – calls the “system”: the structural architecture of global production, trade, and finance within which hegemonic and imperial arrangements rise and decline.

The Chinese and Western formations examined throughout this essay are both players within and partial architects of that larger world-system, a relationship that hegemonic succession narratives tend to obscure.

Those distinctions are more than terminological. A firm diagnosing whether the current US posture in the Gulf reflects declining hegemony, imperial overreach, or deeper systemic reorganization will reach materially different strategic and operational conclusions. Moreover, current conditions arguably suggest the lack of applicability of traditional accounts of global order that assume that stability requires a dominant power capable of enforcing rules across the system (Keohane, 2005 Ikenberry, 2004).

In fact, Arrighi shows that periods of transition are often marked by instability, experimentation, and competing claims to legitimacy, where power is actively renegotiated rather than smoothly transferred (Arrighi & Silver, 1999). Drawing on the longue durée cycles he traced in his earlier study, The Long Twentieth Century, he frames hegemonic decline not as collapse but as reorganization (Arrighi, 2010 [1994]).

Our present moment appears to reflect the structural condition Arrighi describes. Military confrontation in the Gulf, technological decoupling, and divergent development models do not point straightforwardly toward a new hegemon. The evidence points, on the contrary, toward a prolonged phase of fragmentation, in which different regions and sectors align with different centers of gravity as circumstances shift. Power, in this context, both political and economic, becomes distributed, contested, and situational rather than hierarchical. Firms, states, and platforms all exercise partial and competing authority, creating a landscape in which influence must be continuously assembled rather than assumed.

For leaders, the practical consequence of this emergent fragmentation is that strategic clarity cannot be found readily and stably in the environment. It must be generated internally through ongoing probing and sensemaking that is rigorous enough to distinguish signal from noise and flexible enough to revise its conclusions when circumstances shift. What Arrighi described as systemic transition, the prolonged and turbulent interlude between one organizing logic and the next, is also a description of the micro-level cognitive and organizational tasks that fall to anyone responsible for navigating it.

If the third loop transforms the architecture of individual judgment, the leaderly perspective today specifies that that judgment must be trained to read and act amidst a more diffused hegemony. Recognizing whether a regulatory shift signals systemic restructuring or tactical friction, whether a partner’s hesitation reflects institutional logic or political instruction, or whether an emerging market opening is durable or contingent on a bilateral relationship that may shift are not analytical exercises but practical competencies that need to be accumulated through experience, institutional immersion, and deliberate reflection.

From the character reorganization experiences in the third loop of actionable learning, leaders acquire what we might call systemic discernment, the capacity to read situations in multiple registers simultaneously without flattening the ambiguity into a single familiar frame. Consider a firm deciding how to structure a joint venture where state and private authority overlap unpredictably or recalibrating a supply chain in response to sanctions whose scope and duration remain actively contested. The operative question in either instance is not what to do in the abstract but which logic is actually governing the moment and how durable that governance is likely to prove. Answering that question reliably requires the kind of historically and empirically grounded, institutionally literate judgment that extended hegemonic transition makes indispensable.

V. Leadership Beyond a Single Coherence

To be clear, in re-reading Arrighi today, I am not claiming one can find our present fully foretold. His writing offers a structurally grounded orientation, one more durable than any particular forecast. Framing the present as structurally open and systemically complex, his analysis demands a different kind of leadership response than stable environments or transitions recommend and reward. Leaders who internalize his orientation will be better positioned to avoid overcommitting to any single narrative of global order, or logic of global economic activity, a habit that has proven costly for firms caught by supply chain disruption, sanctions regimes, or sudden partner realignment.

A ready example is Apple, whose leadership must simultaneously continue to depend on Chinese supply chains and manufacturing ecosystems while navigating US regulatory pressure and geopolitical scrutiny from both sides. Beyond tactics and operations, their challenge is strategic and existential and requires them to operate at the intersection of incompatible systems without being captured by either. This challenge also appears at smaller scale, for any firm managing dual supply chains, running parallel governance structures, or adjusting public commitments against shifting geopolitical expectations.

What leadership requires in this environment extends beyond a single reorientation toward the edge of coherence. More precisely, it requires the active, ongoing development of the judgment – especially, systemic discernment – needed to operate there. And to operate there involves a range of decisions and behaviors such as building teams that can work across systems, designing strategies that accommodate rather than suppress divergence, and cultivating the interpretive capacity to reframe situations faster than the situations themselves evolve.

As I often repeat to students and clents alike, we don’t learn from experience – we learn from reflection on that experience and then actions based on those reflections. Likewise, the judgment needed to navigate contradictory logics and collisional systems do not compound automatically with experience. Systemic discernment requires deliberate cultivation, through structured reflection on decisions made under genuine uncertainty, sustained exposure to contexts that resist familiar frameworks, and engagement with peers whose interpretive assumptions and feedback differ rather than confirm.

The pace of systemic change today and the shifting interfaces between systems and logics, like those of the U.S. and China, compress the window between recognizing a structural shift and acting on it. As a result, leaders need to commit to making the exercise and renewal of judgment an ongoing executive priority rather than a developmental destination.

It is worth my saying plainly what this re-reading of Arrighi is and is not intended to accomplish. It is not a forecast of hegemonic succession, nor primarily a contribution to debates in international political economy. My argument is that a specific form of historical and structural literacy – the capacity to read the collision of systems rather than merely the competition between firms or states – is itself a leadership competency, and one that is developed through the third loop. By proposing that business leaders engage Arrighi’s framework, I am not asking them to become world-systems theorists. I am asking them to recognize that their strategic assumptions are products of a particular systemic logic, that other logics are internally coherent rather than merely different, and that navigating between them requires a different quality of judgment than optimizing within any single one.

Arrighi described hegemonic transitions as prolonged, turbulent interludes measured in decades. The leaders navigating today’s world face in real time those same structural dynamics compressed into market-imposed strategy cycles and quarterly decisions. Developing, exercising, and renewing the capacity for provisional clarity amid that compression benefits, finally, from leadership that creatively navigates not only complexity and uncertainty but contradictory frameworks and incompatible systems.

References

Giovanni Arrighi (2010) The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, New and updated ed., Verso

Giovanni Arrighi (2005a) “Hegemony Unravelling – I,” New Left Review, 32, March/April 2005, 23-80; https://doi.org/10.64590/5rw

Giovanni Arrighi (2005b) “Hegemony Unravelling – II,” New Left Review, 33, May/June 2005, 83-116; https://doi.org/10.64590/wa8

Giovanni Arrighi (2007) Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-first Century, Verso.

Giovanni Arrighi & Beverly J. Silver (1999) Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, University of Minnesota Press.

Ho-fung Hung (2022) Clash of Empires (Elements in Global China), Cambridge University Press.

G. John Ikenberry (2004) “Review Essay; Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” Foreign Affairs, 83(2), 144-154; https://www.jstor.org/stable/20033908

Robert O. Keohane (2005) After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, rev. ed., Princeton University Press.

Ya-Wen Lei (2023) The Gilded Cage: Technology, Development, and State Capitalism in China, Princeton University Press.

Margaret M. Pearson, Meg Rithmire, and Kellee S. Tsai (2023) The State and Capitalism in China (Elements in Politics and Society in East Asia), Cambridge University Press.

David Slocum (2025, November 13) “Creative Leadership Today,” Crafting Leadership, Substack;

Crafting Leadership with David Slocum

Creative Leadership Today

Creative leadership is an individual and collective practice of deliberately applying established or fostering novel creativity or innovation methods, frameworks, or approaches to challenging opportunities, problems, or other situations over time, while also questioning and refining the assumptions, definitions, and principles underlying these methods, …

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a year ago · 7 likes · David Slocum

Lin Zhang and Tu Lan (2025) “Innovating Urban China: The Rise of the Local Venture State and the Making of New Entrepreneurial Spaces,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 49(1), 142–162; https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13279

Living in Greenwich Village in September 2001, I watched the Twin Towers fall from my Carmine Street rooftop. For much of the rest of that academic year, I tried to make sense of what had happened on that Tuesday morning, for myself and my NYU students. During the same period, both the organizational management and security studies communities were already theorizing the changes to their core subjects under the pressure of the unprecedented event.

In the spring of 2003, I attended an early “Un-Conference” in New York and encountered a non-traditional format that was itself a performance of the decentralized principles being discussed. I was also not entirely surprised when a presenter proposed, with genuine intellectual seriousness, that Al Qaeda’s organizational design pointed toward the future of network design. I recall the room went quiet in the way rooms only go quiet when something is simultaneously obvious and unspeakable (at least not yet, not there).

The argument was not a moral endorsement; rather, it was a structural observation, drawing on the recent, pre-9/11 work of RAND analysts (2001), that argued how a leaderless, cellular, “all-channel” network could absorb devastating strikes to its center and continue to function (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001). Although several people walked out, others stayed and argued well beyond the session’s scheduled ending with no one fully agreeing, but no one entirely dismissing the argument either. That tension between the efficiency of hierarchy and the resilience of modularity has persisted over my succeeding two decades of work with leaders and organizations. And now, twenty-three years on, it is being foregrounded, in blood and fire, on two entirely different continents.

I. Beyond Resilience

Traditional organizations are arguably built like a phalanx, with disciplined ranks and interlocked functions, made to be formidable when advancing on familiar terrain. As American classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes, the classical Greek and Macedonian phalanx was one of history’s most effective systems of coordinated force, being nearly unbreakable from the front, capable of shattering almost anything in its path on level ground (Hanson, 2000). From an organizational perspective, its structural logic arguably passed into the first generation of modern management articulated by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The early twentieth-century engineer and pioneering management thinker’s Principles of Scientific Management standardized every movement of every worker on the same principle of disciplined collective execution, substituting central design for local variation and concentrating power through tight coordination (Taylor, 1911).

The flaw in both systems, as the ancient Greek historian Polybius identified when analyzing Rome’s defeat of the Macedonian phalanx at Cynoscephalae in 197 BC, was structural. He understood that the phalanx suffered from flanking exposure and terrain dependence and risked cascading collapse wherever the formation broke (Polybius, 1926). What proved true of the Spartan line has proven equally true of many bureaucratic firms, that the same tight integration that concentrated frontal power made the whole formation vulnerable to an adversary willing to engage from an unexpected angle.

The standard approach to overcoming this flaw has been advanced by the former U.S. Army general in charge of fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal (and his colleagues), in Team of Teams (McChrystal et al., 2015). His response was to build the capacity of the military system to absorb shocks and return to prior form – resilience– through distributed communication and shared awareness and knowledge. That prescription, sound as far as it goes, has since become something close to a leadership cliché, appearing in everything from annual reports to social media posts, often with diminishing analytical content.

Polymath and writer Nassim Taleb has explored a harder concept that is also worth noting here. In Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Taleb drew a sharp line between systems that merely survive disorder and systems that actually gain from it and emerge from the shock stronger and more capable than before (Taleb, 2012). Resilience, in his account, represents a lower bar, which means you bounce back to where you started. Anti-fragility means the disruption becomes an input to improvement, the way muscles grow through stress or immune systems sharpen through exposure.

The distinction has a clear correlate in business leadership and organizations. Netflix’s Chaos Engineering program deliberately injects system failures, through an aptly named “Chaos Monkey” tool, into production infrastructure to force engineers to build services that improve rather than merely survive disruption (Basiri et al., 2016). The company does not hope its systems will withstand failures; instead, the program engineers internalize processes and operations to improve because of those failures. For organizational designers, the distinction matters enormously, because what looks like resilience is sometimes just concealed rigidity, and what looks like vulnerability can, under the right structural conditions, turn out to be something altogether more generative.

II. Two Doctrines, One Logic

Considering resilience in light of the current conflict in the Gulf, this is where the story becomes (at least for me) both unexpected and instructive. Two deeply opposed military and political traditions have, through entirely separate reasoning, arrived at the same doctrinal and design conclusion.

The first is the Iranian “Mosaic Defensive Strategy,” a doctrine codified nearly two decades ago and stress-tested publicly since late February 2026, when the U.S. Operation Epic Fury eliminated close to forty senior Iranian leaders, including the Supreme Leader and high-ranking IRGC commanders (Bezhan, 2026). On any conventional organizational logic, this killing of senior leadership should have produced collapse by decapitating a hierarchical system at its apex.

Instead, Iran’s 31 provincial Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commands, structured as autonomous units with their own resources, intelligence, and pre-delegated authority, continued to operate on what Al Jazeera described as “general instructions given in advance” rather than real-time orders from a center that no longer existed as it had (Al Jazeera, 2026). The Iranian state did not collapse because it had, by design, embedded its intent into the structure itself rather than concentrating its intent in any single node. That is precisely the cellular logic that Connell identified in his analysis of Iranian military doctrine decades ago and before the doctrine was tested under fire (Connell 2010).

The Iranian model is resilient in the technical sense that it survived a decapitating strike, though the evidence thus far suggests it falls short of being anti-fragile in Taleb’s sense. Absent central oversight, autonomous provincial units have been responsible for the targeting of neutral vessels in the Gulf of Oman, uncoordinated actions that a functioning center might have prevented (The Soufan Center, 2026). Though the system has survived and continued, it remains unclear, as of this writing, if, besides local enhancements to targeting, it has improved overall. In an exceptional series of brief analyses, AI strategist Matthew Kilbane argues the U.S.-Israeli-Iranian conflict is, in fact, the “anti-fragile war” (Kilbane, 2026).

A second tradition is represented by the U.S. military’s DARPA’s Mosaic Warfare, which may move closer toward anti-fragility. This model was conceived not in the shadow of geopolitical vulnerability but of economic asymmetry, when a single aircraft can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and its destruction constitutes a strategic crisis. DARPA’s solution was to decompose the traditional military platform into thousands of low-cost, AI-linked tiles, separating sensing, shooting, and communicating into distributed functions that collectively overwhelm an adversary’s decision-making (Deptula, et al., 2019).

In principle, the U.S. system is designed not merely to survive strikes but to proliferate faster than an adversary can respond, gaining effectiveness as it scales (though the extent to which it has been implemented, and actually converted pressure into offensive capability, is an open question). By contrast, the Iranian model appears to be operational and to have absorbed actual strikes successfully (at least). Both represent mosaic thinking, though the extent to which they are resilient or may even approximate genuine anti-fragility remains to be seen.

III. Convergent Evolution and What It Signals

That ideologically opposed systems converged independently on the same structural logic is a signal of the leadership, strategic, and technological realities of our time. Convergent evolution in biology indicates environmental pressure powerful enough to produce identical solutions through entirely different lineages. The organizational equivalent is an environment so complex and volatile that hierarchy, for all its coordination advantages in stable conditions, cannot absorb shocks quickly enough to survive.

We can see that platform-era businesses arrived at the same conclusion through market pressure rather than military necessity, even though the organizational instinct for flexibility long preceded the digital era. Business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. analyzed the first great corporate unbundling of the functional phalanx in his groundbreaking analysis, Strategy and Structure. Studying the extraordinary growth of firms like DuPont, General Motors, and Sears, Chandler saw how executives dismantled centralized functional organization and replaced it with semi-autonomous divisions, each carrying its own operating logic, coordinated by a lean corporate center (Chandler, 1962).

Alfred Sloan’s multidivisional GM of the 1940s and 1950s is not yet a mosaic, but, as discussed by Chandler, it is the historical midpoint when large organizations first broke the rigid hierarchical formation in response to environmental complexity. Decades later, around 2002, Jeff Bezos pushed the logic further. At Amazon, the API mandate required every team to expose its capabilities as a service to every other team, creating a modular internal architecture in which no single failure could cascade across the whole (Yegge, 2011).

The U.S. military recently reached the same structural conclusion. A 2019 Department of the Army publication puts this concisely.

In practice, mission command tends to be decentralized, informal, and flexible. Plans, orders, and graphics should be as simple and concise as possible, designed for maximum flexibility during execution. By decentralizing decision-making authority, mission command increases tempo and improves subordinates’ abilities to act quickly in fluid and chaotic situations (U.S. Department of the Army, 2019, p. 1-22).

It is telling to read such a formal acknowledgment, from within an institution that once built its operational identity around phalanx-like coordination, that centralized control and decision-making has been superseded. Whether in military doctrine, industrial organization, or cloud computing, it is the same pressure producing these designs – environments that punish single points of failure and reward systems capable of reconfiguring under stress.

IV. The Leader as Curator

The mosaic model demands from its leaders a role that is deceptively simple to describe and operationally demanding to execute. In business, Zhang Ruimin’s transformation of Haier over two decades offers the clearest business illustration. During that time, the CEO dismantled one of China’s largest appliance companies and rebuilt it as approximately 4,000 micro-enterprises, each carrying its own P&L, hiring authority, and autonomous strategic decision-making, within a shared enabling platform. He called the model, “RenDanHeYi,” which literally linked employee value directly to user value (Fischer, Lago & Liu, 2013).

In a McKinsey Quarterly interview, Zhang explained concisely the leadership required in this structure: “You must delegate all those powers – decision-making, hiring and firing, and setting compensation – to the microenterprises themselves. Giving up control is actually an important part of the model” (McKinsey Quarterly, 2021). His account of his own legacy completes the curator image: “changing a hierarchical and bureaucratic enterprise into an ecosystem, changing a whole garden into a rain forest.”

Conversely, the traditional chess-player model, in which the leader moves pieces according to a centrally held plan, assumes both that the board is visible and that the pieces will stay where placed. Neither assumption holds in today’s genuinely turbulent environments. Strategic management pioneer Henry Mintzberg formulated a structural typology that precisely names the organizational logic operating here. Among his five “configurations,” he contrasted the “machine bureaucracy,” which is centralized, standardized, optimized for stable and predictable conditions, and the “adhocracy,” which coordinates through mutual adjustment among distributed units and is designed for environments too complex for standardized rules to govern (Mintzberg, 1984).

The phalanx and the machine bureaucracy belong to the same structural family, as do the mosaic and the adhocracy. The task of the leader as curator, as the case of Zhang Ruimin and Haier makes concrete, is to ensure that the tiles of the mosaic are interoperable, oriented toward the same image, and held by “grout” strong enough to maintain the pattern when individual tiles are removed or replaced. Crucially, the grout in Haier’s model is not culture in the soft sense but platform infrastructure in the hard sense, comprising shared data systems, financial protocols, and a philosophy sufficiently internalized that the center can step back without the picture fragmenting.

This is neither passive leadership nor retreat from responsibility. Pre-delegating authority requires extraordinary clarity about organizational and strategic intent that needs to be clearer, in many ways, than command-and-control demands because there is no center available to subsequently correct for ambiguity. Zhang Ruimin’s model took more than a decade of iterative rollout to reach operational maturity (Fischer, Lago & Liu, 2013). The Iranian military doctrine likewise required nearly two decades of doctrinal preparation before it was activated. Neither happened quickly or easily, and no account of mosaic leadership is honest that omits that long commitment and preparation cost.

V. How Much Center Do You Give Up?

The mosaic model poses an operative question for every leader. It is not whether to decentralize, since twenty-first century VUCA or BANI environmental conditions appear to have settled debates about the benefits of flexibility and modularity in most settings. The question, rather, is how far to go in decentralizing before coherence collapses. The Iranian, Haier, and Netflix cases together suggest an answer organized around three design imperatives that bear directly on practice.

Intent must be pre-embedded in norms and not simply in rules (which give way under novel conditions) and in judgment formed through sustained shared experience and practice. Instead of being handed a manual in February 2026, IRGC provincial commanders acted on the basis of having spent years internalizing a doctrine. Zhang Ruimin’s micro-enterprise leaders at Haier did not simply receive P&L freedom; they operated within a philosophy absorbed through iterative engagement over more than a decade. The connective tissue of shared mental models, protocols, and purpose is the primary organizational infrastructure, not the chart, and must be treated as such in resource allocation and leadership attention.

