The Question I Was Not Allowed to Ask

The room went quiet. An uncomfortable quiet. The kind of emptiness people physically recoil from. A dangerous quiet.

“We make profit to fulfil our fiduciary obligations to our shareholders.”

Fancy words, issued as a defence. In other words, we make profit to make a few rich people richer.

“And to answer the second part of your question, we have an active CSR programme. Perhaps you’d like to get more involved?”

A smile, tainted with menace.

I had been put back in my box for asking, at an All Hands, the question only a naive youngster at the start of his career would think it was alright to ask. Why is making a profit so important? I was quite young, and didn’t know, like asking somebody what they earn, that you don’t ask questions of that kind.

This is how it starts. We learn not to ask, because the question is dangerous to ask. Why is making a profit so important? What gets done with it? By the time we are running things ourselves, the questions have been bred out. We don’t make profit because we’ve thought hard about why. We make profit because that’s what businesses do.

Profit as default. Profit as purpose. The number is the answer because the number doesn’t require an answer.

The Doctrine

In 1970, an American economist published a short essay in the New York Times Magazine. The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits. The essay was largely unremarked at the time. Milton Friedman’s argument was that managers who pursued anything other than profit on behalf of shareholders were spending other people’s money on causes of their own choosing, and that this was a form of theft. It was the first salvo. Over the following fifty years, the argument became the operating doctrine of senior management across most of the developed world.

The doctrine is so deep now that it is unquestioned, the way things are. Most leaders cannot articulate a defence of it because they have never had to defend it. It is the water they swim in. Boards assume it. Investors enforce it. Business schools teach it. Senior compensation is engineered around it. Even leaders who privately dislike it find themselves enacting it daily, because the structures they sit inside are designed to reward nothing else.

By the time I came into business, the doctrine was invisible. The question I was not allowed to ask at that All Hands was the question Friedman had pre-emptively closed: Why is profit so important?

Because it was bizarre that anyone would ask. Nothing else is being measured. Nothing else is being rewarded. No other answer is permitted.

We learn not to ask because the question has nowhere to land.

Biology

A leader trained to maximise profit and nothing else does not behave like a steward of the business. They behave as the system pays them to behave. Optimise their slice. Compete for what they need to deliver it. Ignore the rest.

I was sitting in the weekly operations meeting. Two account leads were fighting over the same people they wanted to work on their projects. Both had clients waiting. Both made the case. Both passionate. Both persuasive. Both completely self-centred. Neither was thinking about the business. Each was thinking about their own client.

This is what most large businesses are. Fiefdoms inside a single corporate boundary, each trying to extract as much of the shared resource as it can before someone else gets there. The common good of the organisation is nobody’s brief. The tragedy of the commons, played out weekly in a glass meeting room.

The body does this too.

Sometimes cells mutate and stop cooperating with the organism. They reduce to a single drive. Grow. Grow regardless of environment. Grow regardless of the host. Grow until the host is dead.

We call it cancer.

The two account leads in the meeting room were not one cancer disagreeing with itself. They were two cancers, each operating its own mutation, both abandoning the larger organism. The body had two tumours, growing alongside each other and competing for the same blood supply.

The fiefdoms in most large businesses are this at scale. Divisions. Regions. Business units. Account teams. Each one organised internally. Each one competing with the others for the same finite resource. Each one optimising for its own number. The leader who treats this as politics has misdiagnosed it. It is biology.

The middle of the business does it most of all. The director sits in the quarterly review, smiling, defending the line he was given by his boss. The manager in the room next door knows his peer is wrong but stays silent. By the time the disease reaches this level, it is invisible because it is normal. Most of the corporate body is the middle. Most of the carriers are here.

The same disease runs at the top. The board presides over a larger version. Grow the multiple. Hit the quarter. Whatever else gets lost in the process is somebody else’s problem.

Domestication is the cancer.

The rewarding of the parts of people that are easiest to control. The leader who began with sharp instincts becomes the leader who runs everything past three stakeholders before speaking. They did not lose their judgement. They were trained to override it. The training is the everyday work of the Machine. Promotions. Praise. Board approval. The quiet pleasure of being the big dog in the room. The Machine rewards the parts of you it can use. It starves the rest. The longer you stay, the higher the price.

Paid Out of Asking

My first domestication, I did not notice. The mutation had taken. I just thought I was ambitious.

