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.

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Gail Severini (2026, April 27) Untitled reply to Enache and Snowden on Kübler-Ross LinkedIn thread, LinkedIn; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7454121496651866112/

Ross Simmonds (2026, March 27) “50+ LinkedIn Stats for B2B Marketers to Benchmark Against (2026 Data),” Foundation Inc.; https://foundationinc.co/lab/b2b-marketing-linkedin-stats/

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, April 24) “Leading at the Threshold: Readiness, Presence, and the Practice of Leadership in an Entangled World, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University; https://thunderbird.asu.edu/thought-leadership/insights/leading-threshold-readiness-presence-and-practice-leadership-entangled

Dave Snowden (2026, April 26) Untitled commentary on Kübler-Ross and change management, LinkedIn post; https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7454035871164477440/

Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner (2015) Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Crown Publishers.

Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (2015) Managing the Unexpected: Sustained Performance in a Complex World, 3rd ed., Jossey-Bass.

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;

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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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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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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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a year 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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4 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.

While I’ve been assembling Top 10 lists of Creative Leadership Books for more than a decade, three issues challenged my doing so in 2025. The first is the continuing proliferation of other media formats that shape the popular discourse and practice of creative leadership today. Podcasts, short-form videos, blogs, and social media posts have become in many ways more influential in driving discussions and debates around creativity and leadership today than books. Moreover, many of the same ideas initially presented in books become more widely disseminated through these other formats and channels.

The second issue concerns the increasing overlap in popular discourse between the leadership in business and other sectors, particularly politics. This overlap is driven, importantly, by the aforementioned proliferation of other social media and digital formats. At the same time, the questioning of boundaries and categories of leadership has become more and more timely and even urgent in today’s fast-changing and complex environment. Expanding the boundaries of creative leadership, both for leaders with formal roles in different sectors and those whose creativity and impact address multiple contexts, suggests casting a wider net of readings from which potential insights can be drawn.

A third issue is the often blinkered non-fiction category from which I ordinarily select most “creative leadership” titles. Following Barbara Kellerman and Jeffrey Pfeffer, I’m a regular critic of the Leadership Industrial Complex that produces a never-ending and frequently insular stream of books and, as noted, other media that circumscribe discussions of creativity and leadership and privilege specific ideas and viewpoints. Recently, that stream has tended toward self-help and self-optimization topics in ways that arguably limit rather than expand the exploration of creative leadership at an historical moment in which the fearless and wide-ranging encounter with current conditions is most needed.

Mindful of these concerns, I’ve nevertheless decided to retain here a focus on non-fiction books published during the last calendar year and to recognize those titles that contribute to creative leadership thinking and practice regardless of their explicit focus on business, politics, or other pursuits. I believe that reading book-length arguments and provocations remains essential to the ongoing learning and growth of creative leaders – though I look forward, in the future, to highlighting the interventions offered by other media and, especially, the stories offered in fiction. Since I also believe that the development of creative leaders, as well as that of creative leadership as a field, benefits from the broadest possible engagement with ideas, experiences, and resources, one valuable starting place, though hardly the only one, are books like those on the following list.

The 2025 book titles that most resonantly frame creative leadership as a dynamic practice that links reflective awareness with decisive action at both individual and systemic levels. Ethan Kross, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic encourage leaders to scrutinize their emotional habits, experimental routines, and self-concepts in order to act with greater clarity and adaptability. They treat development as an ongoing discipline that strengthens judgment under pressure and widens the range of possible responses. Margaret Heffernan, Ranjay Gulati, and Suleika Jaouad show how uncertainty can invite deeper engagement rather than retreat when leaders cultivate presence, curiosity, and the courage to make timely and imaginative choices. Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore integrate these insights by presenting growth as a continuous inquiry into how attention, behavior, and relationships shape action. Taken together, these works argue that leaders who continually cultivate their inner selves can make more grounded decisions and respond with greater originality and steadiness amid competing demands.

A second, complementary group of books widens the horizon by examining how action taking and decision making are also shaped by shifting technological, economic, and organizational contexts. Robert E. Siegel, Sangeet Paul Choudary, and Vincent Cable illustrate how AI-driven coordination, ecosystem restructuring, and geopolitical change complicate familiar strategic moves and require leaders to interpret evolving patterns with sharper situational awareness. Their analyses call for leaders who can navigate contradictions, orchestrate networks, and revise choices as conditions shift. Stephen Witt and the team of Richard E. Thaler and Alex O. Imas deepen this perspective by revealing how cognitive biases, organizational heuristics, and long-term technological bets influence the quality of decisions in high-velocity contexts. These authors challenge leaders to question inherited assumptions, understand the architectures beneath emerging trends, and act with both discipline and flexibility. They also suggest that the year ahead will reward those who can combine reflective insight with more refined sensemaking as bases of bolder, better-timed decisions that sustain creativity despite uncertainty.

CREATIVE LEADERSHIP BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025

Robert E. Siegel, The Systems Leader: Mastering the Cross-Pressures That Make or Break Today’s Companies (Crown Currency)

Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer Robert E. Siegel brings decades of experience as venture capitalist, operator, and consultant to this examination of contemporary leadership contradictions. He identifies five critical dimensions where leaders today face seemingly irreconcilable pressures: execution versus innovation, strength versus empathy, internal versus external focus, local versus global thinking, and ambition versus statesmanship. Building on insights from leaders at varied organizations including Accenture, Mubadala, Wells Fargo, Kering, and Box, Siegel proposes systems leadership as a practice of reconciling pressures that often feel irreconcilable. His dimensions pose essential questions like, how execution can coexist with experimentation, or how empathy and authority can be projected simultaneously. The book likewise challenges leaders to examine whether their current approaches to influence, geography, and purpose remain fit for a world where conflicting pressures are permanent rather than episodic. Siegel’s call to develop a “holistic capability” to hold tensions productively without demanding simplistic either-or choices is both pragmatic and aspirational, offering a blueprint for cultivating creative leadership that thrives in contemporary complexity rather than becoming overwhelmed by it.

Vince Cable, Eclipsing the West: China, India and the Forging of a New World

(Manchester University Press)

Vince Cable, the development economist who served as the UK Secretary of State for Business after earlier leadership positions at Shell and the Commonwealth Secretariat, has written an exceptional data-driven analysis of the geopolitical shifts redefining global influence. His previous works on economic strategy and industrial policy, Money and Power (2021) and The Chinese Conundrum (2022), established a compelling narrative approach that blends long-term structural analysis with grounded political insight. Here, Cable investigates how China and India are creating a new economic and cultural order and whether Western leaders and institutions can adapt. His concept of “enlightened realism” offers an alternative to both naive engagement and reflexive containment, suggesting creative leadership must transcend ideological frameworks to understand fundamentally different approaches to development, technology deployment, and state-market relationships that will define the coming decades. As a result, the book pushes leaders to re-think their organizations’ assumptions about collaborative advantage, narrative power, and the capacity of leaders to engage plural worldviews rather than default to defensive strategic habits.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity is Overrated (and What to Do Instead)(Harvard Business Review Press)

Drawing on extensive research and corporate advisory work, the Columbia University and Universty College London business psychologist reframes authenticity as a potential constraint when leaders cling to fixed self-concepts. Chamorro-Premuzic, well-regarded for Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?(2019) and I, Human (2023), suggests that effective leadership requires ongoing and imaginative self-construction, grounded humility, a disciplined commitment to personal growth, and relational intelligence rather than the unfiltered self-expression and performative authenticity. In the process, he encourages questions about how identity is crafted, how confidence can coexist with doubt, and how leaders can invest in continuous reinvention without losing their integrity. Chamorro-Premuzic’s argument invites leaders to adapt, evolve, and calibrate behaviors based on disciplined self-awareness, aspirations, and situational requirements rather than always striving to express our “true selves.”

Ethan Kross, Shift: Managing Your Emotions – So They Don’t Manage You (Crown)

Ethan Kross, the University of Michigan psychologist whose bestseller Chatter (2021) transformed our understanding of inner dialogue, expands the conversation by exploring emotional regulation as a core practice of leadership. Challenging persistent myths about emotions, he moves beyong conventional approaches like constant confrontation and strategic avoidance to argue that emotions are information systems that can function like immune responses by alerting us to environmental conditions. Kross pushes creative leaders, in particular, to consider whether our emotional habits and regulatory tools widen or narrow our capacity for imaginative problem solving and better decision-making. His analysis urges reflection on how our micro-shifts in attention, language, and context can create significant changes in team culture and decision quality. The book also raises a central question for today’s uncertain environments: how can leaders cultivate a steadier internal climate while remaining fully engaged with the emotional realities of their organizations? The answer takes the form of four critical “shifting” domains – perspective reframing, attention redirection, relationship leveraging, and environmental reshaping – that serve as practical strategies for what Kross terms “emotional agility” in high-pressure creative environments where sustained performance demands sophisticated self-regulation.

Sangeet Paul Choudary, Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy(Independently published)

Platformation Labs founder and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business senior fellow Sangeet Paul Choudary, author of the bestselling Platform Revolution (2016, with Geoffrey G. Parker and Marshall W. Van Alstyne) and Platform Scale (2015), advances a counterintuitive thesis about the future of AI. Rather than focusing on automation or efficiency, he emphasizes AI’s power to reconfigure and enhance coordination, reshape value flows, and reposition actors across ecosystems. To do so, Choudary identifies four critical tensions: workers versus software tools, tool providers versus purchasing firms, consolidating businesses versus disrupted industries, and empowered individuals versus entrenched incumbents. For creative leaders, especially, this reorientation raises pressing questions: When AI enables “coordination without consensus,” do traditional leadership frameworks requiring alignment become obsolete? How should leaders today design roles, partnerships, and talent pipelines when the boundaries between tasks and knowledge domains are shifting? And, what new organizational forms emerge when knowledge work migrates from humans to systems? Choudary’s systems thinking approach, illustrated through examples from shipping containers to Formula One pit stops, suggests creative leadership must shift from managing people performing tasks to orchestrating complex adaptive systems where value creation increasingly depends on sophisticated coordination architectures rather than traditional hierarchical control.

Ranjay Gulati, How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage (Harper Business)

How do organizations cultivate collective courage rather than depending on heroic individuals? What conditions enable people to act decisively amid uncertainty without recklessness? By reframing courage as the ability to act constructively amid uncertainty, interpersonal tension, or reputational risk. Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati argues that boldness can be cultivated through deliberate habits and disciplined practice that strengthen conviction and reduce fear-driven decision making. His research encourages creative leaders to ask how our systems reward experimentation, how we personally respond to discomfort, and whether our cultures truly enable dissent. Like his earlier work, Deep Purpose (2022), the book offers practical reflections on aligning purpose with action, making it especially relevant to environments where creativity, innovation, and adaptability depend on leaders who model thoughtful risk taking. Ultimately, Gulati reveals that courageous people don’t eliminate fear but rather adopt thinking patterns that neutralize or moderate it, creating what he terms positive narratives that recast challenges as moral quests that inspire teams through connection and shared commitment rather than charisma or exhortation.