The mosaic design must include feedback loops from the periphery back to a reconstituting center, however light. This is where the Haier model provides the clearest structural answer to what the Iranian model apparently cannot offer. Haier’s platform aggregates what the micro-enterprises learn from their direct user contact and routes that intelligence back into the ecosystem, reinforcing overall learning and improvement. Though the center does not manage operations, it learns from them and, through the transfer of knowledge, evolves the conditions for all the micro-enterprises.

A pure mosaic, as the conflict in the Gulf currently appears to demonstrate, can preserve the organization while degrading its coherence. The anti-fragile aspiration, in which distributed units not only survive but improve through turbulence and disorder, requires a center both light enough to survive its own removal and substantive enough, when it reconstitutes, to incorporate what the tiles learned while operating alone.

Finally, the leaders curating mosaic organizations must shift their metrics from tile performance to grout strength. Most management systems measure the output of individual units (the equivalent of appraising individual mosaic tiles for color or texture) rather than the integrity of the connections between them. Organizations that build the explicit measurement of cross-unit coordination, knowledge transfer, and shared situational awareness into their performance systems are designing for the volatile and uncertain environment that currently exists. Those that do not are still organizing more like phalanxes, which, while formidable from the front, are exposed on every other side and left to hope their flanks hold against today’s unpredictable threats.

References

Al Jazeera (2026, March 10) “The ‘Fourth Successor’: How Iran Planned to Fight a Long War with the US and Israel”; https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/10/the-fourth-successor-how-iran-planned-to-fight-a-long-war-with-the-us-and-israel

John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds. (2001) Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy,RAND; https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382.html

Ali Basiri, Niosha Behnam, Ruud de Rooij, Lorin Hochstein, Luke Kosewski, and Justin Reynolds (2016) “Chaos Engineering,” IEEE Software, 33(3), 35–41; https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2016.60

Frud Bezhan (2026, March 7) “With Top Brass Dead, Iran Deploys Decemtralized ‘Mosaic’ Strategy to Boost Defenses,” Radio FreeEurope/Radio Liberty; https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-irgc-israel-us-war/33697690.html

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1962) Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, MIT Press.

Michael Connell (2010, October 11) “Iran’s Military Doctrine,” The Iran Primer, United States Institute of Peace; https://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/irans-military-doctrine

David A. Deptula and Heather R. Penney, with Lawrence Stutzriem and Mark A. Grunziger (2019) Restoring America’s Military Competitiveness: Mosaic Warfare, Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, Air Force Association; https://www.mitchellaerospacepower.org/restoring-americas-military-competitiveness-mosaic-warfare/

Bill Fischer, Umberto Lago, and Fang Liu (2013). Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform, Jossey-Bass.

Viktor Davis Hanson (2000). The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece, 2nd ed., University of California Press.

Matthew Kilbane (2026, March 20) “1 of 5 – The Antifragile War: The Iranian Mosaic Doctrine, Agentic AI, and How to Prevent a Perpetual War,” LinkedIn; https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/antifragile-war-iranian-mosaic-doctrine-agentic-ai-how-kilbane-0tjce/

Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, Portfolio/Penguin.

Henry Mintzberg (1984) “A Typology of Organizational Structure,” Organizations: A Quantum View, eds. Danny Miller and Peter H. Friesen, Prentice-Hall.

Polybius (1926) Histories, Fragments of Book XVIII, trans. W. R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press; https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/18*.html

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012) Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Random House.

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Row, Project Gutenberg; https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/6435

The Soufan Center (2026, March 9) “Iran’s ‘Mosaic Defense’ Strategy: Decentralization as Resilience Factor”; https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2026-march-9a/

U.S. Department of the Army (2019) ADP 6-0: Mission Command: Command and Control of Army Forces, Army Publishing Directorate;

https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-0-000-WEB-3.pdf

Steve Yegge (2011, October 11) “Stevey’s Google Platforms Rant” [Leaked internal memo, preserved on GitHub]; Link

Zhang Ruimin. (2021, July 27) “Shattering the Status Quo: A Conversation with Haier’s Zhang Ruimin,” McKinsey Quarterly; https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/shattering-the-status-quo-a-conversation-with-haiers-zhang-ruimin

For Gerald Moynahan*

Reading The Making of a Counterculture in high school in the 1980s felt like opening a door to a world I didn’t know existed. Though written at the end of the 1960s, its incisive argument still felt live and urgent. Cultural historian Theodore Roszak claimed that the deepest threat to human freedom was not any particular government or corporation or other institution, but “technocracy,” a cultural system in which authority rests on technical expertise and the impersonal logic of scientific rationality (Roszak, 1969).

Technocracy does not present itself as ideology, but instead appears instead as neutral expertise, as simply the way things work. At its center lies what Roszak called “the myth of objective consciousness,” the assumption that reality is best known through detached, quantified analysis stripped of moral weight or imaginative engagement. When institutions adopt this stance, they solve problems, but more fundamentally, they define what counts as knowledge and even what counts as real.

In Roszak’s account, the counterculture was less a social rebellion than an epistemological one. It rejected the narrowing of experience imposed by technocratic rationality and sought alternative ways of knowing through art, spirituality, and communal experimentation. What mattered was less the particular forms these took than the underlying insistence that instrumental reason could not account for the full range of human experience. The “visionary imagination” he described was the capacity to perceive what dominant systems could not measure or reward.

This first phase of technocracy, rooted in the postwar consolidation of expert-managed institutions, established the basic tension that would persist across subsequent decades. Systems of expertise increasingly shaped not only human decisions, but perception itself. From Cold War university research tied to defense funding to corporate management systems reducing workers to variables, technocracy reorganized both knowledge and value. The counterculture’s deeper insight was that dissent, under such conditions, must take the form of alternative epistemologies, that is, of different and more complete systems of understanding.

From Technocracy to Information Ideology

Two decades later, in The Cult of Information, Roszak extended this critique into the emerging digital age. His argument then was deceptively simple: information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom (Roszak, 1986). Drawing on the communications theory of mathematician Claude Shannon, he observed that information was being defined in ways deliberately stripped of meaning, enabling an ideology in which data accumulation and processing were mistaken for understanding (Shannon, 1948).

The “cult” that Roszak described rested on a set of increasingly familiar assumptions: that the mind operates like a computer, that sufficiently digitized problems yield to sufficiently powerful machines, and that more data necessarily produces better decisions. Against these, he insisted that “the mind thinks with ideas, not information,” underscoring that interpretation, context, and judgment give data its meaning (Roszak, 1986; p. 30). To mistake data for insight, in other words, is to mistake the scaffolding for the structure.

Taken together, these two books trace a clear historical progression. The technocracy of the 1950s and 1960s evolves into the information ideology of the late twentieth century (and early twenty-first). When the authority of this technical expertise encountered resistance (say, in the form of the counterculture), it reconstituted itself through new infrastructures that subsumed some of the very countercultural critiques that had been mounted against it. What arguably changed was not the underlying logic, but its medium and reach.

The Recomposition of Counterculture in Digital Systems

Think of the extraordinary work and digital utopianism of author and activist Stewart Brand. As Stanford Communications professor Fred Turner writes in his indispensable history of Brand’s role in the development of Silicon Valley, the counterculture and later cyberculture were inextricably connected (Turner, 2006). After initially embracing technology as a positive social force committed to egalitarianism, personal liberation, and collaborative communities, the ideals of tech entrepreneurs would soon give way to, or at least be joined by other animating visions of, the pursuit of individual power, networked economies, and libertarianism.

The platform era of the 2010s and 2020s represents the next phase in this trajectory. Here, information is operationalized through systems of visibility, ranking, and behavioral feedback. Platforms transform data into continuous evaluation, shaping the social and professional norms of what we see, reward, and repeat in real time (Gillespie, 2018). Whereas technocracy relied on institutional mediation and information systems relied on abstraction, platforms collapse both into participatory infrastructures that are co-produced by their users and from which their data is continually extracted (Zuboff, 2019).

It is within this context that my own work on the relationship between leadership judgment and evaluative logics and infrastructures in our current platform era takes shape (Slocum 2026a; Slocum, 2026b). What becomes striking is not the novelty of the platform era, but its continuity with Roszak’s diagnosis. The authority of experts has been extended into algorithmic systems, while the information cult has been transformed into a regime of visibility and engagement. These systems do not merely inform decisions; they shape the conditions under which information is accessed and decisions are made.

At the same time, it is important to keep in mind how much of the emerging leadership response to these conditions has centered on calls for greater authenticity, empathy, and emotional intelligence as distinctly human counterweights to technological systems. While these capacities remain important, they do not in themselves address the more fundamental reconfiguration of how judgment is formed within these environments.

Cognitive Surrender and Organizational Misrecognition

Researchers at the Wharton School have recently outlined how “cognitive surrender,” the tendency to adopt AI-generated outputs with minimal scrutiny under conditions of time pressure and complexity, illustrates this dynamic with particular clarity – and raises appropriately serious concerns (Shaw & Nave, 2024). Put plainly, the fluent coherence produced by generative AI is not understanding. It is the appearance of understanding, delivered with sufficient speed and confidence to pass as insight for users and in environments already primed to reward both.

At the organizational level, this shift becomes visible in failures that are often misattributed to insufficient data. Cases such as Wells Fargo and Boeing, as I have discussed elsewhere, suggest a different diagnosis (Slocum 2026b). These failures did not turn on a lack or mis-handling of information so much as they were produced by over-reliance on informational systems. Metrics and models created an illusion of control while displacing tacit, experiential knowledge that might have challenged prevailing assumptions. In this sense, the issue is not simply noise in decision-making, as described by Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators, but a deeper misrecognition of what constitutes knowledge and how indiividuals or organizations can access it (Kahneman et al., 2021).

This brings into focus the guiding concern of my own series of writings about the displacement of judgment. Across technocratic, informational, and platform systems, what is consistently eroded is the human capacity to interpret, prioritize, and take responsibility under conditions of uncertainty. Data accumulates, systems expand, and outputs accelerate, while the slower, tacit processes underlying judgment are progressively marginalized.

While also necessary, it is therefore insufficient to frame the human response to these systems primarily in affective or relational terms. The central issue emerging from a review of Roszak’s writings, and carried forward in my own thinking, is not whether leaders feel more or connect more, but whether they retain the capacity to interpret, prioritize, and act under conditions increasingly structured to displace precisely those capacities.

Reclaiming Judgment in the Practice of Creative Leadership

It is here that the idea I have elaborated of “creative and countercultural leadership” becomes necessary (Slocum, 2026b). Roszak’s counterculture resisted the epistemic authority of dominant systems, though it often struggled to translate that resistance into durable institutional forms. The challenge we face today, in organizations and across society, is different. Leaders cannot simply refuse platforms; they operate within infrastructures that are now foundational to organizational life. The question confronting leaders is therefore not whether to engage, but how to do so without being fully shaped by their dominant logics.

Creative leadership, in this context, is best conceived of today as a mode of disciplined practice of selective engagement. This stands in contrast to more familiar prescriptions that emphasize authenticity or empathy as the primary human differentiators in an age of AI. Those qualities may be crucial in shaping how leaders relate to others, but they do not substitute for the disciplined cultivation of judgment required to see and act beyond prevailing complex, data-saturated systems of attention and reward, while still operating within them. This practice reframes Roszak’s “visionary imagination” in organizational terms, emphasizing not withdrawal from systems, but the ability to maintain judgment within them.

The introduction of generative AI only intensifies this challenge. If platforms compress judgment by privileging speed and visibility, AI risks pre-empting it altogether. Roszak’s critique of the “cult of information” now extends to what might be called a “cult of coherence,” in which outputs appear meaningful even when detached from lived context. The danger lies not only in deferring to AI, but in losing the habit of interrogating what cannot be easily articulated.

And yet, there is a paradox worth holding. If the counterculture of the 1960s sought expanded consciousness through external means, today’s leaders face the inverse challenge of recovering depth within environments that systematically flatten it. Leadership practices such as sustaining dialogue between tacit and explicit knowledge, slowing decision cycles in high-stakes contexts, and institutionalizing dissent can consequently be understood as contemporary forms of countercultural practice. They operate within systems while resisting those systems’ reductive tendencies.

The Platform Rewriting of Leadership – and Leadership Development

Looking back at the longer arc offered by Roszak’s writings helps us to identify a consistent pattern. Technocracy has long assumed that humans are rational optimizers. Information culture has assumed that more data leads to better decisions. More recently, platform culture has proliferated around the assumption that visibility equates to value. Each of these assumptions carries an implicit anthropology that shapes how leadership is understood and practiced. The re-centering of judgment challenges all three by insisting on the irreducibly human character of interpretation and responsibility.

What becomes increasingly clear, when viewed across this longer arc, is that new tools or faster cycles of decision-making do not simply emerge in the platform era for the sake of speed, convenience, or efficiency. These changes, rather, represent the platforms’ ongoing reorganization of the conditions under which judgment itself is formed, expressed, and recognized. The effect is the reshaping of leadership discourse to privilege visibility, fluency, and speed as proxies for insight, often displacing the slower, tacit, and context-bound processes through which meaningful judgment actually emerges.

Leadership development, if it is to remain credible in this environment, cannot confine itself to equipping leaders to operate more effectively within these systems. Programs that foreground authenticity, empathy, or emotional intelligence without equal attention to the cultivation of judgment likewise risk reinforcing the very conditions they seek to humanize, by leaving intact the underlying displacement of interpretive capacity and responsibility.

Roszak’s persistent insights therefore suggest, finally, a necessary recalibration of current leadership development priorities to take on the more demanding tasks of creating and sustaining the spaces, practices, and disciplines through which judgment can be preserved, exercised, and renewed. By doing so, the most serious leadership development today becomes unavoidably countercultural, not through any act of rejection or contrarianism, but as a deliberate effort to hold open forms of knowing and acting that the dominant infrastructures of the platform era are systematically inclined to close.

*I’ve been blessed throughout my life with generous, wise, and caring teachers – both in that formal role and otherwise. Gerald Moynahan was an early and influential teacher who, besides introducing me to Roszak’s work, had me and my classmates doing primary historical research and analysis in our teens. I still benefit today from the intellectual rigor and spirit of disciplined curiosity and questioning he instilled in us those many years ago.

References

Tarleton Gillespie (2018) Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media, Yale University Press.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Little, Brown Spark.

Theodore Roszak (1969) The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, Doubleday.

---------- (1986) The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, Pantheon Books.

Claude E. Shannon (1948) “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379-423; https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x

Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave (2026) “Thinking – Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender,” SSRN Working Paper; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

David Slocum (2026a, February 19) “From Judgment to Visibility: How Platforms Are Quietly Redefining What Leadership Means,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/from-judgment-to-visibility-how-platforms

---------- (2026b, March 26) “Judgment After Visibility: Creative – and Countercultural – Leadership in the Patform Era,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/judgment-after-visibility-creative

Fred Turner (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press.

Shoshanna Zuboff (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, PublicAffairs.

The “garrison state” is a political term introduced eight decades ago that continues to shape descriptions in policy debates, empirical research, and popular discourse of possible future societal and economic development. Proposed by American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell in 1941, the concept was intended as a provocative speculation and developmental construct that would clarify how societies might evolve under conditions of persistent insecurity (Lasswell, 1941). Today, the underlying logics of a “digital garrison state,” which prioritizes its resources, technonological innovations, and decision-making to security above all else, appear to be increasingly current and operational – and worthy of closer consideration.

The core of Lasswell’s original argument was stark: modern societies could shift from the dominance of “specialists on bargaining” to the supremacy of “specialists on violence,” not through rupture but through a gradual reordering of priorities driven by fear. As a scholar, Lasswell worked across the social sciences and is considered the founder of the field of political psychology. He remains well-known for the breadth of his writing, which included studies of power, a communications model that emphasizes the importance of the channels used, and an early account of wartime propaganda (Lasswell, 1927/2025).

At the center of the societal shift toward a political-military elite was what Lasswell called the socialization of danger. Threat here becomes ambient and shared, and populations come to accept and even to demand the prioritization of security over competing values. As a result, authority centralizes, symbolic management intensifies, and economic life is subtly reorganized around preparedness. Lasswell nevertheless made equally clear that this shift was not inevitable. Rather, it was one possible trajectory among several, to be weighed rather than assumed.

That caution is essential, since contemporary discussions of a digital garrison state often move too quickly from emerging tendencies to systemic claims. The question is not whether elements of Lasswell’s construct are visible today (they are), but whether they cohere into a unified order or instead reflect a more uneven and contested transformation.

Revisiting the Concept: From Militarization to Securitization

Subsequent scholarship has reframed the garrison state less as a binary condition than as a spectrum. What matters is not formal military rule, for example, but the degree to which security considerations dominate decision-making across domains. Israeli political scientist Eyal Rubinson’s “garrison index” captures this variation, demonstrating that states differ significantly in how deeply security logics penetrate domestic and external policy (Rubinson, 2024).

The mechanisms driving this shift are also more complex than Lasswell’s original formulation might suggest. U.S. political scientists Stephen Walker and S. Ivy Lang’s late Cold War study of the “garrison state syndrome” in “the Third World” highlights how threat environments interact with institutional structures in contingent ways. Their research also acknowledges that professional military institutions or a civilan police state, in different contexts, could restrain or amplify the coercive tendencies of policymakers (Walker & Lang, 1988).

What distinguishes our contemporary moment, therefore, is not militarization alone but the expansion of securitization. Economic systems, technological infrastructures, and even everyday behaviors are increasingly framed by politicians and media through the lens of risk and survival. This expansion provides the bridge to the digital domain.

This expansion is visible not only in institutional practice but in language itself. In the United States, for example, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after the attacks of September 11, 2001, integrated 22 separate governmental offcies or programs into a single Presidential cabinet-level department with the mission “to safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values” (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, n.d.). Doing so signaled the elevation of “security” into a master category through which a wide range of policy domains – immigration, infrastructure, public health, and even education – could be reframed.

Since the end of the Cold War, similar moves have been evident in Europe and elsewhere, where political and media discourse increasingly aggregates disparate risks under a common security rubric, from energy dependence to supply chains and digital platforms (Buzan, Waever, & de Wilde, 1997). The cumulative effect of more and more issues being recoded as matters of security is that they become subject to exceptional treatment, reduced tolerance for trade-offs, and heightened executive discretion. Securitization thus comes to operate not only through budgets and institutions, but through the gradual redefinition of what counts as normal political and economic concerns.

The Digital Turn: Surveillance and the Integration of Civilian Life

The novelty of the present lies in the infrastructure through which securitization operates. Whereas Lasswell anticipated the integration of science and governance, contemporary systems embed surveillance and analysis in the fabric of everyday life. Financial transactions, location data, and communication patterns are continuously captured and rendered into analyzable forms, creating a pervasive informational substrate for both commercial and security purposes.

We should consequently attend to the deep historical roots of this integration. The postwar “warfare state,” as described by sociologist John Bellamy Foster and communications scholar Robert W. McChesney, relied on the close coupling of military demand, industrial production, and scientific research, producing a durable institutional nexus between state and market (Foster & McChesney, 2014). That nexus has since expanded into digital infrastructures that extend far beyond traditional defense domains.

Former Harvard Business School researcher Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism captures clearly a contemporary extension of this logic. Data extraction and behavioral prediction constitute a new regime of accumulation, producing what she calls “Big Other” – a distributed architecture of monitoring and control that reshapes power relations across society (Zuboff, 2015). As the comparative cases and table below illustrate, this infrastructure enables multiple configurations depending on how states, firms, and institutions interact.

What further distinguishes the present moment is the expansion of the security ecosystem beyond traditional defense contractors to include technology firms whose capabilities lie upstream of physical force. Companies such as Palantir, which provides data integration and analytics platforms to military and intelligence agencies, exemplify this shift toward software-defined security infrastructures. At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence – driven by firms such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and others – are reshaping the boundaries between civilian and defense applications, as machine learning models are adapted for intelligence analysis, autonomous systems, and cyber operations.