It was the dot-com boom. I was the marketing director of a travel website. One of the founders was a celebrity. We were quite famous. The funding was venture capital. The metric was customer acquisition. Our focus was the exit. The IPO. The cash-out.

Everything pointed at it. Every campaign was sized against it. Every product decision was made through it. We told ourselves we were building a useful service. People did book travel through us. But the service was incidental. The growth was the point.

Pumped full of venture capital and testosterone, we were tech bros before the term was coined. We were sure we were dangerous. We were sure we were doing something the old guard couldn’t. We were sure we were the future. None of it felt like domestication. The cage looked like ambition. The bars were upside.

You don’t feel captured. You feel chosen.

We didn’t know it then, but we were Boxer. The horse in Animal Farm. One mode. I will work harder. He never asked why. He just worked harder, until the system sent him to the glue factory. Our mantra had been updated. I will become richer. Same cage. Same single mode. Newer marketing.

I have spent the years since asking why this happened so completely and so quickly.

The answer is that I was paid to feel it. The reward landed every time. Every quarter beaten brought the IPO closer. The body learns fast.

I did not just live inside the pattern. I used it as motivation. Push hard. Hit the quarter. I mistook pushing for leading. I mistook obsession with the number for ambition. I had conned myself into something worse. I believed my obsession with profit motivated the people who worked for me. It did not. They would never share in the profit. The only thing it secured them was their next pay packet. The motivation I thought I was giving them was the cage itself.

As a leader I was not alone. We are all paid to believe it. Paid with money. Paid with status. Paid with the belief that we are doing the right thing with our working lives. The bigger the role, the bigger the share of compensation tied to the number. Bonus. Equity. Carry. The whole architecture of senior pay rewards the parts the Machine can control. What can be measured gets paid for. The rest atrophies. Vitality. Judgement. The long view. What grows in their place is what no one is measuring. Self-serving manoeuvring. Divisive internal politics. The performance of competence in place of its exercise. We are not just trained out of asking the question. We are paid out of it.

Regeneration

All of this is the brainwashing. We come to believe that the number is the point.

Since Friedman, the point of business has been profit. The answer has held for fifty years and shaped almost everything we now treat as common sense in senior management. It is wrong. Or rather, it is half right.

The fuller answer is profit and regeneration. Two halves held together, neither sufficient on its own.

Profit is what makes the business commercially viable. It pays the people who depend on it. It funds what comes next.

Regeneration is what makes the business worth sustaining in the first place. Not the marketing version of regeneration. Not the CSR version. Not the working group convened to report ESG metrics to the board. Regeneration as the substantive question of what the business returns to the world it takes from.

Every business takes from the world. Energy. Materials. Labour. Attention. The ground beneath the warehouse. The water through the cooling system. The mental life of the people who work there. The capital of investors who could have placed it elsewhere. A business is a process of extraction held inside a legal structure.

The regenerative business is the one that asks, seriously and constantly, what it is putting back. The soils it leaves richer or poorer. The communities it strengthens or hollows. The skills it grows or loses. The places it leaves more alive, or less.

A leader who can answer both halves with equal seriousness is rare. Most have good numbers and nothing to say about the second.

When somebody asks, the answer is the one you already heard. We have an active CSR programme. Perhaps you’d like to get more involved? Regeneration reduced to a side committee. The thing the business should be built around becomes the thing offered to the dissenter as a place to be parked.

The question that does not get asked is the one that matters. What is this business giving back to the world it takes from? Most leaders, asked seriously, have no answer.

The Blind Spot

What I have just argued is not mine alone. A serious movement in business thinking makes this case. Its name is Regenerative Business. It is a counter-movement to the Friedman doctrine. It says the company is a living thing nested inside larger living things.

It also matters more now than at any point in our lifetime. The doctrine of profit-at-all-costs has been running for over fifty years, and the costs it externalises are visible everywhere we look. The carbon released into an atmosphere that cannot hold it. The soils made dependent on chemistry to produce anything at all. The communities hollowed out by the work moving elsewhere. The economies in which the gap between those who own and those who serve has grown wide enough to break the social contract that held them together. We are not going to extract our way out of any of it. Regenerative business is one of the few coherent answers being proposed that does not require either denial or collapse.