Margaret Heffernan, Embracing Uncertainty: How Writers, Musicians and Artists Thrive in an Unpredictable World (Policy Press)

Extending the argument of her previous work, Uncharted (2020), which portrayed uncertainty as inevitable rather than controllable, Margaret Heffernan examines how writers, musicians, and visual artists don’t merely tolerate ambiguity but actively run toward making the future with agency and freedom. The former BBC radio and television producer, and bestselling author of Willful Blindness (2011) argues that these artists’ relationships with uncertainty offer valuable lessons for all leaders. Her case studies illuminate habits of attention, collaboration, and resilience that challenge the managerial pursuit of predictability and efficiency. Heffernan suggests that uncertainty is not simply a constraint but a generative condition for creativity. Overall, the book appeals to leaders to reconsider how we structure time, design experiments, and engage with emergent possibilities. Heffernan also invites reflection on whether leaders genuinely cultivate the openness required for discovery or whether organizational routines (not to mention tech-enabled managerialism and algorithmic decision-making) silently reinforce control. Her insights challenge creative leaders to learn from artistic processes and methods that privilege curiosity and improvisation as essential sources of renewal in turbulent contexts.

Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore, The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact(Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore synthesize more than 15,000 studies into nine interconnected capacities: self-oriented capacities (conscious, authentic, agile), other-oriented approaches (relational, positive, compassionate), and system-oriented frameworks (shared, servant, transformational). Each capacity addresses essential questions: How do leaders develop the conscious awareness to see situations clearly, including their own biases? What distinguishes authentic care from performative empathy? How do leadership habits shape energy, attention, and relationships? With their evidence-based framework, which blends psychology, neuroscience, and systems thinking, the two cofounders of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School challenge conventional leadership development by demonstrating that effective leadership isn’t measured by the leader’s own performance but by how others perform under their guidance. For creative leaders navigating exponential change and ongoing uncertainty, the authors helpfully translate complex academic research into accessible self-coaching roadmaps, arguing that leadership can and should be learned and practiced like any discipline rather than treated as innate talent. The book positions humility, care, and accountability not as “nice to haves” but as essential competencies for unlocking employee potential and engagement in contemporary organizations and deepening impact in environments marked by rapid change and generative tensions.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (Avery)

The former Google executive turned neuroscientist, and founder of Ness Labs (which publishes a highly recommended weekly newsletter), challenges the linear pursuit of goals and proposes a circular vision of growth shaped through curiosity, iteration, and small, reversible tests. Le Cunff argues that life’s inherent non-linearity makes traditional four-year degrees, ten-year career plans, and thirty-year mortgages fundamentally mismatched to actual human development patterns. Her framework, grounded in ancestral philosophy and contemporary cognitive science, poses critical questions: Why do we expect happiness to arrive upon goal achievement when research demonstrates this “arrival fallacy” consistently disappoints? And, how might treating challenges as experiments rather than pass-fail tests transform both learning and innovation? Using scientific method principles, Le Cunff demonstrates that uncertainty can represent expanded possibility and metamorphic space rather than threat or deficit. For creative leaders, her work suggests replacing rigid planning with iterative experimentation, where “productive failure” becomes essential feedback rather than career liability. The growth model she proposes, where goals emerge through conversation with the larger world rather than predetermined isolation, offers practical strategies for navigating ambiguity while maintaining forward momentum in rapidly changing environments in which traditional planning horizons increasingly prove obsolete. Le Cunff underscores the potential of experimentation as a cultural practice that enhances resilience, fosters serendipity, and keeps creative ambition aligned with lived experience.

Richard H. Thaler and Alex O. Imas, The Winner’s Curse: Behavioral Anomalies – Then and Now(Simon & Schuster)

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler, a foundational figure in behavioral economics, joins University of Chicago economist Alex O. Imas to revisit and update earlier anomalies that challenged classical economic models. The authors extend insights from Thaler’s Misbehaving (2015) and Nudge (written with Cass Sunstein, 2009), as well as his original seminal 1990s Journal of Economic Perspectives “Anomalies” columns (written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky), by examining how new data and experimental approaches refine earlier theories of judgment and decision making. The eponymous “winner’s curse,” where auction victors systematically overpay, appears not just in oil lease bidding but in publishing acquisitions and professional football draft trades. For creative leaders, these phenomena raise unsettling questions: If even experts with sophisticated analytical resources fall prey to systematic biases like loss aversion and the endowment effect, what organizational safeguards become necessary? How do financial markets’ persistent inefficiencies (evidenced by meme stocks and cryptocurrency volatility) challenge assumptions about market rationality underlying strategic decisions? The book urges leaders to test how narratives of rationality obscure emotional, social, and contextual influences on behavior – and quietly if consistently distort strategic and creative decisions. Thaler and Imas also highlight how small design choices can produce disproportionate effects on team dynamics and innovation, prompting reflection on how leaders structure incentives, frame decisions, and cultivate awareness of cognitive patterns.

Stephen Witt, The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip(Viking)

The story of Nvidia’s ascent and the relentless drive behind CEO Jensen Huang becomes a study in how technical imagination, strategic persistence, and disciplined storytelling can reshape an entire computational era. What begins as the evolution of a niche graphics component becomes, for Stephen Witt, the journalist and author of How Music Got Free, a deeper inquiry into how leaders cultivate conviction and maintain clarity while navigating technological volatility. The narrative shows how long-horizon bets take root only when organizational cultures protect curiosity and sustain inventiveness across cycles of pressure and opportunity. It also traces the executional demands facing a firm positioned at the center of the global AI supply chain, illustrating how design choices, narrative framing, and ecosystem influence reinforce one another when ambition meets disciplined action. As the race for “the world’s most coveted microchip” intensifies, Witt’s account offers a series of concrete reflections on balancing innovation with operational rigor, managing global interdependencies, and steering teams through accelerating competitive dynamics. The takeaways for creative leaders of the resulting case study include interrogating how audacity and discipline coexist in their own decision making, how culture enables or constrains breakthrough performance, and how lessons from the microchip race might inform the next wave of innovation in their broader business ecosystems.

Two additional recommendations that specifically support building a creative leadership (and life) through better habits and journaling.

James Clear, The Atomic Habits Workbook: Simple Exercises to Building the Life You Want (Avery)

Based on Atomic Habits, his 25-million copy bestseller from 2018, James Clear offers a structured workbook designed to transform theory into practice. Clear’s method emphasizes the cumulative impact of small behavioral adjustments, supported by reflective prompts and environmental design strategies. The workbook encourages leaders to examine how their habits shape attention, energy, and creative output. It raises practical questions about which routines reinforce adaptive thinking and which silently constrain innovation. For creative leaders balancing competing demands, the exercises offer a disciplined yet approachable way to experiment with new behaviors, reinforce identity shifts, and embed learning in daily life. Clear’s latest contribution strengthens the link between habit formation and long-term creative capacity, underscoring that sustained leadership development emerges from repeated, intentional practice.

Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life (Random House)

Writer and artist Suleika Jaouad, known for Between Two Kingdoms (2021), offers a reflective and tactile guide to creative renewal. Blending memoir, artistic exercises, and philosophical insight, she presents creativity as a lifelong process of transmutation shaped by vulnerability, ritual, and embodied attention. Jaouad prompts and inspires leaders to reconsider how they relate to uncertainty, rest, and the emotional textures of daily practice. Her reflections challenge productivity-driven cultures by asking how individuals can create space for intuition and imaginative depth. The book empowers creative leaders to explore how personal storytelling, sensory engagement, and slow observation can reawaken meaning and replenish depleted reserves of energy. Jaouad’s contribution is both poetic and practical, offering a path for leaders seeking greater resilience and imaginative grounding in turbulent times.

Popular discourse surrounding leadership has become thoroughly mediated by digital platforms, social media, and AI. More than a decade ago, Harvard Kennedy School researcher Barbara Kellerman criticized the “leadership industry” – a nexus of management consultancies, business schools, publishers, and thought leaders – for manufacturing consensus, if not conformity, around circumscribed leadership ideas that are engaging but often superficial (2012). Today, that consensus is reinforced through the continuous circulation of certain ideas through social media algorithms, streaming platforms, and podcasts that saturate popular consciousness. Personal branding, marketability, and commodifiable tools are prioritized in these media over rigorous analysis, substantive exchanges, and nuanced perspectives.

As a result, consolidating the structures, incentives, and dynamics of predominant institutions and media platforms, popular discourse shaped by the contemporary mediascape constrain leadership thinking into narrow, shallow, and repetitive forms. The hard work of leading and developing leaders in the real world is displaced by generic frameworks, pithy slogans, and folk theories of leadership. Aspiring leaders are inundated with content but deprived of depth and context, left unable to find specific, evidence-based solutions to their own challenges and the messy realities of leadership. Progress is assumed as inevitable in today’s technology-driven media landscape, yet that landscape may actually be regressing leadership discourse.

More specifically, the regression is to the idea of an “average leader” constructed both by an ongoing celebration of exceptional, high-performing leaders and entrepreneurs and by a largely consensual vision of what good and effective leadership development “should” look like. The average leader thus emerges through triangulation: she is neither a larger-than-life senior executive nor young but precociously accomplished leader, nor does she practice the gamut of personal and professional improvement activities constantly being promoted; she therefore consequently occupies, with the majority of readers or viewers occupy, an aspirational middle ground. The continual consumption of others’ success stories and of self-improvement models, recommendations, and hacks drives a quest for continuous self-improvement, fed by concerns of personal and professional inadequacy and averageness.

By applying a critical lens at the intersection of the leadership industry, management research, and media ecology, we can illuminate how the contemporary media environment produces this more homogenous and potentially restrictive view of leadership while too often excluding alternative perspectives. We can also draw upon critiques of media structures and cultures, connecting historical arguments to present-day algorithms, virality, and always-on content. Ultimately, we can call for more systemic, creative, adaptive, heterogeneous, and deep-thinking approaches to leadership practice and development.

Leadership Entertainment

My premise here is that the field of leadership development should be continually shaped and driven by multiple viewpoints, critical discourse, and emergent thinking. The field of leadership discourse, that is, should be more adaptive, interactive, and rough-edged. Yet the institutional arrangements and incentives of the contemporary leadership industry, as currently structured, dictate a much narrower purpose than supporting the open exchange of ideas and advancement of practices that are fit for purpose. Many of the major players – whether business schools, consultancies, or individual gurus – are driven to deliver the excitement, emotional uplift, and good feelings expected in training programs by their clientele.

As Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer observes bluntly, “the leadership industry has clearly been better at providing heroes, myths, stories, and inspiration than it has been at making workplaces better or leaders last longer in their jobs” (2015: 48) This means sustaining a market for generic yet enticing leadership lessons, frameworks, and credentials that can be bought and sold at scale.

While the industry has long been restrictive of voices and ideas, an underlying assumption here is that the purpose of the media that circulate that leadership content cannot be separated from the content itself. The current media landscape, in other words, deepens the challenges Kellerman and Pfeffer identified around leadership discourse in the past. Such dynamics of media were likewise cogently elucidated decades ago, by media theorist Neil Postman. Writing about television in Amusing Ourselves to Death, he observed that, “the problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining” (1985: 87).

Today, social media algorithms, virality metrics, and engagement-driven business models all conspire to flatten leadership into soundbytes, slogans, and simplified stories. While this content may be readily accessible, emotionally resonant, and useful for personal brand building, it often fails to wrestle with the real complexities and challenges of leadership.