The result is not a replacement of the military-industrial complex, but its extension into a broader security–industrial-technological complex, in which data, prediction, and algorithmic control become central to both commercial and strategic competition. As Palantir co-founder Alexander C. Karp and his corporate affairs head Nicholas W. Zamiska have written, more fundamental still is the continuing need to link current technological innovation more directly to “a larger project for which to fight” and “defend our collective security” (Karp, 2023, p. 66). This reinforces the integration of everyday and emergent digital systems, including AI, into security logics further blurring the distinction between civilian infrastructure and strategic asset.

Core Archetypes: Divergent Paths, Shared Pressures

The current activities and priorities of the United States arguably illustrate a hybrid trajectory toward being a garrison state. The expansion of emergency powers, particularly around immigration, the integration of technology firms into national security functions, and the persistence of a vast security-industrial-technological base all point toward a garrison-like configuration (Esman, 2007; Gotein, 2024). At the same time, institutional fragmentation and (varying levels of) political contestation continue to constrain the consolidation of the digital garrison state.

Israel represents a more mature case. Its persistent exposure to existential threat has institutionalized the influence of the security community across policy domains, producing one of the highest levels of “garrisonization” identified in comparative research (Rubinson, 2024). The integration of defense, intelligence, and technological innovation has created a powerful security-innovation loop in which surveillance and cyber capabilities are developed operationally and exported commercially (Senor & Singer, 2009).

Since February 2022, and the invasion by Russia, Ukraine has undertaken a rapid transformation of digital resources. The national government has implemented a centralized civilian digital infrastructure that integrates wider security operations, enabling real-time intelligence sharing and decentralized coordination, notably through the “Diia” (“action” in Ukrainian) ecosystem (Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, n.d.; Gustafson, et al., 2025). This “state in a smartphone” service seamlessly combines an array of public services, from renewing drivers’ licenses and getting married to registering businesses, with wartime survival and recovery needs, including opportunities to contribute information and money to the war effort.

Importantly, these individual state archetypes have not developed in isolation. They are embedded within a global system defined by both persistent political insecurity and dense interdependence. Threat perceptions are shaped not only by national histories and other conditions but by alliance structures, shared intelligence networks, and coordinated procurement systems, particularly within frameworks such as NATO and U.S.-aligned security partnerships in Asia.

Also critical here are the economic interdependencies – marked by supply chains, technology standards, and financial flows – that bind states together even as they prepare for conflict. These produce a paradoxical condition in which competition and cooperation coexist, and where the security posture of any one state is partly a function of the collective dynamics, politial and economic, in which it is embedded. The archetypes identified above are therefore best understood less as discrete models and more as nodes within a broader system of mutually conditioning pressures and incentives toward securitization.

Regional Pivots: Europe and Asia

Regional considerations help to illuminate this system, and we might view Europe as representing a revealing normative reversal. For much of the post–Cold War period, the European project was organized around the promise of “peace dividends,” welfare provision, and, more recently, ecological transition. The current turn toward rearmament signals a substantive reordering of priorities in which security increasingly displaces these earlier commitments.

Poland has emerged as a leading example of what could be considered a frontier garrison state, shaped by its geographic proximity to Russia and its role within NATO’s eastern flank. The state’s military expenditures have surged to 4.8% percent of GDP in 2026 ($54.1 billion USD, or roughly 200 billion PLN), a dramatic increase from only 2.2% ($13.7 billion USD) in 2020 (Notes from Poland, 2025; SIPRI, n.d.).

Particularly telling here is the expansion of debt-based and supranational funding. Whereas in 2020, nearly the entire allocation came from the Polish State Budget, the current funding arrives from three sources: the Central State Budget ($33.8 billion USD/125 billion PLN), loans from the Armed Forces Support Fund, or FWSZ ($13.7 billion USD/51 billion PLN – essentially loans that contribute to national debt); and loans from the EU Security Action for Europe (SAFE) program ($6.6 billion USD/24 billion PLN – an initial tranche of the €43 billion to be given to Poland over the next five years) (Notes from Poland, 2025; Głowacki, 2026).

Potentially more striking is the societal dimension that accompanies these growing expenditures: programs aimed at training civilians in military readiness and resilience have reframed defense as a shared civic responsibility. Together, these represent a broader shift toward total preparedness, in which the boundary between civilian and military spheres becomes increasingly blurred, not through coercion, but through normalization.

At the same time, the expansion of military spending and activities must be situated within the broader European shift toward rearmament. Since 2022, EU member states have collectively reversed decades of underinvestment in defense, increasing procurement, industrial coordination, and joint capability development (SIPRI, n.d.). Poland’s trajectory is thus both national and systemic, reflecting a wider recalibration – and deeper coordination – of security and economic priorities across the continent.

In Asia, South Korea and Taiwan illustrate a different configuration in which security imperatives are deeply embedded within economic and industrial systems. South Korea’s political economy is characterized by close integration between state policy and large industry and technology conglomerates (chaebol), many of which operate across both civilian and military sectors, and over the last decade have greatly increased their global defense exports (Bae and Fishwick, 2026). This has generated a form of normalized and ongoing mobilization, in which economic growth and military capability are mutually reinforcing.

Taiwan offers a complementary model centered on technological centrality. Its semiconductor industry functions as a so-called “Silicon Shield,” linking global supply chains to national security (Šimov, 2025). By positioning its technological infrastructure as indispensable, Taiwan enhances deterrence while justifying expanded investment in defense and surveillance capabilities. Across both regions, security has become not only a policy domain but a structuring logic of economic life.

Mutually Reinforcing Militarization

A defining feature of the current moment is the transnational reinforcement of militarization through interconnected security-industrial-technological systems. States increasingly collaborate on production, procurement, and development, creating feedback loops that tie national security strategies to global supply chains. Once established, these networks generate strong incentives for continuity, as they become embedded in employment, regional economies, and political constituencies.

The continuing expansion of the global arms trade amplify inter-state collaboration and consolidate global supply chains. International arms transfers have reached near-record levels, with the United States, France, and South Korea among leading exporters and Europe and Asia among the fastest-growing import regions (SIPRI, n.d.). The war in Ukraine and tensions in East Asia have accelerated procurement cycles, perhaps most notably in Europe’s shift toward rearmament.

Flows of arms and the capital supporting them both mark and reinforce geopolitical alignments. Defense contracts lock states into long-term technological dependencies, reinforcing alliances while making retrenchment economically and strategically costly. The arms trade thus functions as a central transmission mechanism of garrison dynamics, linking national trajectories into a broader system of mutually reinforcing militarization.

Again, these dynamics do not unfold in an institutional vacuum. As security-industrial-technological integration deepens, it does so within fiscal systems already shaped by stagnation, debt, and competing social demands. The expansion of security infrastructures therefore raises not only strategic questions, but distributive ones. The central issue is no longer whether states can mobilize resources for defense, but how that mobilization is financed and what it displaces.

The Fiscal Squeeze: Security, Austerity, and the Reordering of Priorities

This transformation is rarely fiscally neutral. As security expenditures rise, they exert sustained pressure on other areas of public spending. Longtime Cornell professor of government Milton Esman’s analysis of the American case, albeit from two decades ago, highlights how the costs of the garrison state are often deferred or obscured, allowing expansion to proceed without immediate disruption (Esman, 2007). Over time, however, these trade-offs become more visible, particularly as social programs face stagnation.

Recent developments in Europe, in particular, cast these dynamics into sharper relief. Since 2022, EU member states have undertaken a rapid and coordinated campaign toward rearmament, reversing decades of underinvestment. Conspicuously, this shift has coincided with slow growth, high debt levels, and already strained welfare systems. As a result, what could appear as a straightforward increase in defense spending is better understood as a reallocation of political and economic priority, in which security investment begins to displace other collective projects.

As French sociologist Frédéric Lebaron and journalist Pierre Rimbert argue, this shift amounts to a form of military or security Keynesianism, in which large-scale public spending is justified not through social investment but through security imperatives (Lebaron and Rimbert, 2025). Crucially, this expansion coexists with continued commitments to fiscal restraint in other domains. The result is not a generalized return of the state, but a selective one: expansive in military and security, restrictive in infrastructure and welfare.

The distributive implications are significant. Proposals to increase defense spending toward 5 percent of GDP – now being openly discussed within NATO and individual member states – would entail, at constant output, hundreds of billions of euros in additional annual expenditure across Europe. In practice, such increases are unlikely to be financed through immediate taxation alone. Instead, they are being enabled through borrowing, accounting flexibility, and exceptional fiscal measures. While this defers political conflict in the short term, it creates longer-term pressures that are likely to materialize as constraints on social spending, public investment, and redistribution.

At the same time, the political mediation of these trade-offs follows a familiar pattern. As Lebaron and Rimbert go on to note, the language of “pedagogy” increasingly accompanies calls for increased defense spending, a term historically associated with the normalization of austerity measures in Europe. Security is thus framed not as one priority among others, but as the condition for all others, rendering trade-offs less visible and dissent more difficult to articulate.

A further layer complicates this picture. Much of Europe’s increased defense spending flows outward rather than inward. The United States remains the dominant supplier of advanced military and technological systems, accounting for a majority share of European arms imports in recent years. Defense expansion therefore operates, in part, as a transnational fiscal transfer, linking European public expenditure to American defense-industrial-technological production. This dynamic reinforces existing geopolitical alignments while limiting the development of autonomous industrial capacity.

Taken together, these developments point to a structural tension that is rarely addressed substantively by politicians. While security imperatives justify expanded public spending, the costs of that expansion are displaced into the future or onto other domains. Over time, this produces a gradual but consequential reordering of state priorities, in which welfare, climate transition, and social investment risk being subordinated to defense and security. What emerges is not simply a fiscal constraint, but a transformation in the underlying logic of political economy – one in which security becomes the primary organizing principle of public finance and institutional decision-making.

Table 1: Comparative Analysis of Congtemporary Garrison and Security-Technology States and Systems

* While not conventional “states,” these systems function less as unitary actors and more as coordination architecturesthat shape and amplify members’ national trajectories.

Conclusion: Between Convergence and Contingency

What emerges from this exploration is not a singular institutional form, but a patterned convergence of pressures operating across distinct political economies. The cases discussed above (and their synthesis in the table) suggest that while threat perception, technological integration, and state-market coupling are increasingly shared conditions, their institutional expression remains uneven. The United States exhibits fragmentation within expansion; Israel demonstrates consolidation under sustained threat; Ukraine reveals rapid wartime adaptation; and Poland, South Korea, and Taiwan illustrate the diffusion of security logics into society and industry. The result is not uniformity, but structured variation.

This distinction matters analytically and politically, both for our efforts to make sense of shifting realities and to work to change them. To treat the “digital garrison state” as a settled condition risks obscuring both the mechanisms through which it develops and the points at which it may be redirected. Lasswell’s original construct was valuable precisely because it foregrounded contingency: that is, with the concept, he invited observers to consider how expectations of danger might reshape institutional arrangements before those arrangements hardened into durable forms. In the present, we can make a parallel move to examine both the expansion of security practices and the deeper processes through which they are normalized through law, technology, economic incentives, and public discourse.

At the same time, we should not understate the extent of current transformations around the globe. The integration of surveillance infrastructures with economic and political systems has altered the terrain on which authority operates. Control is exercised less through overt coercion than through continuous monitoring, prediction, and adjustment. In this sense, the contemporary evolution extends one of Lasswell’s core insights, that the “specialists on violence” are no longer the sole, or even primary, bearers of power. They are joined by specialists in data, algorithms, and systems whose capacity to shape behavior operates upstream of traditional forms of force.

The resulting tension is ongoing and structural rather than temporary and subsidiary. Security logics, once they are embedded in technological and economic systems, generate their own momentum, reinforced by institutional incentives and geopolitical competition. Yet this momentum coexists with countervailing forces such as legal constraints, market diversification, civic resistance, and the persistent plurality of democratic systems. The trajectory, therefore, remains open, but not unconstrained.

We might therefore best understand the digital garrison state as a direction of travel defined by reinforcing tendencies rather than a fixed destination. Its evolution depends not only on external threats, but on how societies interpret and respond to them, that is, on whether the socialization of danger becomes a self-sustaining logic or remains one influence among others in the ongoing reordering of political and economic life. In the U.S. and Europe in particular, this shift is already visible in the emerging trade-offs between defense expansion and social provision, suggesting that the material consequences of securitization may be as significant as its institutional forms.

So What Can Citizens and Leaders Do?

For citizens, the first task is diagnostic rather than reactive. In the opening of his 1941 article, Lasswell notes an earlier discussion in which he contrasted the garrison state and the civilian state in the context of the “Sino-Japanese Crisis” (Lasswell, 1937/1997). He then emphasized the “enormous importance of symbolic manipulation” and the “use of coercion” in the transition to the garrison state (1941: 459). The socialization of danger emerges over time, he is making clear, through a steady expansion of what is generally treated as urgent, exceptional, and non-negotiable in media and everyday discourse and civil society as well as its institutionalization through politics and economics.

The practical question persisting today is not whether threats are real, but how they should be framed, aggregated, and sustained (and by whom). When security becomes the default lens through which economic, technological, and social issues are interpreted, trade-offs recede from view. The civic challenge is to reintroduce transparency into those trade-offs by asking what is being protected, at what cost, for whom, and with what long-term consequences.

For leaders across business, government, and civil society, the challenge is increasingly structural. The terrain of decision-making is shifting with incentives aligning more and more around risk mitigation, data control, and security positioning, while constraints are diffused across geopolitical pressures and technological dependencies. In these conditions, strategy can easily become reactive. The needed leadership discipline involves, instead, an ongoing differentiation of existential from amplified risks, resilience from dependency, and adaptation from structural drift or path dependence.

What unites citizens and leaders is the problem of judgment under conditions of sustained uncertainty and of mediated perception. Navigating this terrain requires more than ongoing adaptation. It requires greater sensemaking, discernment, and judgment – which together contribute to the capacity to engage real security challenges without allowing them to silently reorder the broader architecture of purpose, value, and decision in which we live and lead.

References

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https://monthlyreview.org/2014/07/01/surveillance-capitalism/

Bartosz Głowacki (2026, February 27) “Poland Unveils Detailed Defense Spending for $51B in EU SAFE Loans,” Breaking Defense; https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/poland-unveils-detailed-defense-spending-for-51b-in-eu-safe-loans/

Elizabeth Goitein (2024, December 3) “Deployment of the U.S. Military for Immigration Enforcement: A Primer,” Just Security; https://www.justsecurity.org/105321/military-immigration-enforcement-deportation/

Mariana Gustafsson, Olga Matveieva, Elin Wihlborg, Yevgeniy Borodin, Tetiana Mamatova, and Sergiy Kvitka (2025) “Adaptive Governance Amidst the War: Overcoming Challenges and Strengthening Collaborative Digital Service Provision in Ukraine,” Government Information Quarterly, Volume 42, Issue 3, September 2025, 102056; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2025.102056

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Creative leadership is undergoing a fundamental reimagining. As I’ve previously argued, the discourse and practice of creative leadership that prevailed during the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – and celebrated gifted individuals, who propelled forward exceptional teams or organizations by producing a circumscribed set of creative artefacts, and helped to promulgate self-defining creative industries in the marketplace – has declined and dispersed (Slocum 2025a).

The 2020s have increasingly demonstrated how creative leadership today is a more collective practice, adaptive to more varied and uncertain contexts, and thoroughly connected with algorithmically-governed and AI-augmented digital platforms. My argument here is that developing and sustaining an ongoing practice of creative leadership today can be helpfully understood through the lens of mastery.

That turn to mastery is meant to be precise. Although popular and industry discourses often conflate mastery with excellence, they represent fundamentally distinct if potentially mutually reinforcing orientations toward creative work, leadership, and lives.

To wit, excellence often describes the outward standard of achievement, such as the awarded campaign, the profitable product, or the celebrated innovation. Mastery, by contrast, represents what bestselling peak performance author, Budd Stulberg, in his outstanding new book, The Way of Excellence, calls the internal “infinite game” of becoming, an ongoing practice that sustains excellence precisely because it exists independently of external validation (2026).

Contemporary research on creative expertise provides a similar bearing. University of Buckingham psychologist Kathryn Friedlander, in her valuable The Psychology of Expertise and Creative Performance (2024), suggests that mastery reflects not merely persistence but the gradual integration of technical skill, imagination, and contextual understanding within a domain of practice.

For creative leaders navigating algorithmic capitalism’s volatility, AI’s accelerating capabilities, and constant platform disruption, this distinction becomes critical. In other words, excellence should be understood not as a guiding orientation but as a contingent outcome of mastery. While often valuable, tangible, and the basis of substantive rewards, excellence defined as an end in itself is largely incapable of sustaining creative leadership.

I. The Cognitive Architecture of Mastery

The distinction between excellence and mastery illuminates why some leaders sustain creative output across shifting conditions while others falter when external rewards diminish or market exigencies change. Using Stulberg’s and Friedlander’s books as contemporary touchstones, we can understand mastery as a commitment to excellence for its own sake rather than primarily for external recognition or reward.

This orientation proves especially relevant to creative leaders whose identities become entangled with what Stulberg terms “pseudo-excellence,” evident in the fleeting approval of markets, algorithms, and followers. Where pseudo-excellence demands intensity and perpetual novelty, true mastery requires what he characterizes as “consistency over intensity,” suggesting that leadership develops not through heroic sprints but through sustained rhythms of deliberate practice.

Examining what distinguishes peak proficiency from mere competence, Friedlander identifies multidimensional complexity as the hallmark of mastery: by this, she means a sophisticated integration of technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, and mental imagery cultivated through disciplined practice over time. Her findings confirm that excellence emerges not primarily from talent but from deliberate and exploratory practice, the systematic engagement with increasingly complex challenges that refine and coordinate these multiple dimensions simultaneously.

For creative leaders, the call for deliberate practice suggests mastery functions as an operating system to maintain what, for Stulberg, is a way of excellence even when external conditions vary or prove unfavorable. Importantly, while Artificial Intelligence can enhance the technical aspects of creative work, the technology does not alter the fundamental distinction between mastery as human judgment and excellence as technical or hybrid output.

Friedlander’s work likewise demonstrates how creative mastery emerges from the convergence of multiple capabilities rather than from any single driver such as talent or practice alone. Drawing on a wide range of performance domains, from music and acting to memory sports and scientific research, she argues that creative expertise develops through “multifactorial” models integrating technical skill, aesthetic sensitivity, imagination, and contextual knowledge (Friedlander 2024; 2025).

In this view, mastery reflects not merely the accumulation of experience but the gradual coordination of dimensions into what she describes as a richer internal representation of a given domain’s structures and possibilities. Creative experts come to perceive patterns, tensions, and expressive opportunities that remain invisible to novices because their understanding of the field’s underlying architecture remains incomplete.

Read alongside Stulberg’s emphasis on disciplined consistency, Friedlander’s research helps clarify why sustained practice generates mastery rather than mere repetition. Deliberate engagement with increasingly complex challenges does more than refine technique: it develops what she terms an “architectonic ability to understand” an overall domain – that is, the capacity to grasp the deeper structural and expressive relationships that make creative work meaningful within its cultural context (Friedlander 2024).

Such perception evidences practical mastery by not simply executing existing forms but by reinterpreting them, extending or recombining established conventions in ways that appear innovative yet remain intelligible to their audiences. From this perspective, excellence emerges not as the direct aim of practice but as the occasional outward manifestation of a more fundamental internal transformation involving the gradual expansion of a practitioner’s capacity to perceive, interpret, and respond creatively within a field of practice.

II. Good Work and the Craft of Attentive Leadership

Broadening our consideration of mastery and excellence beyond individual psychology, we enter the territory of ethics and atentie leadership. In Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon propose a tripartite focus for understanding mastery in professional contexts. They argue that genuinely good work must be technically excellent, personally engaging, and ethically sound – three criteria that creative leaders increasingly struggle to balance as market pressures privilege technical excellence while subordinating human engagement and social ethics (2001).