And yet if you search for businesses actually doing the work, the same small set of names appears. Patagonia. Riverford. A handful of Mondragon co-operatives. A few European Mittelstand firms. A small number of B Corp standouts who treat the certification as a floor rather than a marketing exercise. Most people in business have never heard of regenerative business. Among those who have, it has, to borrow a phrase from a different conversation, the structure of teenage sex. A great many people are talking about it. Very few are doing it. The question is why?

The answer is the blind spot. Most leaders have never seriously considered regenerative business. It is not that they have rejected it. It is that it has not occurred to them. The Friedman doctrine has shaped their mental models so completely that regenerative business looks like an alternative for other people’s companies. Not for a real business. Not for us.

And on the rare occasion it does occur to them, the second instinct takes over. The leader does not want to be personally exposed by trying to do something this different. So the impulse is routed to a safe place. CSR. A side project. A working group. Something to sponsor without standing behind. This is why CSR is the first thing jettisoned when budgets tighten. The leader was never on the line.

Wild Leadership is my contribution to this conversation. Others have done the intellectual work of describing what regenerative business is and why it matters. The literature is mature. The case has been made. But ideas do not change reality. People do. And the people who would have to carry these ideas into real businesses have been so thoroughly domesticated that they cannot.

The change being asked of business now is bigger than any change a domesticated leader can carry. There will be no regenerative business at scale until there are undomesticated leaders inside real businesses, willing to put this front and centre, willing to stake their reputation and their salary on it. Wild Leadership is the work of producing those leaders.

This is what puts the work I am doing alongside the work the others are doing. As the other half of theirs. They are working on what business is for. I am working on the leader who has to mean it.

The Three Moves

The work has a shape. Three moves, made together, not separately.

Recognise the taming. Refuse the editing. Reclaim wildness.

Recognise alone is just self-awareness. Refuse alone is rebellion. Reclaim alone is delusion. The work lives at the intersection.

Recognise begins with naming. The leader sits opposite me and names what they have not been allowed to name. Decisions routed through what the board would think. The reorganisation that solved no one’s actual problem. None of it is hidden. It just has not been said. Once they have seen the taming in themselves, they cannot unsee it. They start to see it in others. The second seeing matters as much as the first.

Then they start refusing the small daily edits. The view softened before it leaves the mouth. The sentence checked against the imagined committee inside the head. The discipline is unglamorous, and it is where the work is.

Reclaim is the existential move. The decision to stop accepting the half-life as the price of senior leadership. Not by leaving. By staying and doing the work differently. The ordinary decision the leader would have made before they were trained out of it, made now. What returns is who they always were.

You already know which of the three you are avoiding.

It is costly. The leaders who do it refuse rooms they used to want to be in. They accept smaller compensation than the captured version of themselves would have taken. Certain peers fall away. The cage was made of upside, and stepping out of it means stepping away from some of the upside. I have paid this cost myself.

I Will Become Richer

I have stepped away from being an operator. The pay was good. The next ten years were drawn. I left because the life I had been preparing was not one I wanted to arrive at.

Wild Leadership is the refusal to live a half-life. It is also an invitation. To the leader who has carried the question of what their business is actually for, and has had nowhere to put it. To the founder who built something good and watched it get domesticated.

I will become richer is the mantra the cage gives you. The bonus. The bigger title. The trinkets on the wrist. None of it is wrong. None of it is enough.

The richer life is the choice to lead a business that is profitable and regenerative at the same time. To be the leader who can answer both halves of what the business is for, and to mean them both. To leave the soil, the communities and the places more alive for your having run a company there.

That is the richer life. Mine is in this work. Yours, if you choose it, is in the business you lead.

Over to you.

It was the morning of the big pitch. Weeks of work were culminating in this moment. The chance to win the client over with our creative ideas, and win the account. As the most junior member of the pitch team my contribution had been limited to running errands and sorting out whatever was asked of me.

The Board Director went pale and put down his phone. The room went quiet.

“The client has a problem. Her husband’s car has broken down somewhere in Essex. He was on his way to Stansted. They are going on holiday straight after this pitch and she was going to meet him there. She says she ought to turn around and get him. She won’t be back for two weeks.”

Without even thinking it through I piped up. “I’ve got an idea.”

I left the meeting room and walked to reception.

Three hours later it was all smiles as the client left the building, having said she was very excited about our ideas.