A more open culture of leadership development would resist these homogenizing forces. It would foster debate, nuance, and a diversity of perspectives and experiences. But when major institutions control the production and distribution of leadership thinking in service of their own agendas, we get manufactured consensus instead. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have revolutionized how leadership ideas are disseminated and consumed. These platforms enable thought leaders, influencers, and institutions to reach vast audiences, but, in doing so, they also constrain the conversation in significant ways, both abbreviating ideas into soundbites and often reducing their content into formulas.

The repetition of certain leadership ideas and frameworks across the platforms enable what psychologists call “illusory truth effects” (Fazio et al., 2015). These effects are dangerous in that they can breed a false sense of their universal validity, largely excluding alternative viewpoints and shaping a homogenous vision of leadership and, with it, the deficits of the many leaders who consume that vision and, as a result, are left by popular leadership discourse feeling average.

This mediated consensus inevitably excludes many more challenging, systemically-oriented, and potentially contradictory approaches to understanding leadership. For example, the consensus leaves little room for exploring how leadership is shaped by cultural and structural inequalities, and how developing truly inclusive leadership cultures requires developing contextual intelligence – the ability to understand and adapt our knowledge across the social, cultural and situational dynamics of different specific contexts – and reckoning consistently with these deeper dynamics.

The mediated consensus also largely sidelines frameworks that emphasize how leadership is embedded in complex systems rather than resting in heroic individuals (or, occasionally, teams and organizations). It lacks incentives for sustaining long-term leadership development programs that go beyond short-term skills training or intensive learning experiences. And it often avoids grappling with the darker and contradictory sides of leadership and the less flattering aspects of human nature that can drive leader and follower behaviors toward less productive, even destructive outcomes.

Leadership as Performance in Simplified Struggles

The flattening and homogenization of popular leadership discourse can be directly traced to the incentive structures and technical features of today’s media platforms. Whether it’s short-form content on Twitter/X, TED-style talks on YouTube, or sound-byte driven cable news interviews, the media environment relentlessly abstracts and simplifies. Complex ideas typically need to be compressed into immediately comprehensible and share-worthy chunks, while whole schools of thought are reduced to hashtags. Worse, the most persistent and energetic voices, be they likable or unlikable, tend to win readers’ and viewers’ attention over those offering depth and specificity.

Again, similar dynamics were presciently critiqued in the era of broadcast television. Postman warned of the intellectual expectations instilled by television as a medium: “The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable,” Postman wrote, “that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, technique, and chemistry.” He then crucially added that, “the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes time and invites argument” (1985: 130-131).

Today, amid influencer culture and algorithm-driven media, we can make a similar claim about leadership content. Simplified slogans, self-affirming models, and personal branding tropes create a caricature of successful leadership while avoiding or glossing over many contested questions of organizational and interpersonal dynamics. The result for many leaders engaging this content quickly is something of an aspirational hamster wheel: besides ongoing consumption of leadership content, many commit to ever greater efforts to act on the continual stream of tips and recommendations in pursuit of personal and professional improvement.

In the television age, Postman went on, “It is in the nature of the medium that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest; that is to say, to accommodate the values of show business” (1985: 92). With today’s social media, the media have shifted but the effects have only intensified. Complex notions of politics and power in organizations are reduced to matters of individual charisma and resilience. The rich contextual challenges of culture change and systems design are flattened into linear, step-by-step playbooks, listicles, and canvases. The “visual interest” of television has been supercharged by the brain-stimulating appeal of likes, shares, and comments, creating feedback loops that reward simplicity, speed, and emotional resonance.

Influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk have cultivated large followings by blending leadership advice with personal branding. This turns leadership into a form of aspirational performance, where calls for reflexive storytelling, facile self-understanding, and generic relatability often overshadow substance, at least actionable substance. “As a whole the leadership industry is self-satisfied, self-perpetuating and poorly policed,” Harvard’s Kellerman observes (2012: 169). Without agreed-upon standards or safeguards, longtime and well-resourced institutional players and imaginative individual operators have grown to exploit social media’s emphasis on memorable personalities and well-turned aperçus over critical thought or evidence-based discussions.

These media effects don’t just shape content: they shape people’s expectations, thinking, and mental models. Over time, shallow discourses of leadership come to be taken for granted precisely because they are so pervasively promoted. Like the pseudo-contexts of commercial advertising described by Postman, leadership content today often presents plausible images of success, effectiveness, and happiness without accounting for real-world consequences and constraints. Leaders can bask in the affirming glow of a pioneering entrepreneur’s success story or a well-crafted LinkedIn post that succinctly explains overcoming a problematic personal tendency, all while avoiding themselves the hard work of habit change or culture transformation or the acknowledgment of human complexities and contradictions.

In many ways, the leadership development industry’s response to the incentives of new media mirrors concerns about the internet’s wider impact on human cognition. Just as Nicholas Carr argued a decade ago that online interfaces prioritizing efficiency and limitless access can diminish our capacity for deep contemplation and synthesis, the “shiny object syndrome” of bite-sized leadership content optimized for virality and performative self-improvement can crowd out substantive skill-building and sustainable reflective learning. Constantly toggling between notifications, snippets, and simplifications, we risk losing sight of the integrative perspectives and adaptive behaviors required for leading people and complex systems effectively and meaningfully over time.

The repetition of soundbites and slogans across media platforms has long been understood by communication scholars as a means to entrench this shallowness (Dowling & Kabanoff, 1996). By presenting the same reductive framings again and again, the leadership development industry leverages a cognitive bias that equates familiarity with truthfulness and importance — and contributes, in many instances, to marketing and selling products and services based in those ideas. Nuance and critique, by contrast, face an uphill battle to break through the cacophony. Leadership concepts that fit into bite-sized formats thrive, while complex or critical ideas often struggle to gain traction. Even if we pause to question the validity or relevance of the steady stream of iterations of the same ideas, that ephemeral self-consciousness tends not to progress into ongoing self-reflection amidst the never-ending slurry of posts and presentations.

Leadership Development Heroes and Personalized Bubble Brands

Paralleling the simplifications of leadership discourse across new media has been a proliferation of more targeted platforms and productions promising deeper and more sustained engagement. From long-form podcasts to premium streaming subscriptions to exclusive instructional channels, there is no shortage of “thought leaders” (often self-proclaimed) who have built personal brands around their particular takes on management and leadership. Again, the nature of the media on which they rely is important here: spoken-word audio – traditionally, on radio, and currently, in podcasts and other digital forms – can build on the persuasiveness and emotions of the human voice to foster a sense of authority and to create a sense of intimacy and trust between listener and host or narrator.

On the surface, some of these approaches seem to resist the dynamics of shallowness and fragmentation. Well-known leadership advisers and coaches offer original interviews and commentaries that make clear over time their own positions and priorities. Business school professors and management consultants hold forth in audio series and subscriber-only learning cohorts. Aspiring leaders can increasingly immerse themselves in the works and worldviews of their chosen leadership development guides in hopes of moving beyond the ranks of the average.

Such self-selection into content tends to have the result of reinforcing current or prior thinking and risks a confirmation bias of the leadership and leadership development ideas being considered. Critical engagement with outside perspectives often falls by the wayside in the pursuit of promoting a consistent vision of leadership – and the personal brand of the thought leader.

In other words, even ostensibly deeper dives like podcasts can exist within carefully constructed filter bubbles. With strong incentives to build a loyal base or community of followers, leadership influencers frequently preach to their own choirs, exclude divergent ideas and inconvenient contradictions, and repeat their analyses, commentaries, and stories about current events and past events or examples across multiple channels and outlets in an effort to scale their brands. Many leadership influencers share their ideas across a circuit of interview and podcast shows, publicizing books or otherwise consistently positioning themselves in reinforcing conversations with their guest-host peers.

Even more, the podcast format and business model allows many leadership voices to form collaborations with brands, picking up on an increasing general marketing and cultural phenomenon. Consider the Wicked-inspired clothing lines with the Gap, H&M, Bloomingdale’s and Forever 21, Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami’s two-decade long partnership, and the larger trend it represents, of artists collaborating with fashion brands (Degen, 2024). In podcasting, sponsored segments, product integrations, co-created content, and cross-promotions are among the many comparable opportunities for leaders, influencers, and other wannabe gurus to monetize productions centered around thought leadership.

Power, both interpersonal and institutional, is an illustrative if particularly fraught topic within these brand-driven leadership bubbles. Difficult questions around how formal authority is allocated and exercised, how decisions get made and implemented, and how dissent and debate are handled within organizations are often unexplored (or, at least, under-explored). Still more difficult (and less explored) are potential connections between the power of leadership in the business sector and that of the geopolitical realm.

After all, reckoning honestly with the irrational and self-interested aspects of human behavior is not always great for building an inspirational narrative or a devoted following. As Pfeffer, the Stanford professor and longtime researcher of power, concludes, “the leadership industry rolls along, profiting from the disconnect between its prescriptions and what gets done, a disconnection that means not only problems remain but also the business opportunities from speaking, blogging, and so forth about those problems” (2015: 219).

Ultimately, even seemingly in-depth leadership content can land audiences of leaders aspiring to improve themselves in the same simplistic place when it is driven by the imperatives of brand-building, niche formation, and audience building and maintenance. Inconvenient discussions around power, hierarchies, incentives, and politics within organizations are sidelined, as are critical comparisons to the corresponding impacts of other leadership schools of thought and experiences.

What remains are ecosystems of ideas curated to reinforce the positions and propositions of their particular influencers and institutions. While reassuring for believers, or acceptable to those without the time or inclination to examine ideas further, these leadership development heroes and their content bubbles leave little room for the critical discourse and synthesis of competing perspectives that are necessary for real progress and learning to be achieved, alternative ideas to be advanced, and, often, substantive leadership to be exercised in actual conditions.

Mediating Consensus on Leadership Development

Across these many media and the institutions that supply them with content, certain messages and priorities inevitably circulate recurrently. Through the dynamics of virality and algorithmic amplification, these patterns congeal into an implicit consensus about what leaders today should focus on and how leadership development should be approached. Like any pattern or consensus, the boundaries both focus on some ideas, individuals, and institutions and exclude others. The torrent of content across social media platforms rewards volume, engagement, and visibility, regardless of the substance or specifics.

So what does this constructed consensus look like? At the broadest level, it tends to center around a fairly generic set of priorities: fuller self-understanding, vision-setting, motivating people, driving innovation, embracing uncertainty, managing change. Sometimes these are repackaged with new buzzwords or trademarked frameworks, but the underlying concepts and recurrent hashtags are often quite similar. What’s more, they are frequently presented as timeless truths and universal best practices, illustrated by micro-cases and anecdotes, and untethered from the messy realities of competing contexts and different cultures.

Within this general narrative, certain messages about organizational design and culture are also elevated. The notion of “empathy” – understanding and sharing the feelings of others – is one example that has achieved prominence across leadership development platforms in recent years. It’s not hard to see why: empathy is an admirable human quality that speaks to both the relational and emotional dimensions of leadership. Influential voices like Brené Brown have built enormous followings by preaching the power of empathy and compassion on social media, and in books, TED Talks, and corporate speaking circuits. Yet many such discussions, both of empathy for oneself and others, can easily lose their fuller meaning in the over- or broad-stroke application to leadership.

However, as with many leadership buzzwords that gain widespread popularity, the buzz around empathy in management often overshadows deeper discussions about its real-world applications and limitations. The buzz also often ignores the science and evidence from research on empathy in other fields, such as neuroscience (Reiss 2017). Is empathy equally important at all levels and in all functions of an organization? And across different professional and cultural contexts? How can it be reliably developed and sustained in high-pressure, high-stakes environments? When might the emotional labor of empathy lead to burnout and compassion fatigue?