The “good work” framework suggests that mastery for creative leaders requires attending simultaneously to craft quality, intrinsic motivation, and broader social responsibility, a combination they find rare but essential for sustaining meaningful work across a career. This ethical dimension grows more urgent as AI systems capable of generating technically proficient creative outputs challenge leaders to articulate what makes human creativity not merely different but inimitable.

If mastery provides the internal architecture, craft provides the mode of engagement with others and dynamic environments. Creative leadership, from this vantage point, represents not a static set of frameworks to be applied but an ongoing practice demanding attentiveness to what NYU and LSE sociologist Richard Sennett calls the “materials” at hand: that is, human relationships, organizational dynamics, market signals, and cultural contexts (2008).

Sennett’s work on craft is foundational to my understanding of the current practice of creative leadership. His definition of craftsmanship as “the desire to do a job well for its own sake” is an orientation that resists instrumentalization even while remaining able to produce instrumental results (9). The distinction matters because it locates the source of sustained performance in the quality of attention exercised by craftspeople (and those practicing the craft of leadership) rather than in their outcomes alone. That quality of attention can also be seen at the heart of the increasingly sophisticated mental representations of their domain built by expert practitioners, which Friedlander observed.

Likewise, in his insistence on “consistency over intensity,” Stulberg sharpens the craft argument by clarifying why many creative leadership cultures quietly undermine mastery even while claiming to celebrate it. Whereas intensity privileges visible exertion, urgency, and performative busyness, consistency privileges the quieter repetition through which judgment, taste, and discernment are refined. Read through Sennett’s craft lens, Stulberg helps explain why leadership can often look unimpressive in the short term yet prove decisive over time.

Exploring this understanding through an exploration of motorcycle repair, social philosopher Matthew Crawford demonstrates how mastery involves cultivating what he terms “attentiveness” to subtle signals within complex systems, such as the barely audible sounds and vibrations that reveal underlying mechanical problems before they manifest as failures (Crawford, 2009). The particular craft he focuses on offers a curious if deep-rooted connection to a central source in Stulberg’s book: namely, Robert Pirsig’s iconic meditation on how we perceive value and the barriers we often erect between the soul and the machine, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (2008/1974).

That temporal factor is important. While popular leadership discourse often portrays creativity as episodic inspiration, Stulberg reframes it as a daily practice governed by self-chosen standards and prolonged engagement with increasingly complex problems. This connects directly with Sennett’s notion of craftsmanship as having an ethical relationship to work rather than merely a means to recognition. For creative leaders, the implication is at once sobering and liberating: excellence becomes an emergent property of their practice (and their ongoing commitment to mastery), not a separate target to be chased.

In turbulent environments, this form of attentiveness translates into the sensitivity to weak signals, a capacity to distinguish signal from noise, and a willingness to adjust course based on feedback that others might dismiss or overlook. Rather than being reducible to technique, attentive leadership develops through prolonged engagement with specific materials and contexts, accumulating tacit knowledge that eludes easy codification.

To take a practical example, longtime music producer Rick Rubin’s approach to creative production shows how creativity emerges through patient attention rather than forced innovation. Rubin’s practice centers on creating conditions where creativity can emerge organically rather than manufacturing it through prescribed methods or techniques (2023). His emphasis on listening, waiting, and allowing work to develop at its own pace contrasts sharply with the intensity-driven and formulaic output models that dominate many contemporary creative industries. Rubin’s patient attentiveness privileges a more holistic process over stepwise, product-driven work, and aligns with older perspectives on mastery.

III. Judgment, Discipline, and the Deep Roots of Mastery

Although the ancient Stoic Epictetus never wrote a systematic treatise on mastery in the modern sense, themes close to mastery and excellence appear repeatedly across three parts of his surviving work. Taken together, they arguably articulate a conception of excellence as disciplined practice in judgment, self-command in the face of varying impressions, and the proper use of one’s faculties. While dating from the late first and early second centuries BCE, these pieces retain their significance for leaders today as AI systems generate outcomes more and more rapidly while the distinctively human contribution turns to reside in discernment, curation, and contextual judgment.

To open his Enchiridion (Handbook; especially Chapters 1-5), Epictetus offers a deceptively simple distinction: some things are within our control and others are not. What lies within our control are not outcomes, reputations, or market reactions, but our judgments, intentions, and responses to events. Mastery therefore begins not with performance but with discernment. The disciplined leader learns to separate signal from noise, commitment from circumstance, and responsibility from contingency. In contemporary creative environments saturated with algorithmic metrics and instant feedback, this Stoic distinction becomes less antiquarian advice than practical leadership guidance.

Elsewhere, in the Discourses (I.1 and I.4), Epictetus repeatedly returns to a second idea closely aligned with what we have seen craft theorists describe as attentiveness. He argues that human beings are constantly confronted by impressions, interpretations of events that invite immediate reaction. Mastery lies in learning to pause in the handling of impressions and before granting assent. This discipline of judgment parallels what Sennett describes as the craftsperson’s attentive engagement with materials and what Crawford observes in mechanical diagnosis: put simply, the cultivated ability to notice subtle signals before acting on them. Where algorithmic systems respond instantly to stimuli, the Stoic craftsman of leadership inserts a moment of reflection in which judgment can intervene.

In a final section of the Discourses, translated as “On Training” (Discourses III.12), Epictetus most directly treats mastery as a practice, using analogies with athletics. No significant capability emerges suddenly, he observes, with improvement instead occurring through repeated engagement with difficulty rather than through flashes of inspiration. Mastery develops gradually through disciplined practice, precisely the “consistency over intensity” that Stulberg identifies as the internal architecture of excellence. Difficult circumstances, in this sense, are not interruptions of mastery but rather the environments through which it is forged.

Read alongside the craft tradition, in other words, Epictetus thus reinforces the deeper claims in this discussion that excellence emerges as the visible by-product of a less visible discipline of judgment. Leaders who anchor their practice in that discipline are less vulnerable to the distortions of pseudo-excellence precisely because their orientation does not depend on external validation. Their work becomes an ongoing craft of attention, discernment, and response rather than a pursuit of applause, followers, or likes.

IV. From Individual Craft to Collective Mastery

To sustain ongoing craft work casts light on the need for shared standards, mutual accountability, and distributed expertise that no one individual can sustain alone. Organizations cultivate this dimension of collective mastery when they develop communities of knowledge and practice that elevate rather than homogenize individual contributions. Even the Stoics, often mischaracterized as solitary moralists, understood mastery as a social discipline; Epictetus taught that philosophical training occurred through dialogue, critique, and the shared examination of judgments.

In our time, because the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice famously identified by Anders Ericsson are often misconstrued as a solitary, atomized pursuit, it is essential to recognize that such effortful training requires a pre-existing community to define its benchmarks of excellence (Ericsson et al., 1993). While the individual practitioner performs the labor of refining mental representations, it is the community of practice that provides the regime of competence and the curricula of challenges that make such labor productive (Lave & Wegner, 1991). Without such a social architecture to provide a directional signal, the consistency over intensity advocated by Stulberg would lack the necessary alignment with the evolving standards and ethical demands of the professional domain.

When we draw together Ericsson’s and Lave and Wegner’s perspectives, we see that mastery functions as the vital bridge between individual human capital and collective social capital. Although the rigors of deliberate practice develop the technical proficiency and aesthetic sensitivity Friedlander describes, it is through legitimate peripheral participation that these skills are translated into leadership influence. By moving from the margins to the center of a community, the creative leader ensures that their quest for mastery is not merely a self-referential infinite game but a generative contribution to the shared knowledge and collective resilience of the organization.

While AI tools may support this cultivation of skills through knowledge management and pattern recognition, human judgment remains necessary to maintain the ethical and relational qualities that make communities exploratory and generative rather than merely exploitative and efficient. In fact, more broadly, for creative leaders, particularly, the work of evaluative communities, mentors, and institutional structures are crucial to shaping opportunities for development and recognition.

Returning to Stulberg’s concept of pseudo-excellence then helps us to clarify why algorithmic platform environments can distort a practice committed to building mastery. When leaders optimize for metrics that reward novelty, speed, or visibility, attentiveness to materials and relationships erodes. Crafting leadership, by contrast, requires the courage to work against (or, at least, be indifferent to) these incentives without rejecting platforms outright.

Put more briefly, if mastery begins as an individual orientation to craft, it necessarily expands into a collective and systemic concern, because sustained creative practice is always shaped and constrained by the structures within which it unfolds.

V. Systems Dimensions of Mastery

Besides attentiveness, the collective mastery of complex systems demands the capacity to perceive structures beneath surface events. Systems thinking pioneer Donella Meadows emphasizes that systems mastery requires developing an “ability to perceive patterns beneath complexity” (2008, p. 2). She observes that leaders typically fail because they fixate on events – think immediate crises, quarterly results, specific client deliverables, viral moments – rather than on the underlying structures that generate those events or, more fundamental still, on the paradigms that make certain structures seem to us natural or inevitable.

For Meadows, mastery represents “the capacity to dance with systems” rather than attempting to control them (2008, p. 170), a shift in leadership approach from mechanistic management toward ecological stewardship. While machine learning excels at detecting patterns in historical data, the irreducibly human contribution involves questioning which patterns matter for the present and future, recognizing emergent structures before they fully manifest, and exercising judgment about when to intervene and when to allow systems to self-organize.

Stulberg’s “infinite game” language complements Meadows’ insistence that mastery lies not in controlling systems but in learning how to remain in a productive relationship with them. Both perspectives reject the fantasy of quick cognitive closure (made increasingly easy and appealing by AI) in favor of ongoing immersion and integration. Practically, this rejection can take the form of developing a capacity to perceive deeper structural relationships within a domain, an ability that distinguishes genuine mastery from surface competence. For creative leaders, this ongoing commitment and work helps to reframe systems thinking from an analytical tool into a lived discipline.

Again, here, the Stoic tradition offers surprisingly modern resonance for today’s leaders. When Epictetus advised students to focus their effort on what lies within their control while accepting the broader order of events, he was articulating a stance remarkably close to what Meadows later described as “dancing with systems.” Both perspectives reject the illusion that complex systems can be fully controlled, that is, and instead emphasize disciplined participation within constraints. Mastery, in both accounts, lies not in domination but in developing the perceptual and ethical capacities required to engage complexity intelligently.

The systems perspective also connects directly to the concept of “personal mastery”developed by Peter Senge in his foundational writings about learning organizations. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes personal mastery as “the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision,” explicitly distinguishing it from mere competence (Senge, 2006, p. 7). Where competence involves achieving defined standards, mastery represents a “lifelong calling” requiring a “commitment to truth,” by which he means a willingness to see reality as it actually is rather than as organizational biases or personal preferences would have it appear (160).

Such a commitment proves especially challenging for creative leaders whose work often involves building compelling narratives and aspirational visions and then realizing them. Developing personal mastery requires leaders to move forward while holding simultaneously both idealized possibilities and unvarnished assessments of current reality and its demands.

VI. Learning and Mastery in AI-Augmented Environments

Using learning loops offers a practical expression of these systems insights by allowing us to map interdependent levels of leadership integration. As I’ve explored elsewhere, the current complex and paradoxical environment urges the extension of organizational learning pioneer Chris Argyris’s double-loop learning model into a triple-loop learning framework. While the triple-loop approach has been explored by other researchers (Tosey, Visser, and Saunders, 2011), I believe it has particular resonance for understanding and practicing creative leadership today (Slocum 2025b).

A very brief review helps to show why. Single-loop learning, we may recall, focuses on “doing things right,” executing established techniques and correcting errors within existing frameworks. Double-loop learning interrogates underlying assumptions and goals, asking “Are we doing the right things?” Leaders like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella have demonstrated this capacity by fostering what he calls a “learn-it-all” rather than “know-it-all” culture, questioning the tech company’s foundational assumptions about competition and collaboration.

However, algorithmic capitalism, AI integration, and the changing role of human judgment and creativity increasingly demand a third loop that transforms not just what leaders do or believe but who they become. Third-loop learning confronts systemic contradictions where competing frameworks – say, AI logic versus human judgment or Chinese relational harmony versus Western individual merit – make mutually exclusive demands simultaneously. The question posed shifts from whether we do something right or we do the right thing to, “How do we navigate when ‘right’ itself is conflicted or contradictory?” (Slocum 2025b).

Read alongside triple-loop learning, Stulberg’s work helps distinguish adaptation from mastery. Single- and double-loop learning can still be gamed in pursuit of external recognition and rewards, whereas third-loop learning requires a shift in identity that cannot be externally validated (at least immediately). This explains why many organizations claim to be “learning organizations” while remaining structurally incapable of mastery.

Stulberg’s emphasis on values-anchored practice in The Way of Excellence also exposes a blind spot in many AI-enabled systems initiatives. While machine learning can accelerate feedback loops, it cannot determine which loops are worth sustaining. That determination of value, and the systems mastery from which it emerges, remains irreducibly human, grounded in judgment about meaning, not merely performance.

Mastery at this level involves the capacity to lead through what can be called polycontextual environments, holding incompatible paradigms in productive tension rather than prematurely resolving them. Here, Artificial Intelligence serves as both tool and catalyst: while AI accelerates feedback, pattern recognition, and optimization within existing frames, mastery resides in the distinctly human work of determining which frames are worth sustaining, revising, or abandoning altogether.

VII. Discipline, Passion, and the Limits of Mastery

At this stage of the argument, mastery appears less as a technique and more as an orientation toward complexity. For creative leaders, the central question becomes how discipline, passion, and judgment allow individuals and collectives to remain productively engaged with uncertainty over time.

Seen across this integration of craft practice, systems thinking, and learning theory, mastery entails unavoidable trade-offs. Leaders pursuing mastery must sacrifice the convenience of the hack, the shortcut, the quick win, or the viral moment for the slower rigor of sustained practice, from which excellence may emerge but which it cannot replace. Discipline, in this sense, does not suppress passion but stabilizes it, allowing care for the work to endure beyond moods, incentives, or ephemeral recognition. The Stoic training described by Epictetus similarly joined discipline and care for the work, insisting that character develops through sustained attention rather than bursts of emotional intensity.

Stulberg’s contribution clarifies this relationship further. Passion, in his account, is not flickering emotional intensity but enduring care for the work itself. Discipline provides the structure that protects that care from volatility, distraction, or ego. Such protection proves especially difficult in team or market environments that reward intensity over consistency and innovation over refinement.

Yet this discomfort serves a purpose. Mastery emerges not despite difficulty but through it, as leaders develop the versatility required to engage paradox and complexity productively. When passion becomes synonymous with urgency or self-sacrifice it accelerates burnout and reinforces pseudo-excellence. However, when anchored by discipline, passion becomes the sustaining energy that makes long-term mastery possible.

This is not to suggest that mastery is a neutral or universally accessible ideal. The capacity for sustained practice depends on access to time, psychological safety and trust, institutional permission, and communities of learning – conditions unevenly distributed across organizations, cultures, and careers. Framing mastery as cultivated rather than innate, and as collective rather than individually heroic, can to help prevent it from hardening into an exclusionary standard.

It is also necessary to reiterate that mastery is historical. At its best, it draws on accumulated wisdom while adapting to emergent conditions, connecting traditions such as Stoic discipline with contemporary insights from systems thinking and organizational learning.

Understood in this way, creative leadership mastery is neither simplistically nostalgic nor superficially romantic. It is a practiced commitment to showing up with care, for oneself and others, even when conditions make that difficult. A final takeaway from Stulberg’s work is its clarification of why mastery feels demanding without becoming joyless, and meaningful without becoming sentimental.

For creative leaders facing algorithmic ascendancy, platform volatility, and increasingly contradictory demands, mastery therefore offers not a destination but a way of pathfinding. It represents less a solution to complexity than a discipline for engaging it over time, cultivating the attentiveness, judgment, and ethical orientation that sustained creative work requires. As AI systems generate technically proficient outputs at scale, the distinctively human contribution shifts toward interpretation, discernment, and meaning. The enduring work of creative leadership thus lies not in competing with machines at speed or volume, but in sustaining the ongoing practices of mastery through which individuals and communities continue to produce work that is both excellent and good.

Table 1: Summary of Key Mastery Sources

References

Matthew B. Crawford (2009) Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Penguin.

Epictetus (2022) The Complete Works: Handbook, Discourses, & Fragments, ed. and trans. Robin Waterfield, University of Chicago Press.

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer (1993) “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, 100 (3):363-406; https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

Kathryn J. Friedlander (2024) The Psychology of Creative Performance and Expertise, Routledge.

---------- (2025) “Response to Commentaries on The Psychology of Creative Performance and Expertise,” Journal of Expertise, Vol. 8(4), pp. 283-297; https://www.journalofexpertise.org/articles/volume8_issue4/JoE_8_4_Friedlander_Response.pdf

Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon (2001) Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, Basic Books.

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press.

Donella H. Meadows (2008) Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing.

Robert Pirsig (2008/1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, Mariner Books Classics/William Morrow & Company.

Rick Rubin (2023) The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Penguin.

Peter M. Senge (2006) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, rev. and updated ed., Doubleday.

Richard Sennett (2008) The Craftsman, Yale University Press.

David Slocum (2025a, February 20) “The Rise and Fall of Creative Leadership,” Crafting Leadership Substack;

Crafting Leadership with David Slocum

The Rise and Fall of Creative Leadership

Creative leadership emerged in the post-World War II era as a reimagining of organizational and economic possibility and, in the context of the Cold War, an exemplar of U.S. and Western European cultural and Capitalist potential. Initially rooted in the growing recognition of creativity as a driver of economic growth and a symbol of cultural vitality, t…

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2 years ago · 1 like · David Slocum

----------- (2025b, November 13) “Creative Leadership Today,” Crafting Leadership Substack; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/creative-leadership-today

Brad Stulberg (2026) The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World, Harper One.

Paul Tosey, Max Visser, and Mark NK Saunders (2011) “The Origins and Conceptualizations of ‘Triple-loop’ Learning: A Critical Review,” Management Learning, 43(3), 291-307; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1350507611426239

Across four previous articles (summarized here: Slocum, 2026), I have argued that hyperconnected, data-driven, and algorithmically governed platforms are not merely communication channels but evaluative infrastructures. They shape what is seen, rewarded, and taken as evidence of leadership competence. Because these environments privilege immediacy, legibility, and emotional coherence, they subtly favor responsiveness over deliberation and articulation over accountability. My argument is that, over time, and as a result, leadership risks being redefined less as a craft exercised under uncertainty than as performance optimized for visibility.

This article examines the displacement of human judgment in the platform era. By “judgment,” I mean the seasoned capacity to act wisely and responsibly in volatile situations where certainty is absent, information is incomplete, and no established rulebook provides a clear path forward. Judgment draws on an ingrained “feel for the game,” developed through sustained personal and professional immersion, that enables leaders to improvise responsibly when signals are noisy, partial, or contradictory. Rather than the application of a single or superior logic or calculation, judgment is the reflexive bridge across the gaps where logic, data, and precedent inevitably falter.

Such a working definition exposes a persistent category error in much of contemporary (especially popular) leadership discourse, which treats the indeterminate world of human affairs as if it were a solvable optimization problem. Platforms and AI systems excel at identifying patterns, making predictions, and managing calculable variation, but judgment becomes decisive precisely where probability distributions collapse and responsibility cannot be straightforwardly delegated (Agrawal, Gans, & Goldfarb, 2018). The paradox is that judgment is increasingly required by organizational complexity even as the conditions for recognizing, exercising, and cultivating it are steadily eroded.

It is here, as we encounter a central paradox of the platform and AI era, that we can also appreciate how judgment should be understood as being at the heart of creative leadership. My contention is that “creative” leadership today refers not to novelty, self-expressiveness, or inimitability, but, instead, to the disciplined, heterodox capacity to depart from dominant evaluative and performative logics; that is, to see and act where prevailing systems of attention, measurement, and reward cannot. In this way, I want to claim that creative leadership is inherently “countercultural” – not in posture or personality, but in a refusal to optimize for visibility or adhere to prevailing cultures, logics, or systems at the cost of minimizing substantive impact.