You see, my idea was to go to the most powerful person in the building at that point. The receptionist whose husband ran a garage. In Essex.

Power is what gets the car fixed. The rest is title.

In any organisation power is distributed and doesn’t necessarily lie where you most expect it. In the Nineties some of the most powerful people in a London advertising agency sat at a desk like everybody else. She, and they were almost always women back then, was responsible for greeting visitors, arranging boardroom lunches with fancy biscuits in gold foil, booking taxis, and keeping the front of house looking like what you’d expect.

The receptionist, or receptionists if you were a particularly successful agency, were some of the most powerful people in the building. They knew everything. Who returned together late after the pub and got up to whatever in their offices. Birthdays. Mistresses. Everything.

We confuse authority with power. Not least because power is the promise we are given if we seek promotion. It is a lie told by those in authority. And it is what we give away when we allow ourselves to become domesticated.

When I started work as a graduate trainee in advertising the world moved at a slower pace. I was fresh out of university, excited to be in a dynamic and creative industry, and I loved the work. I loved the social side more. The slower pace meant plenty of time simply to hang out and chat with people.

I got on well with the creatives. Well enough that a group of the older ones, the longer-in-the-tooth ones, tolerated my boyish enthusiasm and let me join them at the Groucho Club across the road from the agency.

I felt like I was in the presence of royalty. These were multi-award-winning creatives. They spoke about the great campaigns they had made and about the good old days of advertising. The Don Draper days.

Except it wasn’t the good old days any more. They weren’t winning awards. The drinking, and I suspect the drugs, was how they were clinging on to old glories.

Each of them, I came to see, had sold out in some way. They had the corner office and tolerance of their behaviour. In return for which they turned out scripts for fast-moving consumer goods. Not cars, or luxury watches. No “We open on a beach” anymore.

They had the titles. They had the offices. They had the reputations. What they did not have was power. The receptionist downstairs had more.

Which leaves the question of what power actually is, if it isn’t any of the things the system rewards.

Real power is the capacity to act cleanly in the moment that matters. To make the call. To meet the situation without flinching, without calculating, without the drag of self-interest blurring the signal. The receptionist had this. The graduate trainee, briefly, had it too. The Board Director, in that pale moment with the phone in his hand, did not. He had every title in the room. He could not move.

A leader with enormous authority and no inner clarity is not powerful. They are positioned. The two are often confused, which is what the system depends on.

For the cleanest example of power, look at a lion. A lion has none of the things we associate with authority and is the clearest demonstration of power we have. It acts, rests, hunts, responds. It doesn’t rehearse the past or simulate the future. It doesn’t carry grievance forward. There is no construct in the way between the situation and the response.

The lion’s power is tested most when it’s hungry, when its young are threatened, when its territory is challenged. In those moments the lion acts with total commitment because its purpose is pure. There is no hesitation, no second-guessing, no routing of the decision through an imagined audience. The lion is fuel and mission, nothing else. This is what power looks like in its uncluttered form.

The human question is whether we can access that same purity when our own version of those moments arrives. To answer that, we need to look clearly at what’s in the way.

What’s in the way is the ego.

Not the basic sense of self that lets a person know their own name. Something else. The ego is the accumulation of a self that must now be defended. It is the sediment of experience: the praise that thickened identity, the wounds that added to what must be protected, the titles that now define, the reputations that must be maintained, the positions that must be held.

The ego is built from the outside in. It sounds like you to yourself, which is what makes it so hard to see. It thinks your thoughts as you. It offers its defence of the self as your own reasoning. It is, for most people most of the time, the narrator of their life without ever being identified as a narrator.

A leader run by their ego is a leader whose every decision is routed through a calculation they cannot see. The Board Director with the phone in his hand was not, in that moment, weighing the options. He was being weighed by them. The pitch represented something to him. The cancellation threatened that something. The ego registered the threat and froze.

The graduate trainee had less ego to defend. Less had been installed. The decision moved before the calculation arrived.

One may object that some ego is necessary to assert, to lead, to take a stand. What’s actually doing that work is ground, not ego. The two are often confused.

Domestication installs the ego. Editing maintains it.

Leaders are trained by the organisations they grow up inside. The approvals teach them what to say. The corrections teach them what to suppress. The rewards shape which parts of themselves to amplify and which to bury. Over time, the leader internalises the audience. The organisational gaze becomes the inner voice. The ego, in the form most leaders carry, is largely this: the residue of being domesticated by the organisations they have worked in. It is why so many senior leaders sound the same. They were trained on the same signals and have internalised the same audience.