While deeper dives into empathy, by Brown and others, can necessarily and helpfully extend the purview and relevance of the topic to wider contexts of leadership, the ceaseless memes and postings in everyday social media circulation remain largely superficial. They invite complex questions often left unanswered by thought leaders in their personalized explanations, moving narratives, and well-packaged frameworks that travel farthest and fastest through media spaces.

Similarly, concepts like Emotional Intelligence, growth (and other) mindsets, and remote and hybrid work, and principles like authenticity, customer focus, and continuous improvement have become mainstays of leadership development discourse. They, too, are valuable ideas that can all too easily devolve into generic content when stripped of context and nuance.

Do these ideas mean the same thing to diverse individual leaders? Or to leaders at every level of an organization? Or at every stage in an organization’s life cycle? Are they equally applicable across national and industry contexts? What is the actual evidence of their impact over time? Again, these thorny questions are often sidelined by the pithy inspirational stories that get the most likes and shares by leaders aspiring to become more than average.

Repeating Romanticized Stories and Scripts

Management researcher James Meindl’s seminal writings on the “romance of leadership” characterized leadership as a social construction where followers attribute organizational outcomes disproportionately to leaders’ unique personal attributes and actions rather than contextual or systemic factors (1985, 1995). This romanticization has been amplified exponentially by social media platforms, where algorithmic amplification and engagement metrics privilege dramatic narratives of visionary tech founders, charismatic CEOs, and entrepreneurial heroes.

Meindl was astute in arguing that it is easier and more romantically appealing to believe that visionary individuals, from Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk, can single-handedly drive organizational success than to fully appreciate the complex contexts in which they operate. This is a dynamic that social media’s preference for simplified, personality-driven content has only intensified.

The dominance of meme-friendly leadership content and viral soundbites on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and Instagram marginalizes more nuanced portrayals of organizational leadership. Lost in the endless stream of inspirational quotes and day-in-the-life posts from self-branded founders, funders, and would-be leadership guides are the critical but less sensational aspects of leadership that Meindl identified: the patient building of team and other stakeholder relationships, the navigation of competing organizational priorities, and the often unglamorous work of maintaining organizational stability, competitiveness, and employee wellbeing.

To his list we might well add the development of patience, tolerance, endurance, and adaptability. This algorithmic privileging of romanticized leadership narratives risks perpetuating a kind of “individual leader attribution error” in which we exaggerate the impact of individual leadership and at the same time neglect or minimize other equally important determinants of organizational outcomes.

This latter dynamic might help to explain the enduring popularity of “great man” (or, still much less often, “great woman”) archetypes, charismatic quotations, heroic anecdotes, and inspiring mini-cases in social media leadership discourse. Largely absent from this discourse are depictions of leadership that emphasize the unglamorous, day-to-day work of leadership in navigating complex systems and stakeholder relationships in what management researcher Jean-Louis Denis and his colleagues called “the messy world of organizations” characterized by “ambiguous authority relationships” (2010).

All told, stories and scripts of leadership on social media thus provide a kind of currency for the quick and frictionless exchange of clearcut leadership ideas and impressions well-suited to an attention economy. Leadership narratives that align with these romanticized individualized ideas both accord with and reinforce popular norms and expectations, and are thereby more likely to be shared, liked, and elevated in algorithm-driven online spaces – even as they risk perpetuating an overly simplistic view of the complex realities of actual situated leadership practice.

Given that certain leadership development messages are consistently amplified, it’s unavoidable that the current media ecosystem manufactures a kind of consensus (or at least a de facto prioritization of a bounded set of ideas and individuals). It is a consensus built through content promotion incentives, information overload, and the energy and originality of those delivering the messages and appealing to people’s desire for clarity and self-actualization amid so much noise and busyness. It is also a consensus built on the lack of deep and substantive conversations or debates about specific leadership values, behaviors, or “solutions.” These are often crowded out by a surfeit of continuous posting, sharing, and promotion of epigrams, wise sayings, and simple models. In the process, these social media dynamics breed a certain conformity of thinking, a narrowing of the boundaries of what leadership could be and become.

For example, and to reiterate, many prevailing narratives and singular figures downplay dynamics of power and the complexities of organizational systems. The current media environment’s emphasis on individual charisma, decisiveness, strength, purpose, and the ability to motivate others with a vision and purpose performance feeds a cycle of repetitive, ephemeral, and easily digestible content. Yet that limiting of both the voices and the ideas they express serves the leadership development industry’s emphasis on promoting at scale a small set of marketable, modularized, readily deliverable ideas that, again, are appealing to individual leaders aspiring to improve themselves. More systemic perspectives, long-term developmental opportunities, and situated, contextual solutions may appear but, if so, typically secondarily.

What’s more, the circumscription of leadership thinking to a relatively narrow range of human virtues and aspirational individual traits may reflect a willful blindness to the actual desires and incentives that shape human behavior in organizations. As the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber provocatively argued in The Utopia of Rules (2015), perhaps the real utopia imagined by many people is not the absence of structures and rules but rather a world where everyone knows exactly what the rules are, and knows that the rules are fair, because they actually appear to make sense. Extended to the leadership development industry, the focus on heroic figures (leaders themselves, as well as the leadership gurus), clear codes of behavior, and universalist principles may therefore be not only a function of media dynamics but also an act of projection of what we wish were true of human nature.

The repetition of idealized leadership archetypes and frameworks across various media can further reinforce this collective and wishful attribution of truth. As psychologists have studied, the leveraging of a “repetition effect” or a “truth effect” can powerfully shape perceptions and perspectives (Unkelbach, 2007). By presenting aspirational leadership behaviors and traits again and again, the leadership development industry taps into the cognitive bias that familiar information is more likely to be accepted as true. Deviations from these well-worn scripts, no matter how grounded in reality, face a steeper climb to credibility and acceptance.

Less a Marketplace of Ideas, More the Marketing of Ideologies and Services

Embedded in the contemporary, thoroughly mediated discourses of leadership development is a pervasive assumption of the inevitability of technological progress. Digital media platforms are credited with democratizing access to information and enabling the “wisdom of crowds” to elevate the best ideas. Online course marketplaces and credential providers are celebrated for expanding opportunities for skill-building and career advancement at scale. Social media influencers in the management and leadership space are seen as scrappy upstarts disrupting the staid institutions of old.

However, my contention here is that this narrative of progress contains a major blind spot. The specific ways in which these technologies are structured and monetized – from engagement-maximizing algorithms to the incentives for personal brand building – are not neutral. They shape both the production and consumption of leadership development content in ways that tend towards simplification, individualization, and the illusion of consensus around problems to be addressed and approaches to be adopted. Moreover, these ideas then become the basis for pursuing and often contracting specific leadership development, advisement, and coaching services.

Rather than a vibrant marketplace of ideas, we have a landscape where the marketing of ideologies and services is amplified, even if they are shallow or ignore critical dynamics of context. Far from the wisdom of crowds, it threatens to crowd out a broader wisdom in favor of hype cycles and false binaries. If “entertainment” was the “supra-ideology of all discourse on television” for Postman in the 1980s (1985: 87), the corresponding supra-ideology of today’s social media landscape may be a fusion of branded performance, incessant engagement, and self-commodification. Virality, shareability, and recognizability become the main arbiters of value, privileging content that provokes and persuades and appears readily applicable over that which acknowledges nuance and uncertainty and longer-term development.

None of this is to say that the technologies and media that have reshaped leadership development in recent years are inherently or comprehensively bad or unhelpful. Nor is it to suggest that those individuals who leverage the technologies and media do not believe in the ideas and values they espouse or have intentions other than to help leaders and organizations to flourish. Indeed, employing these technologies, many of these individuals have created expansive and recurring opportunities for learning and connection that were previously inaccessible to many. The problem is more in our taking the underlying media dynamics for granted and in our assuming that they automatically surface and support the most robust ideas and relevant solutions simply because they can reach the largest audiences.

Moving forward, leadership discourse and education should develop a much more critical and reflexive stance towards the communication dynamics and incentive structures of the platforms they now rely upon to develop and disseminate ideas and promote activities. What would it look like to create media ecosystems, learning environments, and institutions that incentivize more integrative and collaborative thinking across disparate voices, traditions, and frameworks? How might we combine the reach of new technologies with a renewed emphasis on the craft of situated leadership, one grounded in the messy realities of human, relational, and political dynamics in teams, organizations, and communities?

Ultimately, by illuminating the distortions and constraints imposed by the current and inescapably mediated leadership development industry, the hope is to point the way towards realizing a more expansive vision of leadership thinking and practice. Not leadership as a set of slogans and personal brands that feed homogenized aspirations of consumers, but leadership as a mode of sensemaking and acting in complex and emerging social systems. Not leadership as a mediated consensus or conformity perpetuating the powers that be and the feelings of averageness or inadequacy of its consumers, but leadership as a profoundly context-dependent and emergent phenomenon, always assembled by actual, collaborative leaders from the ground up.

References

Nicholas Carr (2010) The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, W.W. Norton & Company.

Natasha Degen (2024) “The Marketing Hurricane of ‘Wicked’ Says a Lot About Our Culture,” The New York Times, Dec. 14, 2024; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/14/opinion/wicked-marketing-collaboration-culture.html

Jean-Louis Denis, Ann Langley, and Linda Rouleau (2010) “The Practice of Leadership in the Messy World of Organizations,” Leadership, 6(1), 67–88; https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715009354233

Grahame R. Dowling and Boris Kabanoff (1996) “Computer-Aided Content Analysis: What Do 240 Advertising Slogans Have in Common?” Marketing Letters, 7(1), 63-75; https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00557312

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

David Graeber (2015) The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Melville House.

Barbara Kellerman (2012) The End of Leadership, Harper Business.

James R. Meindl, Sanford B. Ehrlich, and Janet M. Dukerich (1985) “The Romance of Leadership,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1), 78-102; http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2392813

James R. Meindl (1995) “The Romance of Leadership as a Follower-centric Theory: A Social Constructionist Approach,” The Leadership Quarterly, 6(3), 329-341; https://doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(95)90012-8

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

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

Helen Riess (2017) “The Science of Empathy,” Journal of Patient Experience, 4(2), 74-77; https://doi.org/10.1177/2374373517699267

Christian Unkelbach (2007) “Reversing the Truth Effect: Learning the Interpretation of Processing Fluency in Judgments of Truth,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(1), 219-230;https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.33.1.219

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, frameworks, or approaches – including what creativity, innovation, and leadership mean for individuals, teams, organizations, markets, and business today.

This practice differs fundamentally from the creative leadership that predominated since at least the early 1970s. Whereas that earlier set of practices often relied on charismatic individuals and standardized (indeed, often proprietary and marketed) innovation frameworks within organizations, today’s approach recognizes a host of limitations exposed by cultural analysts’ critiques, creeping industry obsolescence, and what I’ve referred to elsewhere as the historical “rise and fall of creative leadership” (Slocum, 2025).