I. The Quiet Displacement of Judgment

Judgment has not disappeared from leadership practice, of course, but it has been quietly displaced from leadership language. Popular leadership discourse today is confident in its vocabulary – think: purpose, courage, empathy, and authenticity – yet strikingly thin in its account of what leaders actually confront when information is incomplete, incentives misalign, and consequences unfold unevenly over time.

My claim here is that one of the key words, concepts, and capacities that are fading from mainstream leadership talk and practice in the platform era is judgment. The displacement matters not (only) because judgment is a kind of moral aspiration, but because without it, we risk losing a shared way of naming the act of differentiating primary from secondary considerations, choosing among imperfect options, and owning responsibility for outcomes that cannot be fully foreseen.

Historically, one could argue that judgment has long stood at the center of leadership, governance, and professional authority. Aristotle’s account of phronēsis located practical wisdom precisely in deliberation where rules and certainty fall short, emphasizing context-sensitive action rather than the mechanical application of general principles (Aristotle, 1999).

Two millennia later, and employing modern economic terms, economist Frank Knight produced a classic clarification of why such situations matter, when he distinguished risk, where outcomes can be assigned probabilities, from uncertainty, where they cannot (Knight, 1921/2022). Set down more than a century ago, this distinction remains foundational today because it marks the boundary beyond which calculation ceases to guide action and judgment must step in.

Pioneering systems scientist Sir Geoffrey Vickers extended this insight by emphasizing how judgment is an “appreciative system,” one that does not merely transmit facts between individuals but emerges from a joint system of communications between senders and receivers that assigns meaning and value to them (Vickers, 1965/1995).

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu added a further dimension to this already social understanding by locating judgment within what he called habitus: the historically formed dispositions that allow actors to “know how to go on” within a field without explicit rules(Bourdieu, 1977). For readers unfamiliar with Bourdieu, the importance of habitus lies in showing why judgment is neither purely cognitive nor fully conscious; instead, it is embodied history made operative in the present.

What is striking today is not that leaders no longer exercise judgment, but that leadership discourse and practice have more and more difficulty naming it. As a result, judgment is displaced by traits and behaviors that are easier to display and affirm publicly. Resilience, authenticity, and emotional intelligence matter, yet they largely describe dispositions rather than the act of differentiating primary from secondary considerations and choosing among imperfect options with real stakes. While teams still need leaders who can arbitrate trade-offs, allocate attention, and sequence action, today’s increasingly quantified evaluative language tends to point elsewhere.

This displacement reflects a broader shift in evaluative regimes. As research on metrics and rankings has shown, systems of measurement reshape what organizations notice and reward, often crowding out professional judgment in favor of what is countable, comparable, and quickly surfaced (Muller, 2018). Platforms intensify this tendency because they are evaluative environments by design. They make visibility easy, reaction measurable, and coherence legible, while rendering slow discernment and delayed situational understanding comparatively invisible.

Approached this way, the disappearance of judgment from leadership discourse is less a research or developmental trend and more a structural effect of platform-based evaluation. Judgment has not vanished because it is obsolete, in other words, but because the environments in which leadership is assessed have narrowed the space in which judgment can be recognized. Beyond contributing to thinner leadership discourse, this shift erodes the potential of leaders to address complexity responsibly.

II. Discernment: Differentiating Signal from Noise

If judgment is the capacity to act wisely and responsibly under uncertainty, discernment is the precondition that makes such action possible. Discernment involves differentiating the essential from the secondary, signal from noise, and the salient (“what matters”) from the merely visible. It therefore governs attention before it governs action. Without discernment, judgment collapses into unthinking repetition, reaction, or paralysis.

In complex organizational settings, leaders are constantly confronted with more information than they can process. Organizational Behavior scholar William Ocasio recognized a central leadership implication of discernment three decades ago: firm behavior follows from how organizations channel and distribute attention among decision-makers, which means leadership is partly the governance of salience itself (Ocasio, 1997). In platform environments, where attention is continuously captured, redirected, and monetized in real-time, discernment becomes harder because of its long-term stakes.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s later work on noise deepens this diagnosis. While his more familiar writings about bias concern systematic directional error, noise refers to unwanted variability in judgment where similar cases receive dissimilar treatment. Consider the patient who presents the same symptoms to three separate doctors and receives three different diagnoses (Kahneman, Sibony, & Sunstein, 2021).

The Wells Fargo “unauthorized accounts” scandal illustrates how noise, in the form of internal metrics and incentives, can operate at an organizational level. In its September 8, 2016 Consent Order, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau determined that the bank’s employees had opened more than two million unauthorized checking, deposit, and credit card accounts without consumers’ knowledge or consent, within a broader cross-selling practices regime that distorted behavior (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 2016).

The failure emerged because while senior leaders consistently communicated strong values around customer focus and ethics, they failed to understand that the performance metrics and incentive systems guiding their employees were encouraging misconduct at scale.

In platform settings saturated with dashboards, alerts, metrics, and algorithmic amplification, leaders face both a greater surplus of information and much more unstable interpretive conditions. Noise proliferates as judgments are made under time pressure, fragmented attention, and shifting frames. Discernment therefore becomes harder precisely because the environment generates the illusion of clarity while multiplying inconsistency.

This is where discernment differs from analytical intelligence or specific forms of logic. Instead of merely being a cognitive filter applied to inputs, discernment is a practiced capacity shaped by experience to recognize patterns, anomalies, and significance. Discernment is exercised over time, refined through exposure to consequences, and calibrated through feedback and learning that are often delayed.

Platform environments, however, typically reward immediate coherence and responsiveness, which can mask noise as signal and penalize hesitation as weakness. For that reason, the very conditions that make discernment necessary also make it harder to sustain.

III. Tacit Knowledge and the Strained Dialogue with the Explicit

Yet discernment is not only a cognitive filter; it is also an embodied competence rooted in experience and, crucially, in tacit knowledge. British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi’s trenchant claim, that “we can know more than we can tell,” points to a form of knowing that is difficult to articulate but central to skilled action (Polanyi, 1966/2009). Tacit knowledge resides in pattern recognition, contextual sensitivity, and embodied familiarity with a field.

A generation later, British education researcher Michael Eraut likewise showed how much professional competence is developed through informal and often invisible workplace learning, with tacit knowledge accumulating through observation, participation, and situated feedback rather than through formal instruction alone (Eraut, 2000). Their respective conclusions made clear why judgment may not be fully expressible at the speed platforms expect – or provable in the moment.

Organizational knowledge research reinforces this point. The late Hitotsubashi ICS professor Ikujiro Nonaka describes organizational knowledge creation as a “continual dialogue between explicit and tacit knowledge” (Nonaka, 1994, p. 15), thereby providing a useful reminder that what teams can write down is only part of what they know.

British sociologist Harry Collins further differentiates forms of tacit knowledge, showing why some aspects of skill and judgment resist conversion into explicit rules (Collins, 2010). Through this lens, judgment emerges from the ongoing interplay between articulated analysis and unarticulated experience. This dialogue allows teams to test formal models against lived reality, and to revise their understanding when the two diverge.

Platform environments, however, strain this dialogue. Because tacit knowledge is slower to surface, harder to justify in the moment, and often only validated retrospectively, it is systematically disadvantaged in settings that privilege speed, fluency, and immediate legibility. The push toward visibility compresses time for reflection and narrows the space in which experiential cues can be voiced without being dismissed as subjective or anecdotal.

For leadership, the implication of this varied research is unmistakable: judgment depends on tacit knowing, and today’s platform environments systematically devalue tacit knowing because it is slower to surface, harder to measure, and often only visible after consequences unfold.

The 2018 Boeing 737 MAX crisis illustrates how catastrophic such distortions can become when institutional judgment is compressed by competitive, organizational, and reputational pressures. Lion Air Flight 610 crashed on October 29, 2018 in the Java Sea shortly after takeoff from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, Jakarta, Indonesia (NTSB, n.d.; KNKT, 2019). Early leadership decisions had involved complex trade-offs among safety, speed, cost, and competition of the planes. Internally, at Boeing, these choices were framed in compressed decision cycles, as technically justified and strategically necessary. Externally, company leadership communication to airline clients and the public emphasized confidence and reassurance.

Only after catastrophic consequences unfolded did the quality of those decisions become visible. The failure was not a lack of data or intelligence, but a breakdown in the dialogue between explicit models and tacit knowing under institutional pressure for speed, confidence, and continuity.

Viewed in this way, platforms do not eliminate tacit knowledge, but they do contract the space and time for vital dialogue and, with it, the conditions for sound judgment. Indeed, while judgment often involves holding competing interpretations in tension and resisting premature closure, algorithmic systems favor clarity, strong signals, and repeatable positions. Generative AI extends this logic by producing confident outputs that appear to settle uncertainty or ambivalence and, in the process, increasing the risk that teams converge too quickly around a plausible narrative and mistake fluency for reliability (Rosani, Farri, & Renecle, 2024).

IV. Visibility, AI, and the Compression of Judgment

While platforms displace judgment by privileging what can be made visible quickly, generative AI intensifies this displacement by altering how thinking itself is distributed. The danger emerging from AI’s accelerated decision-making is that it subtly reconfigures the relationship between speed, confidence, and responsibility. Where platforms reward responsiveness, AI supplies (seeming) coherence on demand, offering well-formed outputs that appear to resolve uncertainty even when the underlying situation remains indeterminate.

Kahneman’s classic distinction between fast, reactive System 1 thinking and slow, deliberative System 2 thinking remains useful here, but it may no longer be sufficient (Kahneman, 2011). As Wharton School researchers Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave argue, contemporary decision-making increasingly involves a third cognitive locus: artificial cognition that operates outside the human mind yet participates directly in reasoning (Shaw & Nave, 2026). This “System 3” does not merely assist human thinking; it can pre-empt it, suppress it, or substitute for it altogether. In doing so, AI use alters not only outcomes of thinking, but “the shape of human reasoning” and, therefore, the internal human experience of judgment itself.

Such a proposition matters for leadership because judgment depends on the disciplined interplay between intuition, deliberation, and experience over time. System 3 can short-circuit this interplay by offering answers that are fast, fluent, and apparently authoritative. Under conditions of time pressure, complexity, or cognitive fatigue, leaders may adopt AI-generated outputs with minimal scrutiny, a phenomenon that Shaw and Nave describe as “cognitive surrender.” As a result, he concern is ultimately less about the reliance on AI as a tool and more about the partial abdication of human responsibility for interpretation and consequence that that tool allows.

That concern is compounded by platform environments that already equate speed with competence. When AI-generated coherence aligns with platform incentives for immediacy, leaders face a double compression: less time to reflect and fewer cues signaling when reflection is necessary. Judgment, which often requires holding ambiguity open rather than closing it prematurely, becomes harder to recognize and, once recognized, harder to justify. The risk is not that AI makes leaders less intelligent, but that it encourages premature cognitive closure in situations where responsibility warrants patience, reflection, and continuing encounters with uncertainty.

Put more plainly, we should view judgment not as a static trait but as a developmental achievement. It emerges through repeated engagement with uncertainty and repeated exposure to consequences, and through cycles of interpretation, error, and correction. This is why judgment is inseparable from what organizational learning pioneer Donald Schön termed “knowing-in-action”: the capacity to respond intelligently in the midst of practice without relying on explicit rules alone (Schön, 1983). Since such knowing resides in the dynamic interaction between tacit understanding and explicit reasoning, it is most under pressure from the speed and compression that occasion AI use and mark platform logics.

V. Recovering Judgment Under Conditions of Visibility, Speed, and Compression

To recover judgment in these environments, where it has become both harder to exercise and even to recognize, requires more than exhortations to “slow down” or “step back.” It requires rebuilding organizational conditions that protect discernment, sustain dialogue between tacit and explicit knowledge, and resist the automatic privileging of speed and visibility. The challenge is not to reject or minimize interactions with AI or platforms, but to reassert human responsibility within hybrid cognitive systems.

A first move is to distinguish domains where speed is appropriate from those where it may present threats. Not all decisions benefit from deliberate delay, but many leadership judgments do, particularly those involving ethical trade-offs, long-term risk distribution, or irreversible consequences. Aligning evaluation systems with these distinctions is crucial. When leaders are rewarded primarily for prompt and precise responsiveness, judgment-oriented behaviors such as delaying action, seeking dissent, or reframing the problem are easily misread as weakness rather than competence.

Re-legitimating rich and varied experiences as developmental assets, especially experiences that include failure, reflection, and repair, is one way to support these behaviors. Because tacit knowledge is often formed in messy contexts where rules do not neatly apply, as we’ve seen, organizations that remove friction from work also risk removing some of the very conditions through which employees learn greater situational discernment. While the “friction-maxxing” currently in vogue in some organizations is not a universal answer, recognizing the potential advantages of introducing some friction – say, to slow the pace of thinking and enable the embrace of constructive complications – can be valuable.

A second move for leaders is to cultivate disciplined practices of self-correction that are social, not merely personal. Judgment improves through iterative calibration, such as noticing through dialogue where one’s interpretation is wrong, updating one’s salience map, and testing revised assumptions. By creating space for critical thinking, for the articulation of tacit cues, and for the contestation of premature coherence, leaders can help ongoing dialogue to become a practical infrastructure for discernment. In other words, beyond serving as the basis of explicit communication, substantive dialogue can become a method for making tacit knowledge shareable enough to be challenged without pretending it can be fully converted into explicit rules.

Besides interpersonal dialogue, a third, closely related move involves ensuring that leaders and others keep tacit knowledge in active dialogue with AI-generated outputs. This means treating System 3 not as an answer engine but as one of many provisional inputs whose value depends on human interpretation. Teams can institutionalize this stance by requiring humans to name the tacit cues that AI cannot “know” in context – like reputational stakes, informal norms, regulatory sensitivities, the politics of timing, the lived history of a team, and the risk distribution of a decision.

When teams learn to ask, explicitly, “What do we know here that we cannot fully explain?”, they recover some of the tacit dimension of the situational background as legitimate input to judgment. Doing so counteracts the cognitive surrender described by Shaw and Nave by reactivating reflective human judgment.

Finally, recovering judgment requires revaluing learning from near-misses and failures. Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson’s groundbreaking research on failure, learning, and psychological safety is useful here. She argues that organizations do not learn automatically from failure, but through deliberate practices that surface and interpret it through diagnosis, classification, and non-punitive inquiry. Leaders and organizations therefore need to “catch, correct, and learn” what is not working and what can be changed before others do and before failure scales (Edmondson, 2011).

In platform settings, leaders should therefore slow and emphasize feedback loops at key moments so that teams can pause to convert near-misses and small breakdowns into shared learning and re-direction rather than into defensiveness or silence. Over time, dialogue and feedback are precisely what sustain the long-term development of judgment, which depends on calibrated self-correction and ongoing open social interaction rather than flawless performance and polished narratives.

Taken together, these moves provide the makings of a strong creative and countercultural leadership capacity for judgment. They do so by constituting a disciplined refusal to collapse uncertainty too quickly – even when platforms and AI make doing so easy. Ultimately, that discipline depends on the continuing cultivation of the discernment and tacit knowledge that allows leaders to differentiate what matters from what merely moves, acknowledge knowing beyond rules and the visible, and then to decide and act upon that differentiation.

References

Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb (2018) Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, Harvard Business Review Press.

Aristotle (1999) Nicomachean Ethics, Terence Irwin, trans., 2nd ed., Hackett Publishing (Original work ca. 350 BCE); Internet Archive.

Pierre Bourdieu (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Richard Nice, trans., Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Numbver 16, Cambridge University Press.

Harry Collins (2010) Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, University of Chicago Press.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2016, September 8) Consent Order: In the Matter of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. (2016-CFPB-0015); https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/092016_cfpb_WFBconsentorder.pdf

Amy C. Edmondson (2011, April) “Strategies for Learning from Failure,” Harvard Business Review.

Michael Eraut (2000) “Non-formal Learning and Tacit Knowledge in Professional Work,” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(1), 113–136; https://doi.org/10.1348/000709900158001

Daniel Kahneman (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Little, Brown Spark.

Frank H. Knight (1921/2022) Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, Houghton Mifflin/bnpublishing.

KNKT (Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee) (2019) Final aircraft accident investigation report: Lion Air flight 610, Boeing 737-8 (MAX), PK-LQP (KNKT.18.10.35.04); https://www.aaiu.ie/sites/default/files/FRA/2018%20-%20035%20-%20PK-LQP%20Final%20Report.pdf

Jerry Z. Muller (2018) The Tyranny of Metrics, Princeton University Press.

Ikujiro Nonaka (1994) “A Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation,” Organization Science, 5(1), 14–37; https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.5.1.14

NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) (n.d.) Investigation: Lion Air flight 610 (DCA19RA017); https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA19RA017-DCA19RA101.aspx

William Ocasio (1997) “Towards an Attention-based View of the Firm,” Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1), 187–206; https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-0266(199707)18:1+<187::AID-SMJ936>3.0.CO;2-K

Michael Polanyi 1966/2009) The Tacit Dimension, Doubleday/University of Chicago Press.

Gabriele Rosani, Elisa Farri, and Michelle Renecle (2024, November 20) “To Mitigate Gen AI’s Risks, Draw on Your Team’s Collective Judgment,” Harvard Business Review.

Donald A. Schön (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, Basic Books.

Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave (2026) “Thinking – Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender,” SSRN Working Paper; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646

David Slocum (2026, February 19) “From Judgment to Visibility: How Platforms Are Quietly Redefiniing What Leadership Means,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/from-judgment-to-visibility-how-platforms

Geoffrey Vickers (1965/1995) The Art of Judgment: A Study of Policy Making, Sage Publications.

Beyond Assumptions and Stereotypes

Leadership is often framed as strategy, performance, and execution. Yet the quality of our decisions, relationships, and impact is deeply shaped by our inner stance and physiological coherence.

In this interactive session, Humanist and Executive Coach Marie Reig Florensa explores what it truly means to lead from the heart — not as a slogan, but as a grounded leadership practice that bridges ancient wisdom with contemporary science and academic research.

Designed as a leadership workout, the session combines expert input with structured peer reflection rooted in participants’ real-world experience. Rather than offering inspiration alone, it invites leaders to clarify their own understanding of heart-based leadership and examine how it shows up in complex, high-stakes environments.

In this session, participants will:

• Clarify what leading from the heart actually means beyond common assumptions and stereotypes

• Work through seven structured self-reflection questions anchored in their own leadership practice

• Understand how heart-based leadership supports cognitive clarity, emotional intelligence, physiological resilience, and well-being

• Explore how this perspective strengthens teams and fuels meaningful impact in complexity

• Gain insight into key leadership competencies and tangible indicators associated with heart-centered leadership

Who should attend:

• Purpose-driven leaders and emerging leaders

• Entrepreneurs, founders, executives, and steward owners

• Creatives and changemakers working in complex environments

When?

• Format: 90-minute live, interactive webinar

• Date: Monday, April 06, 2026

• Time: 05:00 - 06:30 P.M.

If this speaks to you, join us and register via the link below.

LinkedIn Registration

Best,

Akin

The following article is a work-in-progress that served as the background reading for a webinar hosted by Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University on February 24. A video recording of that event can be viewed at: Metaskills Webinar URL.

The central topic, metaskills, is a pressing one for individual leaders, teams and organizations alike. As the article contends, the current treadmill of skills development programs, often based in elaborate corporate competency frameworks, is in urgent need of review and reconsideration. Rather than outright replacement, however, the argument here is that a set of metaskills – skills that enable the ongoing learning of skills – needs to be integrated with initiatives to identify and develop more ephemeral but still valuable technical skills on which leaders and organizations typically focus.

Sofian Lamali, the co-author with David Slocum, is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he works at the intersection of strategy, people, and organization in complex businesses, partnering with boards, senior leaders, and global HR teams across geographies. He is a veteran I/O Psychologist who applies evidence-based approaches to individual and systemic growth, change & transformation, and organizational health. Sofian is recognized in the GCC region and globally as a thought and practice leader in leadership development, talent management, organizational design and development, and culture.