Editing is the daily maintenance. The ego-run leader edits constantly, often without noticing. A view gets softened before it leaves the mouth. A decision gets routed through what the board will think. A sentence gets checked against the imagined reaction before being committed to. Each edit is a small act of self-protection. Over a career, the edits compound into a leader who no longer knows what they actually think, only what plays. The voice goes quiet. The judgement dulls. The force drains out.

Becoming less edited is not becoming blunt. Blunt is another pose, another edit in the opposite direction. Becoming less edited is letting the real thing through more often. Saying the sentence that’s actually true. Making the call that follows from what you actually see. Trusting the response that rises before the editing committee convenes. It is the practical discipline of refusing to maintain what was installed.

Less domesticated names what is being shed: the installation laid down by years inside organisations. Less edited names the daily practice of shedding it: the refusal, moment by moment, to maintain what was installed.

The lion is not domesticated. Nothing has been installed. Nothing is being maintained. Its power comes precisely from this: there is no construct in the way between the situation and the response. When the moment demands action, action is what happens, uncluttered by self-calculation. This is what human leaders are reaching for when they do the inner work. Not the removal of self, which is impossible and pointless. The removal of the installation.

Most leaders never do this work. Some go further in the other direction. Looking at where leaders actually sit on the spectrum of ego, a shape begins to emerge. It is a barbell.

At one end: low ego, high attachment to purpose and results. The leader disappears into the work. They are indifferent to being seen as right because the thing itself is what matters. Yvon Chouinard is the clearest living example. He built Patagonia into a global company while refusing almost every marker of founder-ego: no personal profile cultivation, no celebrity posture, eventually giving the company away to protect the purpose. His indifference to self is not performance. It is structural. The work is the point. He is not in the way of it.

At the other end: high ego, high attachment to self. Every move calibrated for personal position. Every decision a calculation about how it serves the self. This is the pole where ego justifies deceit, cruelty, the sacrifice of others, the sacrifice of organisations, eventually the sacrifice of anything at all, because the self has become the only thing that counts. The narcissist isn’t free of caring what people think. They are obsessed with it. They just read as not caring because they’re willing to be disliked in service of winning. Every move is still calibrated against how it positions them.

Both ends of the barbell can produce force. Both look fearless from outside. Only one produces clean force. The purpose-fuelled leader genuinely doesn’t compute the self-positioning question. The narcissist computes nothing else.

The soft middle is where most leadership lives. Run by ego but constrained by it. Needing to be liked. Managing image. Checking the wind. The weakest position, because the ego is in charge but won’t admit it, so every decision is compromised by a calculation the leader can’t even see. This is where domestication lands most leaders, and where they stay unless they choose the inner work. The creatives at the Groucho Club were here. So, by then, was the Board Director.

The point is not to become egoless. That is both impossible and another trap, because the ego simply takes up the new project and chases being egoless, which is still ego in spiritual costume. The point is to minimise ego as a driver. Daily. Not as an achievement but as a practice. Strive for it. Do not expect to arrive at it. The work is the reduction of ego’s authority, not its elimination.

Which raises the question of how. Which brings us back to the lion.

The lion, like all animals, is a supreme meditator. Not because it has a practice, but because it has no alternative. It sits with what is. No internal narrative. No rehearsal of yesterday. No projection of tomorrow. No editing. Just pure presence with the moment it is in. This is the base state that humans have largely lost and spend their lives trying to return to.

Meditation, properly understood, is the practice of returning. It is not relaxation. It is not emptying the mind. It is the deliberate training of the capacity to watch the mind without being inside it. To notice thoughts arising without being carried off by them. Mindfulness, which has become the marketable cousin of meditation, is a narrower practice: bringing attention to the present activity, whether walking, eating, breathing. Useful, but thinner. Meditation proper is the sustained practice of sitting with awareness itself, and it is harder than it looks.

It is harder because it is initially a battleground. When a leader sits down to meditate for the first time, their ego registers a threat. It has been the narrator, the manager, the unquestioned voice. Now it is being watched. Its response is predictable. It creates a busy mind. It throws doubts: you’re not good at this, this isn’t working, this is a waste of time, real leaders don’t sit still. These are not signs that meditation is failing. They are signs that meditation is working, because the ego, previously invisible, is now revealing itself as a thing happening rather than as the truth of who you are. The gap between you and it begins to open.