These limitations include creative leadership’s assimilation by entrepreneurs (and their funders), its institutionalization by the Leadership-Industrial Complex, its homogenization on popular digital and social media platforms, its reduction to a regimen of marketable, even commodifiable activities, and its growing disconnect from many of the realities of digital, data-driven, platform-based, and algorithmic capitalism. Creative leadership today emerges from this multifaceted reckoning, informed by both the aspirational potential and the documented shortcomings of its recent incarnations.

Learning as the Core and Driver of Creative Leadership

At its foundation, today’s creative leadership builds on organizational learning pioneers Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s double-loop learning model, where leaders not only act with given tools or methods, however original or imaginative, to solve problems, seize opportunities, and drive innovations (identified in the single loop) but also interrogate and adapt the deeper assumptions, goals, and beliefs that shape those tools, outcomes, relationships, and actions (the focus of the second loop) (Argyris, 2005).

What distinguishes creative leadership now, however, is that it increasingly demands even more than this dual engagement. Creativity becomes essential not merely in executing actions or questioning assumptions but in navigating the increasingly complex learning required when the very frameworks through which we understand creativity, innovation, and leadership collide. Such multi-layered learning marks a crucial shift in how leadership must operate in today’s complex and fast-changing world, where creative capacity itself enables leaders to work across and through incompatible demands.

Consider ideas, models, tools, and methods like psychological safety, design thinking, cross-functional teams, digital whiteboarding platforms like Miro, agile methodologies, and dedicated innovation time. All were once breakthrough approaches that challenged conventional management wisdom. Today, these concepts and approaches populate business school curricula, guide corporate training programs, proliferate in online management posts, and help to shape the workflows of creative organizations worldwide. While many teams deploy them productively to foster genuine collaboration and breakthrough thinking, others apply them formulaically, transforming dynamic practices into rigid processes that can actually inhibit the very creativity they were designed to unleash.

The challenge for contemporary creative leaders therefore lies not in the implementation itself, however imaginative, of widely recognized and adopted creativity or innovation frameworks. Instead, the opportunity rests in continuously interrogating the local applicability and relevance of such frameworks, adapting them to specific contexts, and developing hybrid or alternative approaches that transcend their original limitations. In so doing, creative leadership treats even established creative methodologies as raw material for further innovation.

Contrary to the restrictiveness of previous commercial, policy-making, and academic formulations, and particularly around the work and leadership of cultural and creative industries, creative leadership today transcends traditional boundaries of title, discipline, or domain. It can be exercised by individuals, teams, or organizational collectives who envision new possibilities, reframe problems, make decisions, motivate others, and drive purposeful action. In doing so, creative leaders challenge the inherited boundaries between leadership, management, and entrepreneurship, blending the particulars of these pursuits into a flexible, practice-based approach to navigating uncertainty. Whether in operations, finance, culture, customer engagement, or strategy, creative leadership is now relevant across every function and every level of the value chain in every industry and marketplace.

This practice, however, is marked by a profound paradox: the creative leader must not only generate new opportunities, solutions, and innovations, but must also create new approaches to driving those innovations and solutions and formulate original understandings of creativity and leadership themselves. At a time when many creative tools and methods have become standardized, replicable, and even automated through digital and data-driven platformization and AI, what counts as creativity or innovation should itself being questioned.

Put differently, today’s effective creative leader can no longer rely solely on inherited frameworks or standards, again however ingeniously they may be deployed. Rather, leaders must develop context-specific methods of creative action and continually reassess and re-envision how creativity functions and even what it means in their team, organization, or ecosystem.

Leaders respond to this paradox in varied ways. Some become architects of their own creative theories, naming, refining, and evolving the mindsets, frameworks, and approaches they use. Others focus on the immediacy of leading, relying on intuition, improvisation, and instinct, leaving the articulation of their creative process to reflection, collaboration, or future analysis (or to others altogether). Both these approaches to reflexive understanding and positioning of leaders’ and their teams’ or organizations’ own activities and impacts can deliver value and both contribute to the living evolution of creative leadership knowledge and practice.

Yet the ways that storytelling and meaning-making capture and communicate this knowledge and practice vary for different leaders and in different situations. Their sundry approaches to recognizing and navigating the paradox point toward a fundamental reorientation in how we understand creative leadership itself.

The broader (re-)orientation outlined here demands flexibility not just in tactics but in worldview. Creative leadership today is protean and situational, not formulaic or universal. Just as contemporary artists question the role of art in society while producing individual works and responding to individual commissions, so too must creative leaders question prevailing models of organizational authority, value creation, and collaboration when responding to specific briefs and situations.

What worked yesterday might fail tomorrow, not because the method was wrong but because the terrain has shifted and people have evolved. As such, creative leaders must cultivate a repertoire of approaches and a judgment refined by experimentation, reflection, and sensitivity to context and other interpersonal, organizational, and business components. These conceptual dimensions become concrete in contemporary practice.

From Paradox to Triple-Loop Learning Practice

David Droga’s transformation of strategic marketing through Accenture Song demonstrates learning across both the first and second loops: deploying established creative methodologies while redefining what agency-client (and consulting) relationships can become in a data-driven economy. Satya Nadella’s cultural revolution at Microsoft shows how leaders learn double-loop capabilities through deliberate practice: he cultivated the capacity to question Microsoft’s identity by engaging diverse perspectives, experimenting with failure, and creating spaces for organizational unlearning before relearning could occur.

Virgil Abloh’s work across Off-White and Louis Vuitton challenged traditional boundaries between streetwear and luxury, while constantly interrogating the very concepts of authenticity and cultural appropriation in fashion. Similarly, creators in the creator economy like Emma Chamberlain or MrBeast don’t simply master existing platform algorithms (single loop learning) but actively reshape the definitions of entertainment, authenticity, and audience engagement (double loop learning), creating new frameworks that other creators then adapt and evolve.

The reinvention evident in these examples illuminates what some subsequent analysts identify as the foundation for “triple-loop learning,” which has remained an ambiguously formulated “deeper,” recursive, and metaphorical level of learning that potentially extends leadership beyond the dimensions of doing and thinking to that of the governing variables of situations and systems (Tosey, et al, 2011). This ongoing leadership work of reflecting on and reshaping systems alongside interpersonal and organizational interactions represents a natural extension of Argyris’s double-loop learning and remains essential to the creative leadership that I’m proposing here is built upon it.

Yet the effort to understand “deeper” learning should not devolve into a fixation on individual emotional or intuitive development that occurs at the expense of nuanced engagement with external contexts and the fostering of creative conditions. Nor can it swing simply toward an emphasis on future studies, strategic foresight, or technological transformations that diminishes the importance of individuals and human groups in favor of systemic change.

Instead, creative leadership today embraces what might be seen as a troika of micro-, macro-, and meta-level concerns, integrating personal development with organizational or other associational and interpersonal transformation and broader systemic awareness and change. This inclusive formulation points toward the need fo deeper learning, but existing conceptualizations of triple-loop learning remain insufficiently developed to address fully the systemic collisions and framework contradictions creative leaders actually face.

Such a more productive understanding of a third loop could address what prior approaches largely miss. Where previous theoretical formulations (like Tosey, et al.) focused on purpose and values, and where the double-loop framework, powerful as it remains, addresses assumptions largely within organizational or market bounds, a third learning loop should confront macro-environmental transformations that generate what anthropologist and social scientist Gregory Bateson termed “systematic contradictions in experience.” A productive third loop consequently should emerge not merely from further introspection about individual or organizational purpose or values but from learning prompted by often irresolvable individual or group conflicts between incompatible contextual demands.

Where double-loop learning questions assumptions within a coherent (technical, institutional, human relational, business, leadership) framework that can be clarified or corrected, third-loop learning develops a capacity for leaders to operate when systems collide and frameworks contradict one another and compete.

This distinction matters because global creative leaders increasingly face polycontextual environments where Chinese relational harmony, Western individual merit, European rulemaking, Gulf hierarchical deference, and AI-driven algorithmic logic make mutually exclusive demands simultaneously. The third loop addresses not only better problem-solving within given contexts but what Bateson called the “reorganization of character,” the transformation of the learner’s (and, here, the leader’s) own identity when navigating contextual incoherence that cannot be resolved through improved assumptions alone (Bateson, 2000).

In other words, where the second loop refines how creative leaders think and act, the third loop transforms who they become as they lead through paradigmatic instability. Creativity here becomes the capacity to generate novel responses to irreducible collisions and contradictions, including the transformation the leaders themselves, rather than the production of elegant solutions to soluble problems.

It is important to clarify that these three loops operate as interdependent dimensions of learning rather than hierarchical stages. Third-loop reflection on macro-environmental or systemic collisions both depends upon and potentially reshapes first-loop functional operations and second-loop assumptions. The relationship is genuinely cross-directional: systemic differences recognized in the third loop are both informed by functional specifics and business or operating model assumptions from the first and second loops and simultaneously shape how those operational and strategic dimensions develop differently across contexts.

Recognizing systemic differences in how Chinese versus Western contexts approach AI development, for instance, requires understanding specific technical and funding practices (first loop), business model assumptions about open-source versus proprietary approaches (second loop), and broader paradigmatic differences in how innovation and societal ecosystems function (third loop), with each dimension informing and being reshaped by the others.

The complexity inherent in navigating these differences exists across all three loops, though at different scales and with varying degrees of intensity. Where first-loop complexity may involve operational challenges in executing specific techniques or processes, second-loop complexity requires managing tensions between competing assumptions within an organization. Managing these tensions can itself involve navigating contradictory demands about how to structure operations, allocate resources, or define success across incompatible frameworks.

Third-loop complexity emerges from navigating collisions and contradictions between incommensurable systemic logics that cannot be reconciled through better execution or clearer, single sets of assumptions. Again, the three loops continuously inform each other: functional decisions shape which assumptions become salient, assumptions determine which systemic contradictions matter, and systemic contexts structure which functional operations prove viable.

Operating Across Colliding Systems and Contradictory Frameworks

Creative leaders can develop capacity across these loops through distinct but interconnected orientations and approaches. First-loop learning advances through iteration and experimentation with specific methods. Second-loop learning emerges from structured reflection, often catalyzed by performance failures that expose faulty assumptions. Third-loop learning develops through sustained exposure to incommensurable frameworks, typically requiring leaders to operate across cultural, technological, or organizational contexts where their existing paradigms visibly break down. Recognizing which loop should take priority requires attending to whether challenges stem from execution problems (first loop), misaligned assumptions (second loop), or framework incoherence itself (third loop).

Looking again at the example of artificial intelligence allows us to consider more precisely the reality of such contradictory business and operational frameworks while illustrating this interdependence across loops. Creative leaders cannot simply adopt AI tools (single loop) or question assumptions about creative processes related to those tools (double loop) because AI continuously destabilizes traditional frameworks through and around which creativity itself is understood and experienced.

For example, the tensions between ideation and execution, creator and audience, and novelty and value remain in perpetual flux as generative AI transforms each in incompatible ways. Boston College management and information systems professor Sam Ransbotham, in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group, revealed that organizations achieving superior AI results prioritize “mutual learning between human and machine” that reshapes both parties, not sequential adaptation (2020).

DeepSeek’s development of competitive AI models on minimal budgets through open-source approaches exemplifies this interdependence across all three loops. Chinese ecosystem assumptions about collaborative versus proprietary development (third loop) both emerge from and reshape technical architecture decisions and resource allocation strategies (second loop), which in turn enable and are enabled by radically different operational practices around model training and deployment (first loop). The small-budget, open-source approach illustrates how differences in functional operations, technical and business model assumptions, and systemic understandings of building new technologies remain inseparable: each loop informs the others in ways that create distinctly different innovation pathways.