Continuing their research, writing, and advisory work around metaskills, Sofian and David very much invite your feedback and reactions to the article.

Metaskills are the essential skills that enable individuals and teams to enhance and build other skills. They are transferable across various domains, providing a solid basis for lifelong learning and career success. Unlike technical skills, which are often domain-specific, intended to complete given tasks, and can become obsolete over time, metaskills are enduring and essential for navigating the continually evolving challenges and opportunities of the modern workplace. Metaskills allow leaders to continually learn, evolve, and improve in the face of shifting conditions by making skill acquisition, innovation and adaptation possible.

Why this matters

Leading organizations invest considerable time and resources in identifying, classifying, measuring, and nurturing the skills essential to their success. However, in today’s world, often described as VUCA or BANI¹, traditional functional skills are becoming increasingly transient in their relevance and are on the brink of being further disrupted by the widespread adoption of AI across digital and data-driven platforms.

Recent research by Australian and Chinese management scholars confirms that AI technologies are fundamentally reshaping work through automation of routine tasks while simultaneously creating demand for adaptive, human-centered capabilities (Bankins, Hu, & Yuan, 2024).² Furthermore, recent movements of corporate skill-based initiatives often fail or under-deliver due to their complexity, as they try to address several thousands of skills, thereby confusing employees with an overwhelming menu of expectations. That complexity is only growing as AI-augmentation changes, sometimes radically, corporate understanding of how human skills relate to tasks, processes, and systems.

While organizations struggle with this complexity, researchers at Georgetown University suggest that overreliance on granular skill taxonomies may actually hinder genuine development when implemented without attention to foundational learning capacities (Oschinski, Crawford, & Wu, 2024).³ Often, what we perceive as a “technical skill” is actually the visible outcome of multiple meta-skills working together. For instance, take coding: while it appears to be a purely technical ability, strong performance in coding depends on meta-skills

such as:

Without these underlying capabilities, the technical skill alone is brittle and difficult to sustain. This illustrates how meta-skills act as the foundation and multiplier that give depth, flexibility, and long-term value to technical expertise. The relationship between technical competencies and underlying adaptive capacities reflects broader patterns in how AI reshapes skill requirements, with growing evidence that AI literacy must be coupled with metacognitive and interpersonal capabilities to yield sustainable performance (Bankins, et al., 2024).

The key question for organizations and leaders is: how can they invest in skills in a manageable way and ensure a sustainable return on that investment? According to researchers at the University of Wollongong, AI-driven leadership suggests the answer lies in cultivating higher-order capabilities that enable workforce adaptation across diverse and evolving contexts (Hossain, Fernando, & Akter, 2025).⁴ We believe these universal, highly transferable skills – which enable the development of other skills – warrant priority investment. To truly be considered meta-skills, these abilities must play a crucial role in developing other skills, much as core competencies in corporate strategy serve as foundational capabilities enabling integration and coordination of other organizational capabilities. Evidence indicates that while technical skills face rapid obsolescence as AI capabilities expand, adaptive and metacognitive capacities remain essential throughout professional careers (Bankins, et al., 2024).

This overview will focus on seven critical metaskills — curiosity, connection, bio intelligence, purpose, adaptability, focus, and judgment — exploring their importance and offering insights into how executives can develop them.

01 Curiosity

Curiosity: The drive to explore, question, and seek new knowledge and perspectives. Curiosity fuels learning, creativity, and innovation by prompting leaders to ask “why?”, “what if?”, and “what else?” rather than accepting things as they are.

Curiosity is essential because it prompts leaders to seek out new information, question assumptions, and stoke their and their team’s imagination. In doing so, curiosity drives and sustains the dialogue with others at the heart of critical thinking (and, even, optimal interactions with AI models). Executives who remain curious are more likely to explore fresh opportunities, discover innovative solutions, and avoid stagnation.

Leaders can cultivate curiosity by embracing a mindset of ongoing inquiry and asking better questions. Regularly questioning assumptions, seeking out new perspectives, and exploring areas beyond one’s expertise to solve problems [creatively] and find new opportunities. Executives should also encourage curiosity in their teams, supporting a culture of growth and learning where questioning and experimentation are valued.

02 Connection

Connection: The ability to create meaningful and trusting relationships and to understand how seemingly disparate ideas, people, or systems interrelate. Connection across contexts and networks deepens communication and listening, fosters collaboration, and helps leaders navigate organizational complexity by seeing the bigger picture. Connection is vital for executives, whether they are managing diverse teams or working in complex organizations or building coalitions and partnerships across sectors and communities. Understanding how systems and people are interconnected and building relationships accordingly allows leaders to break down silos and foster collaboration. This is vital at a time when increasing AI adoption heightens the anxiety of human employees.

To improve connection, leaders should actively seek out opportunities to engage with multiple perspectives, both within and outside the organization, and build diverse networks. Executives should also practice systems thinking to better understand the relationships between different people, separate parts of their organizations, and the wider contexts in which their enterprises operate.

03 Bio-Intelligence

Bio-Intelligence: Understanding and working in harmony with human nature – both biological and psychological. Bio-intelligence involves recognizing the rhythms and capacities of oneself and others, using and regulating emotional and physical energy efficiently, and promoting well-being.

Bio-intelligence has become increasingly important as leaders recognize that peak performance is tied to well-being – psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual. Executives who understand their own biological rhythms and those of their teams can create healthier, more sustainable and successful work environments.

Leaders can develop bio-intelligence by enhancing self-awareness and becoming attuned to their own energy levels and emotional states and listening to their bodies. Practices like mindfulness, regular physical activity, and managing life-work integration can all contribute to higher levels of bio-intelligence and resilience.

04 Purpose

Purpose: The ability to create or find meaning and align personal and organizational actions with larger shared goals and meanings. Leaders who cultivate purpose inspire and motivate others, continually coordinating their individual and collective efforts.

Purpose is a critical metaskill that draws on and extends both personal values and organizational priorities. Leaders with a clear sense of purpose inspire loyalty and drive engagement, even in difficult times. Purpose can also act as a compass for individuals and teams during moments of uncertainty. Executives can clarify their sense of purpose by consistently reflecting on their own core values and beliefs and making shared meanings with others. Regularly revisiting the “why?” behind their work and organizations’ priorities, and then consistently communicating this purpose can inspire and fuel others to perform and create feedback loops to refine the work being accomplished together.

05 Adaptability

Adaptability: The capacity to change, pivot, and thrive in new conditions and with different people. Adaptability is crucial for navigating a world where technological, social, and market shifts occur with increasingfrequency and, as with AI, leaders are called upon to determine ways forward and galvanize others’ action to get there.

Adaptability, long considered essential for leaders, has only grown in importance. Executives today must respond rapidly in response to external shocks, whether those are market disruptions, technological advances, or unexpected crises. As well, leaders must embrace ongoing internal tensions and dissonances in their roles and relationships.

Current research on leadership in specifically AI-driven organizations identifies such adaptive capability – the capacity to grasp consequences of technological deployment and pivot strategies accordingly – as among today’s most critical competencies for navigating algorithmic transformation (Hossain, et al., 2025).

Leaders should regularly seek out new people and experiences and accept changes that challenge them to adapt and grow. Developing greater Emotional Intelligence, which fosters better management of one’s own emotions and deeper empathy for others, is a crucial contributor to effective adaptation. Taking on unfamiliar roles, learning new skills, or leading projects in volatile environments can help develop adaptability over time.

06 Focus

Focus: The ability to concentrate on what truly matters amidst distractions. Focus enables leaders to make sense of changing contexts and determine what matters and to prioritize effectively, channeling energy and resources toward major decisions, key initiatives, and long-term goals.

Focus is the metaskill that keeps executives on track in a world full of noise, distractions, and AI slop. Leaders who can maintain focus are able to prioritize the most critical initiatives, guiding their teams toward long-term goals even when faced with competing short-term demands.

To improve focus, executives should regularly step back, and identify and review their greatest priorities across the domains of their lives. Such reflection and prioritization require minimizing distractions, creating systems for managing competing demands effectively, and prioritizing opportunities for renewal. Coaching and mentoring can also support the development of this practice.

07 Judgment

Judgment: The capacity to engage in critical thinking and deliberate sense-making and decision-making by balancing facts, intuition, experience, and ethical considerations. Judgment enables leaders to make sound choices in uncertain and ambiguous situations, avoiding reactive or short-sighted actions, and engage in effective problem-solving.

Judgment is the foundation of effective decision-making and the sense-making that these decisions are based upon. In environments characterized by uncertainty, leaders need to weigh various factors, including data, intuition, personal experience, and ethical considerations. Good judgment is what allows executives to navigate ambiguity and avoid biases and decision-making traps.

Leaders develop good judgment from varied experience, deliberate reflection on their decisions, and seeking feedback to identify areas for improvement. Over time, this reflective practice strengthens judgment, decision-making, and problem-solving capabilities. A consistent reflective practice also allows for the development of human judgment capable of transforming data into foresight by synthesizing creative intuition beyond the pattern recognition and trend extrapolation of AI.

So, what does this mean for talent strategies?

It’s time for educators and organizations to reframe their approach. Today, too much emphasis is placed on technical skills – including the integration of AI models into learning and development – while swinging entirely to the other extreme, focusing only on meta-skills, is equally risky. The real challenge – and opportunity – lies in finding the balance point between the two.

The Georgetown research on workforce development in the AI era confirms this tension, finding that while AI tools can enhance training efficiency, implementation must carefully balance technological capability with genuine skill development to avoid undermining learning outcomes (Oschinski, et al., 2024).

Technical skills help organizations exploit current opportunities and deliver on today’s priorities. But leftunchecked, and as AI rapidly expands into this space, they quickly become obsolete,locking companies into costly and reactive cycles of reskilling⁵. Meta-skills, onthe other hand, enable organizations to be ambidextrous by unlocking exploration:they fuel adaptive strategies, future readiness and sustainable competitive advantage. Yet relying on them alone risks weakening day-to-day performance and competitiveness.

The imperative, then, is not choosing one over the other but reconciling both ends of this polarity. By weaving technical skills and metaskills into a coherent strategy, organizations can develop leaders and build a workforce that are both agile in the present and resilient for the future. Striking this balance is not just a design choice, it is the essence of adaptive leadership.

In our era of rapid change, leaders can no longer rely on static knowledge, fixed strategies, or a given set of technical skills. A Canadian-American research team, led by scholars at York University in Toronto, that examined leadership of AI transformation in a healthcare organizations, confirms that navigating technological disruption requires individuals to develop not just technical capacity but adaptive capacity to respond to contextual changes and interpersonal capacity tomanage the human dimensions of transformation (Abbasiyannejad, et al., 2024).⁶

Metaskills are critical because they enable executives to cultivate these adaptive and interpersonal capacities, fostering continuous learning, thoughtful action, andversatility in the face of uncertainty and complexity. These metaskills serve as a foundation upon which other skills can be built, across the uncertainty and complexity of ongoing change, thereby enabling leaders to learn continuously and adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

References

¹VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous. BANI: Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear,Incomprehensible.

²Bankins, S., Hu, X., & Yuan, Y. (2024). Artificial intelligence, workers, and future of work skills. Current Opinion in Psychology, 58, 101828. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2024.101828.

³Oschinski, M., Crawford, A., & Wu, M. (2024). AI and the Future of Workforce Training. Center for Security and Emerging Technology. December 2024. https://doi.org/10.51593/20240033.

⁴Hossain, S., Fernando, M., & Akter, S. (2025). The influence of artificial intelligence-driven capabilities on responsible leadership: A future research agenda. Journal of Management & Organization, 31(5), 2360–2384. Advance online publication June 13, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1017/jmo.2025.10010.

⁵World Economic Forum (2025), The Future of Jobs Report 2025, World Economic Forum, Geneva. According to the report, employers on average expect that 39 % of workers’ core skills will be transformed or become outdated by 2030.

⁶Sriharan A., Sekercioglu N., Mitchell C., Senkaiahliyan S., Hertelendy A., Porter T., Banaszak-Holl J. (2024). Leadership for AI Transformation in Health Care Organization: Scoping Review. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2024; 26: e54556. https://doi.org/10.2196/54556.

Across four articles, written between March 2025 and February 2026, I have published more than 15,000 words examining how hyper-connected, data-centric, algorithmically-governed, and AI-augmented platform ecosystems are reshaping leadership discourse and practice. This sustained inquiry reflects a deliberate effort to clarify what leadership increasingly requires when visibility, engagement, and repetition become not just conditions of communication, but dominant evaluative logics.

Taken together, these articles advance a single, cumulative claim: in the platform era, leadership is being quietly redefined as a function of visibility rather than judgment. Digital platforms do not merely accelerate the circulation of leadership ideas; they reorganize the incentives that determine which forms of leadership are noticed, rewarded, and emulated. Over time, those incentives shape leaders’ aspirations, learning, and practice themselves.

I am not launching a broadside against platforms, nor am I mounting a nostalgic defense of pre-digital authority. Platforms are now infrastructural realities of organizational and social life. My argument is diagnostic. When leadership discourse is governed by engagement metrics, algorithmic amplification, and performative coherence, capacities central to effective leadership – contextual judgment, sensemaking, and relational depth – become harder to cultivate and easier to overlook. In each article, I’ve approached this problem from a different angle, moving from discourse format, to cognition and behavior, to aspiration and identity, and finally to leadership practice under conditions of digital reversal.

1. The Dilemmas of Mainstream Leadership Discourse in the Platform Era (March 21, 2025)

The first article establishes the foundational problem by examining how platform formats shape leadership discourse itself. Beginning with a reflection on optimal LinkedIn post length, it argues that platforms impose implicit epistemic constraints. Length, tone, cadence, and emotional valence are not neutral stylistic choices; they function as filters that privilege certain kinds of ideas while systematically disadvantaging others. As I write directly about leadership discourse today, “platforms and formats are not neutral: they reshape not only what we say, but how we think about it” (Slocum, 2025a).

Drawing on media theory and the evolution of business publishing, the article traces the shifts from books to summaries, from arguments to snippets, and from institutional vetting to algorithmic relevance (Postman, 1985; Tufekci, 2017). While these transitions have democratized participation, the have also displaced traditional signals of expertise with engagement metrics. Authority increasingly accrues not to those who deepen understanding, but to those who maintain visibility. Leadership thus begins to be understood less as the capacity to hold complexity over time and more as the capacity to render oneself and one’s thinking immediately communicable within platform-friendly formats.

In practice, this is visible when complex leadership questions – around power, trade-offs, or organizational politics – are routinely reframed as short lists, personal reflections, or motivational takeaways because those formats travel best on platforms. The resulting dilemma is structural rather than personal: leaders and leadership thinkers must participate in platform ecosystems to remain relevant, yet meaningful participation often requires compressing or adapting ideas into forms that erode nuance, context, and relevance to particular situations and settings.

2. Engaging Ourselves to Death? Leadership in the Platform Age (April 2, 2025)

If the first article diagnoses distortion at the level of discourse, the second descends into its cognitive and behavioral consequences. Building on the late media ecologist Neil Postman’s critiques of entertainment and information overload (Postman, 1985; Postman, 1990), I argued that contemporary leadership operates under conditions of compulsory engagement. Platforms are engineered around persuasive design, dopamine-driven feedback loops, and metrics that reward constant interaction (Fogg, 2002; Alter, 2017; Lembke, 2021).

For leaders, this engagement imperative has two destabilizing effects. First, as I wrote, “Leadership becomes inseparable from performance when engagement itself becomes the metric” (Slocum, 2025b). Responsiveness, frequency, and emotional clarity increasingly substitute for judgment and substance as proxies for effectiveness. Second, engagement metrics migrate from indicators to evaluators, encouraging a form of metric myopia in which what is easiest to measure crowds out what is most substantive or consequential.

Under such conditions of compulsory engagement, leadership increasingly comes to mean visible responsiveness – being seen to react, acknowledge, communicate, and signal care – rather than the slower work of judgment, decision-making, and relationship-building.

This dynamic is readily visible inside organizations, where leaders’ responsiveness on Slack or Teams – consider reaction emojis, rapid replies, visible presence – can become informal signals of care and competence, even when deeper strategic thinking or difficult conversations occur elsewhere and remain largely invisible. The article also introduces context collapse as one of today’s defining leadership challenges, in which messages lose deeper meanings as they are continuously reinterpreted across overlapping audiences and time horizons (boyd, 2014; Davis, 2020).

3. The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader (December 21, 2025)

The third article shifts the analysis from engagement to aspiration. In it, I examine how leadership development itself is filtered through algorithmic media, and I argue that the “average leader is produced not by failure, but by algorithmic normalization” (Slocum, 2025c). This figure, marked by their aspirations to become a better leader, emerges through constant exposure to homogenized leadership content optimized for scale and repetition.

Drawing on critiques of the leadership industry (Kellerman, 2012; Pfeffer, 2015) and psychological research on repetition and illusory truth effects (Fazio et al., 2015), I show how algorithms amplify consensus rather than inquiry. Familiar frameworks gain authority through visibility, while alternative and often systemically grounded perspectives struggle to surface. In this environment, I contend that “repetition, not rigor, becomes the primary source of authority” (Slocum, 2025c). Generative AI models trained on popular leadership content increasingly reproduce the same narrow repertoire of virtues and formulations, reinforcing the consensus they are typically prompted to summarize.

Leadership in discourse and practice becomes, in turn, less defined by situated effectiveness than by proximity to a normalized ideal – one produced, circulated, and reinforced through algorithmic repetition.

Many leaders encounter this dynamic through an endless stream of podcasts, newsletters, and posts that recycle a narrow set of leadership virtues – authenticity, vulnerability, purpose – largely detached from the organizational contexts in which those qualities become difficult to enact. The tyranny here is pervasive yet subtle. Leaders are not coerced into conformity; they are invited into it. By aspiring to improve themselves, they internalize platform norms that reward clarity over complexity and inspiration over confrontation with uncomfortable realities.

4. How Digital Platforms Have Rewired Leadership Discourse – and Reshaped Leadership Practice(February 5, 2026)

My fourth and most recent article synthesizes the preceding analyses through media ecologist Andrey Mir’s concept of digital reversal (Mir, 2025). It argues that platforms do not merely amplify leadership messages but reshape leadership practice itself. As I put one of its central claims, “platforms do not merely amplify leadership; they quietly retrain it” (Slocum, 2026). When media systems scale to extremes of speed and reach, their original benefits invert. Information abundance becomes meaning scarcity. In the process, expressive freedom collapses into algorithmic conformity.

What emerges is a form of leadership optimized for platform compatibility: influence that travels, resonates, and persists within algorithmic systems, even when detached from institutional responsibility or long-term consequence.

Within this reversed ecology, leadership becomes increasingly gamified. Engagement dashboards, badges, and algorithmic rewards condition leaders to communicate for reach and reaction rather than understanding (Alter, 2017; Eyal, 2014). High-arousal emotions spread faster than deliberation (Brady et al., 2017), pulling leadership discourse into agonistic arenas where influence is measured by attention and interaction rather than judgment.

Public figures such as entrepreneur Elon Musk illustrate how leadership communication can be performed through platforms themselves, where volatility, provocation, and attention shocks generate disproportionate influence independent of its institutional role. Generative AI intensifies these tendencies. AI-generated leadership content tends toward emotionally smooth, agreeable tones, reinforcing homogenization and a social-desirability bias (Dentella et al., 2023; Salecha et al., 2024). In this way, generative AI does not introduce a new logic into leadership discourse so much as it operationalizes existing platform preferences – speed, positivity, and stylistic coherence – at scale.

Crucially, the discussion in this article pivots toward practice. It argues that reclaiming leadership requires deliberate counterweights to platform logic: slower communicative modes, stronger relational infrastructures, and disciplined reflective routines (Newport, 2016; Heifetz et al., 2009). These are not retreats from technology, but conditions for exercising judgment within it.