That gap is where leadership actually becomes possible. Until you can see the ego moving, you are just run by it. Once you can see it, you have a choice.

Time in nature does a different kind of work. It puts the leader in a system that does not care who they are. No titles. No audience. No feedback on how they’re doing. The forest doesn’t notice them. The sea doesn’t reward them. Whatever self-construct they have been maintaining has nothing to push against, and within a few hours, sometimes less, it begins to thin. You remember that you are an animal in a body, not a reputation moving through rooms. The sediment loosens because nothing is feeding it. This is why leaders return from time outdoors feeling lighter without being able to say quite why. The weight they were carrying was social. The society was temporarily absent.

Stillness is the third practice, and it is the one most leaders cannot do at all. It is not meditation as a formal practice, nor nature as a place. It is the capacity to be unoccupied. To sit in a room with no stimulus and no task, and simply be there.

Pascal observed, three centuries ago, that all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. The observation has only sharpened with time. Watch people in the liminal moments of a day: the wait for a lift, the pause between meetings, the minute in a queue. Almost none of them are still. The phone comes out immediately. Content pours in. The mind is kept busy at all costs, because stillness exposes what the busyness was covering. And what it was covering is the noise underneath. The noise of the ego, unobserved, running its commentary. A noisy mind is a less powerful mind. The leader who cannot sit alone for ten minutes without reaching for stimulation is a leader whose inner life has been outsourced to whatever the feed happens to be serving.

Stillness as a practice means refusing to fill the gap. Not all the time. But regularly. Enough that the mind learns that the gap is safe, that the noise will settle if left alone, that what is underneath is worth meeting. Over time the leader who practises stillness develops a different relationship with their own mind. It becomes something they can rely on rather than something they must manage.

These three practices are not self-care. They are not supplementary. They are the work.

And this is where Wild Leadership parts company with most of the leadership literature and almost all of the self-development industry. The self-development industry thrives on doubt, anxiety, and self-interest. Its economic model depends on the customer remaining inside the ego’s game. The frameworks, the courses, the optimisation programmes, the personal branding, the relentless focus on the self’s development are all, at bottom, exercises in thickening the self-construct rather than loosening it. The customer is kept busy becoming a better version of the self rather than becoming less run by the self. The ego is flattered that it is now a project. The domestication continues, just in a more flattering register.

Wild Leadership is the opposite move. The inner work is the work, because purpose cannot be fulfilled by a leader whose every decision is being edited in real time by an unseen committee. The undoing of domestication is not personal growth. It is the recovery of the capacity to lead. Most leaders get domesticated by the organisations they work in, and then spend their careers being run by what was installed. The practices of meditation, nature, and stillness are not additions to the leadership life. They are what makes real leadership possible in the first place.

The lion at rest is still. The lion on mission is something else. A pride hunting an antelope is the clearest image of purpose in action. Every member is in position. There is no performance, no jockeying, no calculation of individual credit. There is one goal, held by all, and the pride moves as a single organism toward it. The stillness and the mission are not in tension. The stillness is what makes the mission possible. The lion that cannot rest cannot hunt. The mind that cannot be still cannot act cleanly when action is required.

The receptionist could act because nothing had been installed in her yet. The Board Director could not, because too much had. The graduate trainee in that meeting was not yet a leader. Just lucky. Lucky to be too junior to have been edited. Lucky to have spent time with a powerful person to know when that power was needed most. The luck wears off. The editing begins. Most leaders spend the rest of their careers being run by what was installed in the years that followed.

The power is not added by the work. It is uncovered by it. It was always there, underneath what was installed.

You probably already know who in your building has the power. You probably also know what you have traded for what you have. The work begins where that knowing stops being abstract.

Purpose is the fuel. Ego is the friction. The most powerful leaders are not empty of self. They are simply not run by it, because something larger than the self is doing the pulling.

That is Wild Leadership. Grounded. Undefended. Moving because the work demands it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

It wasn’t fists banging on the table. No one was shouting across the boardroom.

But it was the moment I realised I had domesticated myself as a leader, even though I didn’t yet have the word for it.