Western AI leaders confronting DeepSeek’s approach thus face not only technical competition (first loop) or strategic challenges about open versus closed models (second loop) but fundamental questions about whether their entire innovation paradigm remains viable and competitive, a potential third-loop collision demanding identity transformation rather than strategic adjustment.

In this case, creative leaders face the bind of needing to master AI’s current capabilities even as those shifting capabilities redefine what mastery means. That bind, in turn, requires the development of specific competencies: the ability to work with AI as thinking partner while maintaining critical distance from its outputs, the capacity to recognize when AI-generated solutions reproduce rather than transcend existing patterns, and skill in articulating value propositions for human creativity that don’t rely on scarcity or superior execution.

Dutch digital transformation researcher Rogier van de Wetering and colleagues has explored this requirement for “adaptive transformation capability” amid discontinuous change (2022). But the more profound leadership challenge involves developing what Bateson termed “meta-contextual perspective,” the ability to see through contexts rather than merely choosing between them, to lead when the ground itself remains unstable.

Cultural variations can present these contradictions with particular force. Chinese creative leadership operates, speaking generally, through a system of relational care, coordination, and collective harmony; Western creative leadership, by contrast, tends to prize individual attribution and merit-based advancement; European creative leadership works within carefully orchestrated and regulated shared standards for producing and evaluating work; Gulf creative leadership broadly emphasizes hierarchical respect and personal relationship networks.

Recent research by Cambridge Judge Business School’s Daniel Petersen and Keith Goodall (2025) reveals that Chinese managers experience Western multinationals, particularly those headquartered in the U.S., as strong on human capital development but weak on social capital cultivation, reflecting incommensurable cultural logics about how leadership care functions. A decade ago, cross-cultural management consultant Michael Gates similarly observed that, Gulf leadership models practice being “hard on issues, soft on people” within high power-distance structures, emphasizing eloquence and personal force in ways that differ markedly from both Western egalitarianism and East Asian reactive harmony (Gates, 2015).

These are not stylistic differences that code-switching resolves. They represent epistemological contradictions about what creativity means (individual breakthrough versus collective refinement), how innovation emerges (disruption versus incremental improvement versus consensus-building), and what constitutes legitimate “creative authority.” The differences call upon leaders, whether through experimentation, collaboration, reflective practice, or self-transformation, to come to terms with and find paths among conflicting mindsets and meanings, contexts, cultures, and worldviews.

Third-loop learning requires creative leaders, for instance, to navigate situations where Chinese partners expect relationship-first decisions while Western boards demand data-driven rationales and European regulators expect compliance while Gulf collaborators require hierarchical deference – and all this simultaneously, not sequentially. Such coordinated understanding and engagement demand precisely this identity transformation: not becoming culturally fluent but developing capacity to hold contradictory cultural frameworks without synthesizing them into false coherence.

The creative leader must learn to operate in the contradictions and collisions themselves, building what might be understood as polycontextual capability where one’s own assumptions about creative leadership become visible as assumptions rather than universal truths, enabling genuine navigation of systematic differences in how cultures structure creative possibility and realization. Leaders develop this capability not through cultural training programs but through extended practice leading across contexts where their default frameworks fail, learning to recognize the discomfort and dissonance of paradigm or systemic collision as signal rather than noise, and cultivating what might be termed “reflexive disorientation” as a productive leadership state.

Reflexive, Relational, and Historically Grounded Creative Leadership

Learning to navigate these contradictions is rarely a solitary pursuit. Leaders develop third-loop capabilities through sustained dialogue with peers facing similar paradigmatic tensions, through collaborative reflection on shared failures, and through building communities of knowledge and practice that make contradictions discussable and actionable rather than sources of shame and withdrawal. This collective dimension proves essential because individual leaders cannot typically generate sufficient perspective on their own paradigmatic limitations.

Together, these collisions and contradictions are vividly illustrated in contemporary creative leadership. TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew navigates irreducible tensions between US national security frameworks demanding data sovereignty, Chinese governmental expectations around content and control, and global user demands for algorithmic personalization. His efforts are noteworthy because these demands cannot be sequentially addressed or synthesized into a single coherent policy. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming’s relocation to Singapore while maintaining Chinese citizenship embodies, at a geopolitical level, the identity transformation Bateson described: not resolving the US-China contradiction but learning to operate within it (Fortune Asia, 2024).

Similarly, leaders at global marketing and communications holding companies like WPP and Publicis navigate contradictions where clients simultaneously demand AI-driven efficiency, human creative authenticity, and protection from AI-generated mediocrity and slop.

Such complexity and contradictions cannot be “aligned” or “balanced” through better strategy (often a priority of double-loop learning); rather, they require the emergence of a capacity to lead when “efficiency,” “authenticity,” and “protection” mean incompatible things to different stakeholders. Reed Hastings’s Netflix transformation has involved continuous operational and business model shifts – from DVD rental to streaming platform to content producer to global entertainment network – each requiring not just strategic pivots but fundamental reconceptions of what Netflix was becoming, often while maintaining multiple leadership identities simultaneously for different markets and regulatory environments.

Whereas Nadella’s Microsoft transformation exemplified double-loop learning through questioning organizational identity within a coherent technology paradigm, Hastings navigated systematic collisions between building a technology company and leading a content studio, a disruptor and an establishment player, a Silicon Valley innovator and a Hollywood producer. These identities, in brief, demanded the simultaneous embrace of what had traditionally been incompatible strategic logics.

Three Interdependent Learning Loops for Creative Leadership

To reiterate, the three loops of learning – operational improvement, assumption questioning, and framework contradiction and systemic collision navigation – operate as interdependent dimensions rather than sequential stages, each informing and being shaped by the others within historical contexts.

In this regard, it is also imperative to understand creative leadership today as inherently historical. Claims that creativity is a timeless human capacity, often vaguely conceived in terms of artistry or imagination, ignore its profound contextual variation over time. Particularly in combination, leadership and creativity have been understood differently in medieval guilds, Renaissance workshops, artisanal associations, factory systems, industrial corporations, and digital networks. Today, we lead creatively within ecosystems increasingly shaped by entrepreneurial agility, data flows, distributed agency, platform economies, and machine learning.

The implication is clear: creative leadership is not just about future-thinking but about understanding that our own present positions and conditions are constructed through historical awareness, self and cultural literacy, and specific social, economic, and technological contexts, meaning that the tools and assumptions we inherit need to be regularly re-evaluated for their relevance. Historical consciousness itself becomes part of a learning practice when leaders deliberately study how past frameworks emerged, succeeded, and failed in their contexts, using this understanding to recognize when their own frameworks have become artifacts of conditions that no longer obtain.

To lead creatively today therefore means to embrace multiple responsibilities: to act decisively and to reflect systemically, to navigate contradictions and collisions without false resolution, and to recognize how operational decisions, strategic assumptions, and systemic contradictions continuously shape each other. It means both doing and questioning, executing and reimagining, managing the short-term while shaping the long-term. All that needs to be done while also developing the creative capacity to hold incompatible demands in productive tension while understanding how specific practices inform broader paradigms and vice versa.

Put differently, and in the words of a pair of contemporary Italian economists, this leadership is based in “a learning process that necessarily involves behavioral changes as the result of cognitive changes (modification of deeply held values, beliefs, and assumptions)” (Auqui-Caceres & Furlan, 2023: 757). Such a process takes on special import when leading other creative people, who each bring their own evolving experiences, priorities, and perspectives, and when enabling creative collectives and communities.

Here, creative leadership becomes not merely personal but relational, involving the delicate and, unavoidably now, technologically mediated balance of individual autonomy with collective goals through dialogue, empathy, negotiation, and shared inquiry. As a practice, creative leadership thus turns fundamentally on an openness to and embrace of learning in the toggling between creative actions and reflections, between single-loop efficiency and double-loop effectiveness and triple-loop transformation, recognizing that these modes of learning remain interdependent rather than isolated.

In our uncertain times, we cannot lead by using received ideas as autopilots – or reactive copilots, like prompt-dependent AI models, or even agentic partners – however creative they may initially appear or once have been. We need instead to lead with adaptive purpose and self- and contextual intelligence, questioning what we’re doing, why, where, and with whom, continually remaking both the tools and the terms of our leadership.

Creative leadership is not a fixed model, school, or identity but an individual and collective practice: deliberate, evolving, and generative. It develops through years of reflective experience and active learning, often accelerating when leaders encounter contexts that fundamentally challenge their existing repertoires and mindsets. It is guided by the awareness that leading creatively today is not only about driving innovation but also about shaping and re-shaping meaning, growing ourselves and others, challenging institutions and systems, and stewarding possibility through all levels of learning.

The imperative today ranges from improving what we do, to questioning what we assume, to transforming who we become amid paradigmatic instability, always recognizing that these dimensions inform and depend upon each other in the ongoing learning and practice of creative leadership.

References

Chris Argyris (2005) “Double-loop Learning In Organizations: A Theory of Action Perspective,” in Great Minds in Management: The Process of Theory Development, eds. Ken G. Smith & Michael A. Hitt, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 261-279; 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” (Review Article), European Management Review 2023, 20: 741–761; https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12615

Gregory Bateson (2000) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; 1972.

Fortune Asia (2024, May 8) “TikTok’s Lawsuit Against the U.S. Reveals Billionaire ByteDance Founder Zhang Yiming is Living in Singapore While Keeping His Chinese Citizenship,” Fortune Asia, May 8, 2024; https://fortune.com/asia/2024/05/08/tiktoks-lawsuit-us-billionaire-bytedance-founder-zhang-yiming-living-singapore-china-citizenship/

Michael Gates (2015, May 27) “Cross-Cultural Factors in Leadership in the Middle East,” Cross-Culture Blog; https://www.crossculture.com/cross-cultural-factors-in-leadership-in-the-middle-east/

Daniel A. Petersen and Keith Goodall (2025) “Leadership Development in the Cross

Cultural Context of China: Who Really Cares?” International Business Review 34(3), April, 2025; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2025.102400

Sam Ransbotham, Shervin Khodabandeh, David Kiron, François Candelon, Michael Chu, and Burt LaFountain (2020) “Expanding AI’s Impact With Organizational Learning,” MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group, October 2020; https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/expanding-ais-impact-with-organizational-learning/

David Slocum (2025) “The Rise and Fall of Creative Leadership,” Crafting Leadership Substack, February 20, 2025; https://creativeleadershiphub.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-creative-leadership

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

Rogier van de Wetering, Patrick Mikalef, and Denis Dennehy (2022) “Artificial Intelligence Ambidexterity, Adaptive Transformation Capability, and Their Impact on Performance Under Tumultuous Times,” In Savvas Papagiannidis, et al., eds., The Role of Digital Technologies in Shaping the Post-Pandemic World, I3E 2022, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13454, Cham: Springer International Publishing; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-15342-6_3

The following article may seem to some readers unusual for this Substack or – at least to those who have signed up expecting only insights and suggestions about developing one’s leadership as craft or re-booting creative leadership – a tangential excursion from creative and innovative businesses into the geopolitical realm.