(Provisional) Conclusion: Leadership Beyond Platform Logic

Across these articles, leadership emerges as increasingly constrained not by a lack of tools or case examples, but by surplus mediation. Platforms reward visibility, emotional clarity, and repetition, while undervaluing judgment, contextual intelligence, and meaning-making. Over time, these incentives reshape not only leadership discourse, but leadership aspiration and evaluation.

Taken together, these shifts point toward an emergent re-definition of leadership in the platform era. Leadership is increasingly understood as the ability to sustain visibility, signal coherence, and generate engagement across mediated environments. More and more, influence accrues through emotional legibility, stylistic consistency, and algorithmic reinforcement rather than through contextual judgment, institutional stewardship, or the navigation of difficult trade-offs. This emerging definition is rarely stated explicitly, yet it is enacted daily in how leaders are evaluated, promoted, imitated, and developed.

Guiding my writing on this topic is the goal to contribute to leadership studies and practice by showing that platforms do not merely influence or facilitate leadership communication; they redefine leadership itself as an activity that is becoming more and more performative and metric-driven unless consciously resisted. My aim is neither to argue for platform exit nor to propose a new leadership model. Rather, my purpose across these articles is diagnostic and developmental: to help leaders to become more aware of the structural pressures shaping contemporary leadership so that they can engage platforms more deliberately rather than unconsciously conforming to platform logics.

Leadership capable of enduring impact must therefore learn to operate both within and beyond platform logics, cultivating forms of influence that remain meaningful even when they are not immediately visible. That task may be unfashionable in an attention economy, but I believe it is an aspiration that remains central to any leadership worthy of the name.

References

Adam Alter (2017) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Penguin Press.

danah boyd (2014) It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Yale University Press.

William J. Brady, Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel (2017) “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313–7318;
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618923114

Jenny L. Davis (2020) How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things, MIT Press.

Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Günther, and Evelina Leivada (2023) “Systematic Testing of Three Language Models Reveals Low Language Accuracy, Absence of Response Stability, and a Yes-Response Bias,” Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (51) e2309583120; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2309583120

Nir Eyal (2025) Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products, Portfolio.

Lisa K. Fazio, Nadia M. Brashier, B. Keith Payne, and Elizabeth J. Marsh (2015). “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993-1002; https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000098

B.J. Fogg (2002) Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, Morgan Kaufmann.

Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky (2009) The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Harvard Business Press.

Barbara Kellerman (2012) The End of Leadership, HarperCollins.

Anna Lembke (2021) Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, Dutton.

Andrey Mir (2025) The Digital Reversal: Thread-Saga of Media Evolution, Andrey Mir [Self-published].

Cal Newport (2016) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Grand Central Publishing.

Jeffrey Pfeffer (2015) Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time, Harper Business.

Neil Postman (1985) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Viking.

------------ (1990) “Informing Ourselves to Death,” Speech presented to the German Informatics Society, Stuttgart, October 11, 1990; https://web.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/informing.html

Aadesh Salecha, Molly E. Ireland, Shashanka Subrahmanya, João Sedoc, Lyle H. Ungar, and Johannes C. Eichstaedt (2024) “Large Language Models Display Human-like Social Desirability Biases in Big Five Personality Surveys,” PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 12, December 2024, pgae533; https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae533

David Slocum (2025a) “The Dilemmas of Mainstream Leadership Discourse in the Platform Era,” Creative Leadership Hub, Substack, February 21, 2025; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/the-dilemmas-of-mainstream-leadership

David Slocum (2025b) “Engaging Ourselves to Death? Leadership in the Platform Age,” Creative Leadership Hub, Substack, April 2, 2026; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/engaging-ourselves-to-death-leadership

David Slocum (2025c) “The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader,” Creative Leadership Hub, Substack, December 21, 2025; https://www.craftingleadership.com/p/the-algorithmic-tyranny-of-the-aspirational

David Slocum (2026) “How Digital Platforms Have Rewired Leadership Discourse – and Reshaped Leadership Practice,” Creative Leadership Hub, Substack, February 6, 2026);

Crafting Leadership with David Slocum

How Digital Platforms Have Rewired Leadership Discourse – and Reshaped Leadership Practice

The following post continues my consideration of how today’s digital and data-driven platform media shape our leadership thinking and practice. Among earlier entries on the topic are “The Dilemmas of Mainstream Leadership Discourse in the Platform Era…

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9 months ago · 3 likes · David Slocum

Zeynep Tufekci (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Yale University Press.

Skills are expiring faster than organizations can replace them. Despite heavy continual investment in reskilling, many leaders still question whether their people (or they themselves) are truly prepared for what comes next.

Join this live Thunderbird School of Global Management webinar with me, Professor David Slocum, and human capital strategist Sofian Lamali to explore why skills alone are no longer enough – and how metaskills provide a more durable foundation for ongoing leadership, learning, and performance in an AI-accelerated world.

In this 60-minute session, we’ll examine:

· Why many skills-based initiatives underdeliver despite good intentions

· What metaskills are, and how they enable more robust learning, judgment, and adaptability

· How leaders can strengthen these capabilities through everyday work practices

Register now to secure your place: https://asu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_TqtwGb4mSfeqgjhxhuBXPA

All registrants will receive a valuable background paper about ‘Metaskills for Today’s Executives’

I look forward to seeing you there!

The following post continues my consideration of how today’s digital and data-driven platform media shape our leadership thinking and practice. Among earlier entries on the topic are “The Dilemmas of Mainstream Leadership Discourse in the Platform Era,” “Engaging Ourselves to Death? Leadership in the Platform Era,” and “The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader.” These analyses of the current platform environment hearken back to my earliest scholarly research, which focused on the film and media industries. My current work seeks to make sense of the thoroughly mediated evolution of contemporary leadership discourse and practice. This focus is for me more than an academic exercise: both for understanding and developing their own leadership practices as well as understanding the perceptions and expectations of others, I believe leaders today can benefit from a more sophisticated awareness of the digital platform spaces and dynamics in which information about leadership circulates.

Digital and data-driven platforms have become the dominant infrastructure through which leadership ideas circulate, are interpreted, and take shape. Their influence extends far beyond distributing information. They reorganize the very conditions of communication, making speed, visibility, and emotional resonance the primary currencies of influence.

This shift reflects what media ecologist Andrey Mir identifies as the digital reversal, a phase of media evolution in which digital environments, having reached extremes of scale and speed, flip their original benefits into their opposites. Information abundance becomes informational noise and meaning scarcity, in which facts blur into fakes, and literate habits of reflection reverse into reflexes, pushing us back toward reactive digital orality (Mir, 2025, 5, 32). For leadership discourse, which depends on contextual judgment, narrative coherence, and relational understanding, these reversals unsettle familiar practices and introduce new constraints on how local meaning can be made and situational interactions can occur.

The reversal, however, does not function as a single dramatic transformation. It operates as a continual process in which the micro-structures of digital communication amplify tendencies already present in mainstream leadership discourse. Leaders today are asked to perform influence in a setting where the audience is fragmented, algorithmically sorted, and primed for emotional cues. Communication becomes less an extension of leadership work and more a form of leadership work itself.

This is particularly true in spaces such as LinkedIn, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Instagram – and even Substack and the podosphere – where metrics and algorithmic distributions shape what leadership looks like. The challenge is not only that depth and nuance travel less easily and rapidly across these infrastructures but that the infrastructures themselvs actively shape how leaders think about the nature of influence. As marketing consultant and brand strategist Justin Oberman concluded when reviewing three recent technical papers released by LinkedIn explaining the future of its feed, “the algorithm now treats ‘popular’ and ‘meaningful’ as the same thing” (Oberman, 2025).

The Gamified Performance of Leadership

The gamification of influence is one of the clearest ways platforms rewire leadership discourse. Digital systems translate participation into feedback loops built on unpredictable rewards. Researchers and practitioners alike have shown how engagement dashboards, profile strength meters, and “Top Voice” badges encourage habitual posting exploit variable-ratio reinforcement patterns that strengthen compulsive behaviors, (Alter, 2017; Eyal, 2014). Leaders quickly learn that posts which evoke emotional clarity, personal uplift, or moral urgency tend to outperform more tentative, abstract, or analytic remarks. The platforms reward not the reasoning behind ideas but the responses they provoke.

This incentive structure shapes the texture of leadership communication. Messages often adopt compressed narrative arcs or tidy emotional tones to maximize circulation. Anecdotes that resolve neatly or takeaways framed as universal lessons spread more readily than contextualized arguments.

Exemplifying the power of aligning leadership identity with the rhythms of digital gamification is Elon Musk’s online presence. His use of humor, attention shocks, sentiment shifts, and abrupt declarative statements reliably generates engagement and at times has correlated with short-term fluctuations in specific stock prices, include Tesla’s, and more general movements in cryptocurrency markets (Metta, et al., 2022; Ante, 2023). Rather than communicating within the logic of the platform, Musk performs leadership through it.

As I noted in previous writing here on algorithmic conformity in leadership discourse (Slocum, 2025a; Slocum, 2025c), these performance expectations narrow leaders’ communicative repertoires. The gamified system favors expressive sharpness over interpretive depth, rewarding those who master the cadence of digital attention rather than those who cultivate patient judgment.

Mir’s reversal framework clarifies this drift by showing how digital tools and processes designed to enhance communication eventually dictate behaviors – notably, “impulsive” ones – when pushed to their extremes (Mir, 2025, 58). Leaders must therefore recognize that the platforms not only amplify their messages but also quietly shape their instincts about what leadership should look and sound like.

Outrage, Identity, and the Agonistic Arena

If gamification influences the structure of leadership expression, the outrage economy shapes its emotional content. In their studies of moralized communication, psychologist William J. Brady and his New York University colleagues demonstrate that high-arousal emotions such as anger and disgust spread rapidly through networked systems because users feel compelled to pass them along (Brady et al., 2017). This dynamic becomes especially acute in leadership discourse, where statements intended to navigate organizational dilemmas are often subsumed into larger cultural or political contests.

Consider the controversies involving James Damore at Google, surrounding his 2017 internal memo criticizing the tech giant’s culture and diversity policies, or Disney’s continuing public disputes with Florida officials, which erupted in 2022 around the company’s criticism of state educational policies and Governor Ron DeSantis’ efforts in response to strip Disney of its self-governing authority (Wakabayashi, 2017; Allen, 2024). Both episodes illustrate how quickly internal leadership challenges can be absorbed into external symbolic and cultural politics struggles marked by moral polarities rather than critical reasoning.

Leaders can become trapped in the digital “agonism,” or conflict, that Mir identifies as central to digital orality, where communication becomes a competitive, emotionally charged performance shaped by the crowd’s reactions (Mir, 2025,18-20). Messages are evaluated not for their analytic merit but for their alignment with tribal positions, transforming organizational communication into cultural performance.

Leadership personalities with large digital followings, including Simon Sinek and Brené Brown, operate within these dynamics as well. Each has built a large following that functions as a digital tribe, complete with shared language, canonical texts, and quasi-moral frameworks. Sinek’s “Start with Why,” both the book and one of the most-watched TED Talks of all time, and Brown’s work on vulnerability (which has been explicitly extended to leadership in her recent book, Strong Ground) circulate as quasi-doctrinal pillars within communities that reward reinforcing performances of the same ideas (Sinek, 2009; Brown, 2025). This tribalization encourages amplification of simplified frameworks that promise clarity across contexts in uncertain times.

Their influential frameworks offer emotionally coherent heuristics that function as identity markers for digital communities. Their authority emerges as much from network effects as from conceptual contribution. In an earlier discussion of mainstream leadership discourse and platform constraints, I argued that these patterns flatten the leadership conversation by preying on users’ confirmation bias and privileging ideas that can be recirculated easily across channels (Slocum, 2025b). The effect is an homogenized vision of leadership, again typically lacking context or nuance, that crowds out alternative perspectives.

Although these ideas can be valuable to some, the platform dynamics that sustain them privilege repetition over transformation and contextualization. The community’s identity becomes attached to the core concept, and dissenting or complexifying views receive less algorithmic visibility. The structure echoes sociologist Zeynep Tufekci’s argument that digital movements mobilize quickly through identity signals but often struggle with deeper organizational or institutional development (2017).

Algorithms, AI, and the Synthetic Leadership Voice

Algorithmic recommender systems further reshape leadership discourse by conditioning not only what circulates but how leadership begins to look and sound. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram privilege content that is brief, affective, and rhythmically engaging, favoring leadership communication that resembles oral storytelling rather than analytic exposition. This epitomizes what Mir describes as the contemporary reversion to digital orality. Indeed, among the most widely circulated leadership messages are those that consist of confessional stories, provocative micro-lessons, or short prescriptive claims delivered with polished emotional pacing and distinctively personal voice.

Generative AI intensifies this tendency by producing synthetic leadership voices optimized (or, as described in ChatGPT’s default personalization setting, “balanced”) for friendliness, affirmation, and emotional resonance. A result is digital feeds increasingly populated by AI avatars, automated motivational clips, and templated leadership monologues. Recent research argues that large language models tend toward social-desirability and agreeableness biases, producing communication that is more harmonious than incisive, as well as a “yes-response bias” (Salecha et al., 2024; Dentella et al., 2023). Mirroring broader platform preferences and reinforcing an homogenous leadership voice, these dynamics substitute a pleasant cadence for strategic clarity.

Again, Mir’s analysis helps explain this smoothing effect. As digital environments saturate users with information, systems evolve to filter and compress meaning to reduce cognitive load (Mir, 2025, 55–60). AI becomes a natural extension of this reversal, flattening expressive variance into dependable, optimistic, and emotionally mild aesthetic patterns. In this environment, leadership discourse risks becoming dominated by such synthetic tones. The challenge for leaders is to maintain expressive autonomy amid increasing algorithmic imitation.

When Platform Logic Overtakes Institutional Judgment

Crises reveal how quickly platform logic can subsume institutional judgment. During the 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank, high-arousal commentary circulated far more rapidly than measured analysis, shaping perceptions among investors, policymakers, and the public. As Yale finance professor Andrew Metrick put, the episode unfolded not only as a financial event but as a platform-mediated spectacle in which the narratives gaining velocity through X overshadowed institutional attempts at stabilization and resulted in “the panic of 2023” (Metrick, 2024).

Similar dynamics appear in the communication patterns of Open AI CEO Sam Altman, whose sweeping declarations about AI and calls for unprecedented investments have arguably influenced investor sentiment more strongly than operational detail (Murgia and Hammond, 2023). His leadership presence functions partly as narrative performance, reinforcing how digital audiences interpret leadership authority through emotionally charged storylines about social transformation rather than institutional fundamentals.

These pressures also permeate internal organizational life. Slack, Teams, proprietary messaging systems, and digital workplace environments generally produce constant employee visibility through reaction emojis, public praise channels, and activity indicators. Likewise, by appearing frequently active or emotionally expressive within these digital spaces, leaders can often be perceived as more engaged, even when the substance of their relational or strategic work tells a different story. These internal socio-technical affordances reward display over depth, and visibility over substance, in local work settings in ways that parallel the proliferation of such rewards in more public platforms (Slocum, 2025c).

Recognizing that platform logic operates upstream of institutional judgment also allows leaders to better protect the foundations of their decision-making and relational work. It can clarify why restoring interpretive stability demands more than message or IT management. It requires re-centering leadership work in practices and contexts not entirely governed by platform dynamics.

Reclaiming Leadership in Our Reversed Media Ecology

To counterbalance the speed, spectacle, and simplification of digital and data-driven platform media, leadership practice today must therefore prioritize forms of interaction and communication that restore temporal depth and contextual grounding. By (re-)introducing slower modes of engagement, including long-form writing, small-group discussion, and continuous learning routines, leaders can encourage collective reflection, slower modes of thinking and engagement, and what Georgetown professor Cal Newport refers to as “deep work” (Newport, 2016). These practices resist the fragmenting tempo of digital culture and reinforce the kinds of interpretive patience needed for meaningful sensemaking.

Equally important is the need to strengthen internal cultures that value the less visible dimensions of leadership work that include deep listening, relational sensemaking, attention to emotional climate, and the cultivation of psychological safety. As Ronald Heifetz and his Harvard Kennedy School colleagues argued two decades ago, such adaptive leadership requires leaders to observe systemic signals, listen below the surface, and intervene thoughtfully in ways that demand patience and perceptual nuance (Heifetz, et al., 2009). These and related practices have long been central to effective leadership and need to be updated for today’s platform environments to foster organizational and other work climates conducive to shared learning and mutual trust.

These commitments require a sophisticated relational intelligence tailored to technologically mediated contexts. Emotional intelligence in leadership, as psychologist and author Daniel Goleman and colleagues have demonstrated, depends on attunement, empathy, the capacity to support others’ development as leaders, and finally to create sustainable change in organizations (Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2013). Again, leaders today must update their styles of engagement not only to interpersonal dynamics but also to the algorithmic and platform architectures that increasingly shape them. Strengthening relational capacity provides organizations and other systems with interpretive stability and direction amid the volatility of digital interactions and other macro-envronmental changes.

Navigating this terrain more deliberately can allow leaders to understand the self-reinforcing and simplifying process of communication as a structural feature of platform ecologies rather than as an expression of personal temperament. Such awareness can illuminate why unemotional or nuanced statements tend to vanish quickly from view on digital channels while sharper, more polarized interpretations linger. Leaders who engage platforms themselves more deliberately (rather than assuming they are neutral) are also better positioned to design communications and interactions that resist being pulled entirely into the competitive spectacles of digital orality.

Finally, leaders can better cultivate an internal discipline that blends reflective awareness with experimental action. This discipline supports them in resisting emotional contagion, pacing responses, and grounding decisions in their values and priorities rather than the structural forces of spectacle. James Clear’s globally bestselling work on habit formation underscores how small, repeated behaviors can create durable patterns of attention and judgment. More recently, Clear has underscored the grounded and practical basis of making these changes in a workbook that explicitly calls for leaders to move from understanding their habits to changing them (Clear, 2018; Clear, 2025).

A related approach to refining leadership practices appears in tech leader turned neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s concept of “tiny experiments.” These small, low-risk tests can help leaders to change and grow themselves and others through curiosity-driven iteration rather than performance-driven perfectionism (Le Cunff, 2025). Such routines enable leaders to adapt their behaviors amid uncertainty while maintaining coherence and integrity. Together, these practices affirm that leadership in the platform era is not a static identity but a process of continual inquiry, adjustment, experimentation, and set of interactions with others.

Extending Toward Creative Leadership Today

These practices resonate deeply with the evolving understanding and practice of creative leadership. Double-loop learning, originally proposed in the 1970s by behavioral scientist and Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris, entails leaders learning not only about actions but from examining and reshaping the assumptions that shape those actions (Argyris, 2005). More recent researchers, including economists at the University of Padova, have updated Argyris’s thinking and shown its thoroughgoing contemporary relevance (Auqui-Caceres and Furlan, 2023). Indeed, in a media ecology defined by reversals, my claim is that triple-loop learning has now become indispensable. Leaders today must navigate the pressures of platforms on their actions and assumptions while also questioning the frameworks that guide their responses to those pressures and the systems in which both pressures and frameworks exist (Slocum, 2025d).

This approach to learning and leadership reframes challenges not as obstacles but as opportunities for reinterpreting how influence and meaning can be generated in contextually sensitive ways. It is an orientation that also demands flexibility in how leaders work with established methods. While tools such as design thinking, agile workflows, psychological safety, or cross-functional collaboration can generate breakthroughs, their value diminishes when they are applied ritualistically. Leaders must assess whether inherited approaches fit present conditions and adapt them as needed. The resulting process of continuous reinvention echoes the creative leader’s responsibility to treat established practices not as fixed solutions but as evolving components of a dynamic repertoire.

Creative leadership also insists on attending to the tensions and paradoxes embedded in platform-era leadership. Leaders must cultivate both individual autonomy and collective coherence, both rapid experimentation and patient reflection, both human judgment and technologically informed insight. These demands require not a rigid formula but a repertoire of approaches grounded in context and relational sensitivity. Often, the most effective creative leaders learn and operate simultaneously at micro, macro, and meta levels; that is, they strive to develop themselves, shape their teams and organizations, and engage with and refine the systemic dynamics that define their broader environment.

Finally, creative leadership today provides a path for resisting the flattening tendencies of and homogenizing digital platforms by re-centering meaning-making as a core leadership task. Leaders must shape interpretations, frame possibilities, and create shared narratives that cut through the endless noise of the digital and hybrid worlds. They must steward the creative capacity of their organizations while questioning the assumptions that underpin their own decisions. In doing so, leaders can reclaim the possibility of acting with coherence and purpose amid the distortions of digital reversal. Creative leadership is thus not a refuge from the platform era but a disciplined, generative response to its defining challenges.

Leadership Beyond Reversal

Digital platforms have rewired leadership discourse by accelerating performance pressures, amplifying emotional currents, narrowing expressive possibilities, and elevating visibility over judgment. By incisively examining how digital environments intensify and invert the communicative and informational norms through which leadership occurs, Mir’s concept of digital reversal offers a powerful lens for understanding these shifts. Yet leaders need not be held captive to these conditions. By cultivating slower, more reflective communicative practices, strengthening relational infrastructures, developing sharper contextual intelligence, and embracing the reflexive discipline of creative leadership, they can counteract reversal’s most corrosive effects.

Leadership today depends on the ability to create coherence where platforms create noise, to foster trust where digital orality encourages agonism, and to make decisions that transcend the incentives of visibility. This work is neither simply nostalgic nor straightforwardly oppositional. It accepts the realities of platform-era conditions while insisting on the human capacities that continue to make leadership vital and meaningful. Leaders who remain more fully aware of the platforms in which they live and work can better anchor their practice in reflection, creativity, and judgment that will not only allow them to navigate digital reversal but shape its next evolution.

References

Doug Allen (2024, March 28) “In Florida, There’s Détente in the Battle between Disney and Gov. Ron DeSantis,” NPR; https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241296687/florida-governor-ron-desantis-disney-legal-battle-settled

Adam Alter (2017) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Penguin Press.

Lennart Ante (2023) “How Elon Musk’s Twitter Activity Moves Cryptocurrency Markets,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 186, Part A, January 2023, 122112; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2022.122112

Chris Argyris (2005) “Double-loop Learning in Organizations: A Theory of Action Perspective,” in K. G. Smith & M. A. Hitt, eds., Great minds in Management: The Process of Theory Development, pp. 261–279, Oxford University Press;
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199276813.003.0013

Mercedes-Victoria Auqui-Caceres and Andrea Furlan (2023) “Revitalizing Double-loop Learning in Organizational Contexts: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda,” European Management Review, 20(4), 741–761.
https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12615

William J. Brady, Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel (2017) “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313–7318;
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618923114

Brené Brown (2025) Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit, Random House.

James Clear (2018) Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, Avery.

------------ (2025) The Atomic Habits Workbook: Simple Exercises for Building the Life You Want, Avery.

Vittoria Dentella, Fritz Günther, and Evelina Leivada (2023) “Systematic Testing of Three Language Models Reveals Low Language Accuracy, Absence of Response Stability, and a Yes-Response Bias,” Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (51) e2309583120; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2309583120

Nir Eyal (2014) Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Business Books.

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee (2013) Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Harvard Business Review Press.

Ronald A. Heifetz, Martin Linsky, and Alexander Grashow (2009) The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Harvard Business Press.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff (2025) Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, Profile Books.

Andrew Metrick (2024) “The Failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the Panic of 2023,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 38, No. 1, Winter 2024, pp. 133-152; https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.38.1.133.

Sanjeev Metta, Nidheesh Madhavan, and Krishnamoorthy Krishnamoorthy Narayan (2022) “Power of 280: Measuring the Impact of Elon Musk’s Tweeks on the Stock Market,” Ushus-Journal of Business Management, Vol. 21, No. 1, 17-43; https://doi.org/10.12725/ujbm.58.2

Andrey Mir (2025) The Digital Reversal: Thread-Saga of Media Evolution, Andrey Mir [Self-published].

Madhumita Murgia and George Hammond (2023, November 2023) “The Sam Altman Effect: ‘His Superpower is Getting People Onside,’” Financial Times; https://www.ft.com/content/05b80ba4-fcc3-4f39-a0c3-97b025418b3c

Cal Newport (2016) Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Grand Central Publishing.

Justin Oberman (2025, December 2) “Why Real Thought Leaders are Leaving LinkedIn: Your Best Work is Invisible (And It’s Not Your Fault),” Oberthinking, Substack;

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Aadesh Salecha, Molly E Ireland, Shashanka Subrahmanya, João Sedoc, Lyle H Ungar, and Johannes C Eichstaedt (2024) “Large Language Models Display Human-like Social Desirability Biases in Big Five Personality Surveys,” PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 12, December 2024, pgae533; https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae533

Simon Sinek (2009, September) “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” TedxPuget Sound.

---------- (2009) Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Portfolio.

David Slocum (2025b, March 21) “The Dilemmas of Mainstream Leadership Discourse in the Platform Era,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://creativeleadershiphub.substack.com/p/the-dilemmas-of-mainstream-leadership

David Slocum (2025b, April 2) “Engaging Ourselves to Death? Leadership in the Platform Era,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://creativeleadershiphub.substack.com/p/engaging-ourselves-to-death-leadership

David Slocum (2025c, December 21) “The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://creativeleadershiphub.substack.com/p/the-algorithmic-tyranny-of-the-aspirational

David Slocum (2025d, November 13) “Creative Leadership Today,” Crafting Leadership, Substack; https://creativeleadershiphub.substack.com/p/creative-leadership-today

Zeynep Tufekci (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Yale University Press.

Daisuke Wakabayashi (2017, August 8) “Contentious Memo Strikes Never Inside Google and Out,” The New York Times; https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/08/technology/google-engineer-fired-gender-memo.html

In an age of endless social media scrolling and algorithmic content optimization, the proliferation of leadership listicles, bulleted posts, and stepwise solutions offering “must-read insights” and “essential tips” has become inescapable. While the desire for accessible wisdom is understandable, and the attempted distillation of an ever-growing surplus of management ideas commendable, these oversimplified formats may be doing more harm than good to aspiring leaders and the broader discourse around leadership development.

In 2009, in The Infinity of Lists, the Italian critic and semiotician Umberto Eco examined humanity’s enduring compulsion to enumerate and catalog, positioning listmaking as a fundamental expression of Western culture’s desire to comprehend and contain the boundless. He argued that our shifting approaches to lists, from medieval catalogues of saints to modernist literary experiments, reflect changing attitudes toward infinity and completeness. The listmaker of any era confronts the overwhelming vastness of reality by selecting, ordering, and excluding, and, in doing so, reflects the era’s particular relationships with order, knowledge, and the infinite.

Social media lists may be one reflection of our efforts today to grapple with such absolutes. While varying enormously in quality, and appearing across diverse social media platforms, the majority of lists about leadership – for example, “5 Proven Steps to Better Leadership” – often imply a narrative: transformation and problem-solving through simple steps. The fuller implication is that these lists suggest (or, depending on tone, promise) a story of progress, efficiency, or self-improvement achieved while overcoming common challenges that readers can embrace, often oversimplifying complex realities. At the same time, underpinning many lists and the narratives they imply are contemporary cultural myths of leadership such as being charismatic, productive, or humane.

Beyond the typically unexamined narratives and myths they contain, here are five compelling reasons why we should resist the allure of reductive leadership lists:

1. The False Promise of Universal Application

The notion that leadership insights can be distilled into neat, numbered packages that work across all contexts fundamentally misunderstands the nature of leadership itself. Leadership is inherently contextual. What works brilliantly in one situation may fail miserably in another. When we reduce complex leadership challenges to generic bullet points, we strip away the very context that gives leadership its meaning and effectiveness and makes its practice worth improving in the first place.

Consider how different leadership approaches must be in a fast-moving tech startup versus a legacy manufacturing company, or how cultural contexts dramatically alter what constitutes effective leadership across global organizations. The “5 Breakthrough Ideas for Driving Innovation” or “The 7 Challenges Today’s Leaders Face” format implicitly suggests a one-size-fits-all solution or explanation that simply doesn’t exist in real leadership scenarios. While they may be helpfully suggestive, or directionally accurate, these lists typically lack framing that adequately conveys for who, what, and where they are most potentially relevant.

The danger becomes particularly acute when we consider the global nature of modern business. Leadership practices that prove effective in Silicon Valley might be counterproductive in Singapore, yet listicles rarely acknowledge such cultural nuances. And indeed, an argument could be made that disseminating how-to lists via globalized and social media has the effect of homogenizing leadership discourse and marginalizing many ideas and practices that are more locally and culturally valuable. This oversimplification can lead to failed leadership initiatives and, worse, ecompromised relationships across cultural boundaries.

2. The Dangers of Cognitive Oversimplification

Leadership listicles feed into what the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman famously called “System 1” thinking, our brain’s preference for quick, intuitive responses over slower, deeper, more analytical thought. While this may feel satisfying in the moment, and may also trigger the release of dopamine and activate the brain’s reward pathway, it can create dangerous cognitive shortcuts in how we approach leadership challenges and the wider world. While appealing, the reduction of nuanced leadership concepts into easily digestible lists that make quick sense of hypothetical or imagined situations may impair our ability is to engage more consistently in the slower, deliberate, and reflective thinking of System 2 that allows us to process the complexity of the leadership situations we actually encounter (Kahneman 2011).

Many lists, with titles like “The 4 Essential Leadership Skills for Being Future-Ready,” are premised as “either-or” summaries that are ill-suited to today’s world. When we become accustomed to consuming leadership wisdom in serial or bite-sized formats, we risk losing the mental muscles needed for deeper analysis, contextual thinking, and problem framing. Even more, the accumulation of lists and their consistent consumption may contribute to what Kahneman described in his later work as “noise” (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein 2021). That an unpredictable variability in decisions can plague leaders over time when we are awash in irrelevant factors – potentially including those elements included in generic advisory lists – and don’t have reasoned rules or the habits of mind to build such rules and bring discipline to our decision-making.

This cognitive simplification often manifests in what might be called the “checklist fallacy,” the mistaken belief that leadership development is a matter of ticking off boxes rather than engaging in deep, reflective, and adaptive practices. In The Checklist Manifesto, physician Atul Gawande draws a crucial distinction, writing that checklists “are not comprehensive how-to guides … they are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals” (2010: 128). The fallacy arises when brief lists of uncertain origin and reliability become a basis for would-be expertise rather than a tool expertly employed.

3. The Erosion of Critical Leadership Discourse

The cognitive oversimplification driven by simple lists has a particular recent history in the handling and presentation of management and business information. If the listicle format degrades the quality of wider leadership discourse itself, this tendency preceded social and platform media. More than two decades ago, writing about “the cognitive style of PowerPoint,” Yale statistician and computer scientist Edward Tufte argued that widely used bullet outlines, for example, “failed to bring clarity, focus, or credibility to the presentations. On the contrary, the argument and evidence appeared broken up into small, arbitrary and misleading fragments.” Rather than bringing intellectual discipline, he observes, such formats “accommodated the generic, superficial, and simplistic” (2003: 11).

Tufte found that the very form of bullet outlines both “encourages us to be intellectually lazy” and dilutes the content being communicated. Drawing on earlier research, he identified three specific ways that forms of presentation, notably unelaborated lists and bulleted outlines, compromise content. First, these lists are typically too generic, offering a series of things to do that could apply to any business in any market conditions. Next, bulleted outlines leave unspecified the nature of critical relationships of the individual items, which could be sequential, priority-based, or pertaining to membership in a set. A third form of dilution involves leaving unstated critical assumptions about how a given business works (Shaw, Brown, and Bromiley 1998).

Today, amidst incomparably greater speed and volume, the emphasis on listicles and outlines reflects a desire to create ever-more-clickable headlines and shareable content and threatens amplifying the same effects. Even when lists or bulleted steps derive from more serious and thoughtful research, the lack of background understanding about how the various listed items have been generated deprives them of subtlety and sophistication. The metrics-driven nature of digital media means that nuanced discussions of leadership theory and practice are increasingly displaced by what performs well on social platforms. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where superficial content breeds demand for more superficial content – which contributes to the erosion of wider popular discourse about leadership.

4. The Illusion of Actionability

While leadership lists often present themselves as immediately actionable, they frequently offer vague directives that provide little genuine guidance for real-world application. Bulleted items like “be authentic” or “embrace innovation” or “practice empathy” or even “be better listeners” sound compelling but offer minimal practical value without specific implementation strategies and deeper context. Take, for instance, the common challenge of building psychological safety in teams. While listicles might suggest simple steps like “encourage open communication” or “celebrate failures,” the reality varies dramatically between contexts: what works for a surgical team in a hospital requires very different approaches than for a product development team in a startup, or for a trading desk in an investment bank or the crew of a commercial airliner.

Beyond the immediate impact on content quality and integrity, this trend has broader implications for leadership education and development programs. When simplified lists become an increasingly prominent form of leadership discourse, even formal educational institutions feel pressure to adapt their content to meet learners’ expectations for quick, easily digestible information. For example, a complex challenge like managing hybrid work arrangements gets reduced to “5 Key Tips for Leading More Successful Hybrid Teams,” missing crucial nuances about industry-specific needs, team dynamics, and organizational culture that might make remote work highly effective at a software company but potentially problematic at a creative advertising agency.

The problem compounds when organizations build or contract for leadership development programs in which such oversimplified principles are expected. Valuable resources are often wasted on initiatives that emphasize quick wins and surface-level changes rather than the deeper, more challenging work of ongoing and substantive leadership development. Yet these quick fixes and simple solutions (and “the power of positive thinking” that complement them) typify a dangerous illusion of leadership development that Harvard leadership expert Barbara Kellerman argues in The End of Leadership (2012) prioritizes often fast-paced, entertaining, and motivational form over substance. This illusion of actionability can actually impede the genuine leadership development enabled by embracing the complexity of leadership journeys by creating a false sense of progress.

5. The Devaluation of Experience

Perhaps most fundamentally, the listicle format implicitly suggests that leadership wisdom can be transmitted through simple declarative or, again, motivational statements rather than earned through experience and reflection. This runs counter to decades of research on experiential learning and skill development. In American educational theorist David Kolb’s formulation, “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (1984: 38). When we reduce leadership development to consuming lists of tips and tricks, we risk devaluing the essential role of lived experience, reflection, and personal growth in developing individual leadership capabilities.

Recent management studies reinforce this perspective. In a review of 25 years of leader and leadership development research, Australian management scholar David Day and his colleagues concluded that, more than programs, workshops, reading, or listening, it is through “day-to-day leadership activities where the crux of development really resides” (2014: 80). While it is possible to incorporate reflection on and application of online leadership lists into ongoing leadership practice, Day’s emphasis on experiential leadership development seems more generally to stand in stark contrast to the passive consumption model promoted by listicles and bulleted guides with titles like, “The 5 Steps You Need to Take to Lead AI.”

This devaluation of everyday leadership practice updates a problem that Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton described decades ago (1999). The “knowing-doing gap” has evolved beyond organizational walls into today’s social and platform media. While executives once substituted elaborate presentations for action, contemporary “thought leaders” flood platforms with decontextualized listicles, bulleted frameworks, and viral soundbites that prioritize “smart talk” over demonstrated experience and are habitually consumed by digital dwellers. This shift has amplified the original problem of complex ideas being reduced to easily shareable factoids and platitudes, while the messy reality of leading teams and driving change is glossed over. True leadership wisdom, earned through years of practical experience and learning from failures, risks being drowned out by a cascade of superficial hot takes and oversimplified formulas.

Moving Beyond Lists – or, at least, their Superficial Consumption: A Path Forward

The solution isn’t to abandon the pursuit of accessible leadership wisdom, or the distillation and illustration of relevant ideas and experiences, but rather to develop more thoughtful approaches to sharing, exploring, and consuming leadership insights. Indeed, and to be clear, some lists and bulleted outlines that appear on social are substantive, concrete, contextualized, evidence-based, and open-ended. Many of these include valuable reflections, elaborations, and extensions of the simple items included in the lists themselves. Yet for the many more skeletal outlines and listicles that proliferate on social platforms, we do well to ask basic questions like the following:

1. Where does this work – and, Who says so?

Before embracing the latest “transformational,” “agile,” or “human-centered” leadership advice, examine whether these appealing buzzwords actually translate to meaningful practices in your specific industry, team or organizational design, and cultural context. Beyond physical locality or geography, ask whether this advice apply to virtual, digital, and platform environments or do leaders need to adapt it. And be sure to query the source and their bases for sharing the ideas and advice. Be sure to ask, Are trending leadership principles universally effective just because they’re widely shared or come from a recognizable source?

2. What’s conspicuously missing?

Look beyond inspirational terms like “psychological safety,” “radical candor,” or “servant leadership” to identify critical gaps and complex relationships that simplified iterations or tips based on these ideas or frameworks conveniently ignore. Consider what essential but messier realities have been glossed over with attractive but generic terminology. View lists as ‘open-ended’ and ask, What contributions or critiques would you add based on personal experiences and diverse perspectives?

3. What’s the real substance?

Instead of accepting that stepwise directives about “emotional intelligence,” “growth mindsets,” or “authentic leadership” automatically lead to success, investigate the actual research, theoretical foundations, and documented case studies that either support or qualify these popular concepts. What empirical evidence or specific, messy, real-world experience exists behind the bullets outlining how to embrace these ideas?

4. How would this actually work tomorrow?

Transform vague imperatives about being “innovative,” “resilient,” or “inclusive” into concrete actions. Which specific behaviors, resources, and metrics would make these appealing but abstract concepts operational in your particular leadership context? And where may be gaps or exceptions that could help to apply your actions based on these ideas more effectively?

5. What does your own hard-won experience say?

Critically compare trending advice about “vulnerability,” “purpose-driven leadership,” or “digital transformation” against the insights you’ve gained through direct experience. Where do these popular frameworks align with reality? Where do they oversimplify the genuine challenges you’ve faced? What are ways to combine the reports and recoemmendations with your own experiences?

These questions encourage leaders to look past the seductive simplicity of contemporary leadership buzzwords and trending concepts to engage with the more complex realities of organizational life that lists often overlook in favor of shareable, relatable, but ultimately superficial advice.

The title of the original Italian edition of Eco’s catalog was La Vertigine della Lista – translated literally, The Vertigo of Lists. As we navigate an increasingly complex business landscape, and do so more and more via platformed and social media that feature AI-generated content, the leadership development community should resist the temptation to oversimplify or make superficial sense of the surfeit of ideas, opinions, and perspectives circulating today. Genuine and actionable leadership wisdom rarely comes in easily numbered and universally applicable packages, and our approaches to sharing and developing leadership insights, and developing our own leadership practices from active experiences, should reflect this reality.

References

David V. Day, John W. Fleenor, Leanne E. Atwater, Rachel E. Sturm, and Rob A. McKee (2014) “Advances in Leader and Leadership Development: A Review of 25 Years of Research and Theory,” The Leadership Quarterly 25: 63-82; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.004Get rights and content

Umberto Eco (2009) The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay, trans. Alastair McEwen, Rizzoli.

Atul Gawande (2010) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Metropolitan Books.

Daniel Kahneman (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein (2021) Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, Little, Brown Spark.

Barbara Kellerman (2014) The End of Leadership, Harper Business.

David A. Kolb (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Prentice-Hall.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton (1999) “The Smart-Talk Trap,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1999; https://hbr.org/1999/05/the-smart-talk-trap

Gordon Shaw, Robert Brown, and Philip Bromiley (1998) “Strategic Stories: How 3M is Rewriting Business Planning,” Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998; https://hbr.org/1998/05/strategic-stories-how-3m-is-rewriting-business-planning

Edward Tufte (2003) The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, Graphics Press LLC.