While the subject of “Two Wars, Two Lenses” concerns how we might approach a fundamentally political topic, the discussion aims to raise several general issues that potentially speak to leaders across many other settings. First, all leaders need to accept the inevitable trade-offs between identifying potentially illuminating metaphors and historical parallels and appreciating the complexity and uniqueness of every strategic situation. While distilling and communicating resonant simplicity from messy complexity is a vital leadership skill, in other words, a common risk for business and political leaders alike is oversimplification and engendering groupthink around that messaging.

A second general issue foregrounded in the piece is the need for leaders of all stripes to develop and deploy better contextual intelligence. That imperative begins with leaders determining what is salient, that is, what matters in give strategic situations. Again, acknowledging trade-off is crucial – here, between a focus on specific, galvanizing historical comparisons and varied, often contradictory facts on the ground. Historical context, indeed, is an especially challenging in an era of both intensified short-term thinking in business and electoral politics and the flattening of the past by social and other digital media that collapse the vast, differentiated timeline of history into a single, homogenized field.

Third, recognizing the roles of social, digital, and platform media in our lives and leadership today point to a particular context that this Substack will consistently explore: the informational, narrative, and discursive dynamics that powerfully shape our leadership understanding and practice. Elsewhere, for example, we will feature analyses of how today’s popular leadership discourse is increasingly driven by platform technologies, social media, and AI, and how that discourse privileges certain aspects of and approaches to leadership and marginalizes others (think about how ‘leadership’ is circumscribed and marketed on LinkedIn).

With the “Two Wars, Two Lenses” piece, the aim is to deepen understanding of the complexity, contexts, and narratives of a current profoundly challenging leadership situation. As a final note, while posted here at Crafting Leadership, the article is also avalable at On Global Leadership. We’ll have much more to say in coming weeks about future joint activities between Crafting Leadership, the Creative Leadership Hub, and OGL, but for now we believe the piece represents the kind of thought leadership that is relevant to audiences and followers across the sites. As always, we look forward to hearing your reactions and feedback. Thanks for being here and reading.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Western leaders immediately reached for historical analogies to frame their response. The comparison that dominated discourse was predictable: Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler, Ukraine as Czechoslovakia, and the West facing a Munich moment requiring resolve rather than appeasement.

Yet this reflexive turn to the 1930s and the run-up to World War II, while emotionally satisfying and politically expedient, may obscure a more complex and ultimately more instructive historical parallel: the path to World War I in the early 1900s, when Europe’s great powers sleepwalked into catastrophe not because they failed to confront external aggression, but because they could not escape the structural contradictions of their own making.

More fundamentally, the very act of selecting such historical analogies can reveal as much about contemporary power dynamics as it does about historical truths. The choice between viewing current events through the lens of 1914 versus the 1930s reflects not merely analytical preference but profound disagreements about global order, institutional legitimacy, the distribution of responsibility for international instability, and the priorities of leaders going facing the future.

The Seductive Clarity of the 1930s Lens

The appeal of the Hitler analogy extends beyond its analytical utility to its political function. Like Nazi Germany’s systematic repudiation of the post-Versailles order, Putin’s Russia has consistently challenged the post-Cold War settlement through sequential territorial acquisitions in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and now Ukraine. According to this view, both leaders employed similar authoritarian tactics: testing Western resolve through incremental aggression, exploiting democratic hesitation, and framing expansion as historical correction rather than conquest.

Yet this framing serves clear political purposes beyond historical analysis. Equating Putin with Hitler mobilizes Western public opinion while simultaneously constraining policy debate. Few politicians can advocate negotiation or compromise when facing “the new Hitler.” The analogy transforms complex geopolitical tensions into moral absolutes, making certain policy options politically untenable regardless of their strategic merit. President Zelensky’s elevation to Churchillian status serves similar mobilization functions while deflecting attention from the more uncomfortable question of whether Western policies contributed to current tensions.

Such institutional parallels seem equally compelling but require more detailed critical examination. Just as the League of Nations proved impotent against fascist aggression, contemporary international institutions have appeared inadequate to address today’s great power competition. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which formally outlawed war as an instrument of national policy yet proved powerless against Japanese, Italian, and German aggression, finds its contemporary echo in repeated UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Russian actions while lacking enforcement mechanisms.

However, this parallel obscures how institutions like the International Criminal Court and sanctions regimes function differently for different actors. The ICC’s highly selective prosecutions (pursuing African leaders and Russian officials while avoiding Western leaders responsible for civilian casualties in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan) reveal these institutions as instruments of geopolitical influence rather than wholly neutral arbiters of international law.

Current sanctions deployed against Russia likewise represent the determined efforts of a dollar-based and Euro-American governed financial system rather than collective and unified international action. The freezing of Russian central bank reserves worth over $300 billion and exclusion from SWIFT demonstrate how economic interdependence, rather than creating mutual restraint, can become weaponized when one side controls essential economic infrastructure. From many non-Western perspectives, these measures represent less a principled defense of international law than a selective application of economic coercion by a declining hegemon seeking to preserve its institutional advantages.

These contemporary actions also echo the destructive economic warfare of the 1930s, when competing currency blocs and trade preferences replaced multilateral cooperation. Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1931 and subsequent creation of the sterling bloc, followed by the Ottawa Agreements of 1932 establishing Imperial Preference, demonstrated how economic interdependence could fragment into exclusive spheres when great powers prioritized unilateral advantage over collective stability (Eichengreen, 2019). Similarly, the United States’ Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 triggered retaliatory measures that reduced global trade by over 25% between 1929 and 1934, showing how economic nationalism could rapidly unravel interdependent systems (Irwin, 2011).

Even more significantly, the 1930s analogy deflects attention from how NATO expansion, despite repeated Russian warnings, paralleled the alliance building that contributed to 1914’s escalation dynamics. The admission of former Warsaw Pact members (starting with Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999) and Soviet republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 2004), while understandable from their security perspectives, represented a fundamental revision of the post-Cold War settlement from Russian viewpoints. This expansion occurred despite U.S. diplomat and Cold War architect of containment George Kennan’s prescient 1997 warning that it would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era” (Kennan, 1997).

The Uncomfortable Mirror of 1914

The pre-World War I parallel offers a more complex but potentially more accurate diagnostic frame, one that distributes responsibility across multiple actors rather than identifying single aggressors. In the decade before 1914, all European powers contributed to escalation through their inability to adapt outdated political and economic models to changed circumstances. The Triple Alliance binding Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy faced the competing Triple Entente linking France, Russia, and Britain, creating interlocking commitments that transformed local conflicts into continental wars. The Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 and the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France in 1904 created treaty obligations that effectively eliminated diplomatic flexibility when crises emerged.

Contemporary parallels extend beyond formal alliance structures to underlying strategic dynamics. NATO’s eastward expansion, while driven by legitimate security concerns of new members, created the same encirclement dynamics that contributed to German strategic anxiety before 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abrupt dismissal of Otto von Bismarck in 1890 eliminated Germany’s most skilled practitioner of flexible diplomacy, replacing calculated ambiguity with erratic personal rule that alarmed European capitals and contributed to the rigid alliance systems that would prove so catastrophic. General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, lacking his famous uncle’s strategic flexibility, turned contingency planning into rigid doctrine that required Germany’s attacking France through Belgium regardless of the war’s origins.

Russia’s response today, seeking to establish buffer zones through force, mirrors Austria-Hungary’s desperate attempts to preserve influence in the Balkans against rising nationalism. Austrian Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf spent years advocating preventive war against Serbia and Italy, unable to recognize that his multinational empire’s survival depended on avoiding the very conflicts he sought.

Through this lens, Ukraine appears not as Czechoslovakia requiring defense but as Belgium in 1914: the smaller nation whose crisis activates alliance systems and triggers broader conflict. This perspective does not excuse Russian aggression but places it within a broader pattern of great power competition where all major actors have contributed to escalation through rigid adherence to incompatible strategic visions. Even Russia’s relatively moderate leaders like Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov became prisoners of mobilization timetables and alliance commitments, discovering too late that supporting Serbian nationalism meant triggering European catastrophe.

The pre-1914 era’s institutional innovations proved inadequate when tested by genuine crises, much like today’s international legal mechanisms. The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 created arbitration systems and laws of war that worked for minor disputes but collapsed when core interests were at stake. Contemporary international law exhibits similar selectivity: effective against weaker states but ignored when major powers perceive existential interests.

The particular institutional innovation of having supranational leaders rather than national governments propose military deployment, as seen in European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s advocacy for multinational defense forces, reflects contemporary Europe’s attempt to transcend traditional state-based decision making yet risks repeating pre-1914 patterns where well-intentioned collective security efforts escalated rather than resolved underlying tensions.

Likewise misguided was the earlier era’s faith in economic rationality, which was called out at the time by Norman Angell in his influential book, The Great Illusion (Angell, 1910, pp. 28-49). The British journalist and politician demonstrated through detailed financial analysis that conquest could no longer pay, as modern economies depended on complex credit systems and trade relationships that military action would inevitably destroy. His argument convinced many European intellectuals and policymakers that economic self-interest would prevent rational leaders from pursuing military solutions to political disputes.

Yet this confidence in economic interdependence as a peace-preserving mechanism collapsed catastrophically in August 1914, when European powers abandoned profitable trade relationships and integrated financial systems for military objectives that Angell had correctly identified as economically destructive.

The parallel with contemporary assumptions about economic interdependence constraining great power competition proves particularly unsettling: today’s leaders similarly assume that global supply chains, financial integration, trade relationships, and even driving growth though arms production create sufficient incentives for peaceful conflict resolution, potentially overlooking how these same relationships can be weaponized when fundamental interests appear threatened.

In the essential The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark argues that no single actor engineered World War I (Clark, 2012). Clark, an Australian-born scholar specializing in Prussian history and modern European politics, demonstrates through meticulous archival research that all major powers contributed through their inability to transcend inherited strategic assumptions. The British Empire struggled to maintain global commitments while facing German industrial competition. France remained fixated on recovering Alsace-Lorraine lost during the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Austria-Hungary sought to preserve multinational empire in an age of nationalism. Germany felt encircled despite, or because of, its economic dynamism.

Contemporary parallels are striking. The United States struggles to maintain global hegemony (in the second Trump administration, through actively reshaping it) while facing Chinese economic competition and internal political polarization. The European Union, designed for managing prosperity and integration in the post World War II era, confronts military and strategic demands it cannot adequately address. Russia, despite its resource wealth, feels marginalized by institutions designed and consolidated during its period of weakness. China seeks recognition as a great power within structures that institutionalize Western advantages.

As University of Toronto historian Margaret MacMillan notes in The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, European leaders of the early twentieth century similarly became prisoners of their own alliance systems, unable to find diplomatic solutions because military mobilization schedules and treaty obligations left little room for flexibility (MacMillan, 2013).

The Politics of Historical Analogies

Historical analogies like these function as more than analytical tools; they serve as instruments of political mobilization and policy legitimation. The choice between 1914 and 1930s as narrative frames reflects deeper disagreements about global order, institutional legitimacy, responsibility for international instability, and leadership priorities. These competing analogies operate within what might be termed the cultural politics of historical memory, where the selection of dominant political narratives becomes a form of soft power projection (and the basis of policies justifying harder power deployment) that shapes not only policy options but the very parameters of legitimate debate.

The 1930s analogy serves Western institutional interests by portraying current arrangements as legitimate bulwarks against authoritarianism requiring defense rather than reform. It justifies increased military spending, expanded alliance commitments, and economic sanctions while deflecting questions about whether Western-dominated institutions contributed to current tensions. The framing treats sovereignty and territorial integrity as universal principles while obscuring how these same principles were violated by Western interventions in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya. This selective application of principles reveals how analogies can function as ideological instruments that naturalize particular power arrangements while delegitimizing alternatives.

In Analogies at War, Harvard Kennedy School scholar Yuen Foong Khong demonstrated how historical analogies often serve to legitimize predetermined policy preferences rather than illuminate complex strategic realities (Khong, 1992, pp. 8-12). Khong, drawing on extensive interviews with policymakers involved in Vietnam decisions, shows that leaders typically select analogies that support their existing inclinations rather than engage in genuine analytical comparison. The emotional resonance of the Hitler comparison makes it particularly effective for mobilizing domestic support while constraining policy alternatives that might appear as “appeasement.” This dynamic transforms historical analogies from analytical tools into rhetorical weapons that can foreclose rather than inform strategic deliberation.

While less politically convenient, the 1914 parallel forces acknowledgment that institutional rigidity and strategic inflexibility can transform manageable tensions into systemic crises. It suggests that addressing current challenges requires examining how alliance expansion, economic globalization, and institutional design may have inadvertently created the conditions for conflict rather than cooperation. This framing aligns with what international relations scholar Robert Jervis classically termed the “security dilemma,” the recognition that “many of the means by which a state tries tp increase its security decrease the security of others” and inadvertently create spiraling tensions (Jervis, 1978, p. 169).

As former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock predicted in 1997 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the 1914 lens likewise requires acknowledging that NATO expansion “may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War” (Matlock, 2022; Matlock 2004). Beyond the failure to include rather than exclude Russia from European security arrangements, the expansion betrayed a more basic inability to understand Russian strategic perspectives and concerns. However, this perspective demands the intellectual courage to question not just tactical implementations but the fundamental assumptions underlying post-Cold War institutional arrangements, making it inherently more challenging for established elites to embrace.

Crucially, both historical analogies reflect European and Western past experiences rather than global perspectives. Neither framework adequately captures how the majority of the world’s population views current events: not necessarily as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, but as an opportunity to escape from Western-dominated institutions and create more representative global governance structures.

India (and perhaps by extension much of the Global South) increasingly approaches great power competition through the lens of multipolarity, Malaysian strategic analyst Rahul Mishra recently observed, and the country has adopted a position of strategic autonomy and “multi-alignment” rather than choosing sides in ideological conflicts (Mishra, 2023, p. 43). This perspective helps explain why countries representing over 60% of global population have refused to join Western sanctions against Russia, seeing the conflict as a dispute between great powers rather than a moral crusade warranting universal alignment. The dominance of European historical analogies in Western discourse thus reflects not analytical superiority but the continued influence of Western-centered frameworks that may obscure rather than illuminate contemporary geopolitical dynamics.

The Multipolar Opportunity

Contemporary discussions of multipolarity are often viewed in the West as a challenge to international stability, but this perspective again arguably reflects the particular interests of established powers rather than objective analysis. For much of the world, multipolarity represents not a dangerous development but a welcome return to historical normality after several centuries of Western dominance.

The emergence of alternative institutions like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS expansion, and regional payment systems reflects not mere opposition to Western leadership but legitimate demands for more representative global governance. Countries like India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia (representing billions of people) have consistently advocated for UN Security Council reform, more equitable international financial institutions, and trade arrangements that serve broader interests rather than perpetuating asymmetric relationships established during colonial periods and, more recently, by the victors of World War II.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, whatever its limitations and strategic motivations, addresses infrastructure deficits that Western-dominated institutions have failed to adequately address for decades. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank provides development financing without the structural adjustment conditionalities that have characterized World Bank and IMF lending. These alternatives succeed not because they oppose Western values but because they offer more favorable terms and greater respect for recipient sovereignty and interests.

Even within established institutions, the Global South (or, as some prefer, the Global Majority) increasingly challenges Western assumptions. UN General Assembly voting patterns on Ukraine-related resolutions reveal a world far more divided than Western commentary suggests. Countries representing the majority of global population have consistently abstained from or opposed sanctions on Russia, not necessarily because they support aggression but because they reject the selective application of international law and the weaponization of economic interdependence.

This broader context complicates the project of analyzing current events and formulating leadership paths forward. Rather than asking how to preserve Western-led order against authoritarian challenges, the more relevant question becomes how to create genuinely inclusive institutions that address the legitimate grievances of all major powers while maintaining effective mechanisms for conflict resolution and international cooperation.

External Enemies Versus Internal Contradictions

The distinction between external and internal diagnostic focus becomes even more crucial when examined from global rather than primarily Western perspectives. The 1930s analogy directs attention outward, toward external threats requiring unified response, but this framework assumes the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements and the righteousness of defending them.

Current Western policy exemplifies this external focus while avoiding uncomfortable questions about institutional failures and shortcomings. President Biden’s early framing of the conflict in Ukraine as a battle between “democracy and autocracy” deflects attention not only from America’s own democratic vulnerabilities but from how democratic institutions have often been used to advance particular geopolitical interests rather than universal values. The concept of “democracy” itself becomes problematic when claims of democratic values and instituions like free speech and fair elections are used to justify interventions that violate the sovereignty of non-democratic states.

Put simply, the 1914 parallel forces leaders to examine structural contradictions within their own systems and international relationships. It suggests that the greatest dangers may arise not from external aggression but from the inability to adapt inherited institutions to genuinely changed circumstances. This perspective requires acknowledging that Western-dominated international arrangements may be not just inadequate but antiquated and actively counterproductive in a multipolar world.

Contemporary political polarization exemplifies this internal challenge across Western democracies. The rise of populist movements represents not random discontent but increasingly systematic tension between globalizing elites and populations who feel excluded from the benefits of cross-border flows of people, capital, information, goods, and technology. Brexit voters rejected not just EU membership but technocratic governance models that seemed unresponsive to their concerns. Trump supporters challenged not just political establishments but economic structures that appeared to benefit educated professionals at working-class expense.

These domestic tensions interact with international challenges in ways that neither historical analogy fully captures. Western support for Ukraine, however morally justified, occurs against a backdrop of declining infrastructure, rising inequality, and institutional trust deficits that external focus cannot address. The resources devoted to military assistance and sanctions enforcement could alternatively address domestic challenges that threaten democratic resilience more fundamentally than Russian actions.

The Leadership Challenge of Structural Honesty

Any choice between historical parallels ultimately reflects deeper questions about leadership responsibility and institutional adaptation. Churchill’s wartime effectiveness derived not from simply opposing external enemies but from recognizing that British imperial structures were obsolete at a time when democratic values required defense. Contemporary leaders face similar challenges requiring simultaneous external vigilance and internal structural reform.

The most sophisticated approach would combine support for Ukraine’s sovereignty with honest examination of how Western policies contributed to current tensions. This requires intellectual courage to acknowledge that NATO expansion, however justified from member perspectives, created security dilemmas that may have contributed to conflict escalation. It means recognizing that economic sanctions, while preferable to military action, function as instruments of coercion that may strengthen rather than weaken authoritarian control.

In essence, a better approach requires accepting that effective leadership in a multipolar world demands creating genuinely inclusive institutions rather than defending inherited structures that privilege particular actors. The post-1945 order served important functions during the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War periods, but institutional arrangements designed for American hegemony and European reconstruction may be inadequate for addressing 21st-century challenges.

Effective leadership requires what British international lawyer and foreign affairs adviser Matt Waldman has described as “strategic empathy,” the willingness and ability to understand others’ perspectives in order to anticipate actions and avoid strategic mistakes (Waldman, 2012, pp. 1-3). While Waldman wrote specifically about U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, others, notably American political scientist John J. Mearsheimer, have offered similar reflections about Western failures to understand Russian motivations regarding Ukraine(Mearsheimer, 2014). Neither advocates fuller understanding to mean moral equivalence or abandoning allies, but rather as the basis for recognizing that sustainable security requires addressing root causes alongside immediate threats.

The most sophisticated leadership approach would consequently combine external vigilance with substantive internal structural reform. This could mean supporting Ukraine’s sovereignty while simultaneously examining whether current Western policies, alliance commitments, and institutions adequately address 21st-century realities. Specifically, it requires the intellectual honesty to ask whether NATO expansion, Western-centered economic policies and infrastructure, or domestic political structures have inadvertently contributed to current instabilities by perpetuating conflictual rather than cooperative international positioning.

Such dual awareness is undeniably more complex than focusing solely on external enemies or internal contradictions. But history suggest that tragedies occur when leaders cannot escape the limitations of their own strategic assumptions, whether those assumptions involve appeasing aggressors or rigidly adhering to obsolete frameworks. The most dangerous leadership failure may be the inability to maintain simultaneous awareness of genuine external threats and genuine internal structural challenges.

True strategic wisdom lies not in choosing between external vigilance and internal reform but in developing frameworks that address legitimate grievances across the international system while maintaining effective mechanisms for conflict resolution. This requires moving beyond historical analogies that privilege particular perspectives toward more inclusive approaches that acknowledge the complex motivations of all major actors.

The alternative (continued reliance on frameworks that divide the world into democracies and autocracies, defenders and aggressors, legitimate and illegitimate actors) risks perpetuating the very dynamics that transformed manageable tensions into systemic crises in both 1914 and the 1930s. Only by combining honest acknowledgment of Western institutional limitations with principled opposition to aggression can leaders navigate the structural transitions that define our current moment while creating foundations for more stable and equitable international cooperation.

As University of Toronto political historian Timothy Snyder concludes in The Road to Unfreedom, “Politics is international, but repair must be local” (Snyder, 2018, p. 277). Defending democracy, in other words, requires more than opposing authoritarian enemies. That call for honest confrontation with democracy’s internal vulnerabilities includes acknowledging how economic inequality, institutional sclerosis, and political tribalism have weakened democratic resilience across many European and North American states that have acted to support Ukraine as a democracy under attack. Only through such structural honesty can leaders navigate the multipolar transitions that define our current historical moment.

References

Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910; https://ia601305.us.archive.org/29/items/cu31924007365467/cu31924007365467.pdf

Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, London: Allen Lane, 2012.

Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Douglas A. Irwin, Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, Vol. 30, No. 2 (January 1978): 167-214; https://www.jstor.org/stable/2009958

George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, February 5, 1997; https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html

Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, New York: Random House, 2013.

Jack F. Matlock, Jr., “Jack Matlock: Ukraine Crisis Could Have Been Avoided,” The Transnational, May 27, 2022; https://transnational.live/2022/05/28/jack-matlock-ukraine-crisis-should-have-been-avoided/

Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended, New York: Random House, 2004.

John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (2014): 77-89; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-crisis-west-s-fault

Rahul Mishra, “From Non-Alignment to Multi-Alignment: Assessing India’s Foreign Policy Shift,” The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs and Policy Studies, Volume 112, pp. 43-56, published online, 14 Feb 2023; https://doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2023.2165367

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

Matt Waldman, “Strategic Empathy: The Afghanistan Intervention Shows Why the U.S. Must Empathize With Its Adversaries,” New America Foundation, 2012; https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/4350-strategic-empathy-2/Waldman%20Strategic%20Empathy_2.3caa1c3d706143f1a8cae6a7d2ce70c7.pdf