I had raised a strategic issue. Not as rebellion. Just as a question worth exploring openly, so that different perspectives could be heard and a collective view could emerge.

That was not how the moment unfolded.

The CEO shut the conversation down calmly, said he would reflect on the issue and make the decision himself, and the meeting moved on.

Something shifted. I realised that the power I believed I had, and the power I believed the board had, did not exist in the way I had thought.

And yet I stayed. I adjusted. Over time, I became easier for the system to contain.

Most experienced leaders have had a moment like this. A meeting where they discovered the boundary of acceptable thought. A moment where the system revealed itself more clearly than before.

Very few people walk out of the room when that happens. Most do something much more human.

They adjust.

And that adjustment is where domestication begins.

The thesis

The thesis is simple. Organisations do not break their leaders by force. They reward them into compliance.

Promotions. Praise. Board approval. The quiet pleasure of being the big dog in the room. None of these are villainous. They are how the system works, and they work brilliantly. The leader who began with sharp instincts becomes the leader who runs everything past three stakeholders before speaking. They did not lose their judgement. They were trained to override it.

No one needs to break a leader. The system only needs to reward the parts of them that are easiest to control.

The leader who has been domesticated does not feel domesticated. They feel mature. Politically aware. Strategic. They have learned how the world works. They have stopped saying the thing that would once have got them in trouble. They are calmer in meetings. They are easier to manage.

They are also quieter than they used to be. Less in their own authority. More dependent on the room’s reaction to know what they think. The judgement is still there. It has just been trained to wait for permission.

This is not a story about bad leaders inside good systems, or good leaders inside bad ones. It is a story about how successful systems shape the people inside them, even when the systems mean well, and even when the people are good. Domestication is the price of admission. The longer you stay, the higher the price.

The question is what to do about it.

The Three Moves

I have come to think the work of Wild Leadership is three moves.

Not one act. Not a transformation. Three moves, made daily, made repeatedly, in the small moments where the system asks for the small adjustment.

Recognise. Refuse. Reclaim.

Recognise the taming. Refuse the editing. Reclaim wildness.

The square is the Machine. You do not escape it. You work inside it. The three circles are the moves. Where they overlap, in the centre, sits Your Wild Leadership.

It is not a destination. It is a practice. Only present when all three moves are happening at once.

Recognise alone is just self-awareness. Refuse alone is rebellion. Reclaim alone is delusion. The work lives at the intersection. And only there.

Each move has its own object. Each one is harder than the one before. And each one only becomes possible because of the one that came before it.

Recognise the taming. In yourself, and in others.

Seeing the taming is what the system most needs you not to do. As long as the leader cannot see the editing, the politicking, the small daily trades for comfort, the system runs without friction. The moment the leader sees, friction enters.

The board meeting I described was one such moment.

There was an earlier one, sharper. A senior colleague tore into my team in front of me. He was on the board. He had a reputation. My boss had told me beforehand that if he behaved this way I should let him get away with it and repair things with my team afterwards. By the time I sat down in the room, I had already been told how to respond. My authority had been handed over before I had used it. I just did not know it yet.

Once you have seen this in yourself, you cannot unsee it. And then, almost immediately, you start to see it in others. The leader who has gone quiet. The friend who keeps explaining why they cannot leave. The colleague who used to push back, who now nods. The mentor who has stopped giving the hard answer. You see them all. You see what each of them has traded, and what they got for it, and what it has cost them.

This second seeing matters as much as the first. Recognising your own taming can be a private grief. Recognising it in others is the beginning of solidarity. The work cannot be done alone. The three moves are easier to make in the company of other people who are also making them. Recognition is the doorway through which that company becomes findable.

Refuse the editing

The view that gets softened before it leaves your mouth. The decision that gets routed through what the board will think. The sentence that gets checked against the imagined reaction before being committed to.

Each edit is small. Over a career, the edits compound into a leader who no longer knows what they actually think, only what plays.

The editing is the daily maintenance of the domesticated self. The leader who has been shaped by years inside an institution edits constantly, often without noticing. There is the imagined committee that convenes between thought and speech: the chair, the CFO, the dominant peer, the person whose approval has come to matter more than it should. Every sentence is run past the committee before it is allowed out. By the time the sentence emerges, the original thought has been smoothed, qualified, rounded, made safe. The voice goes quiet. The judgement dulls. The force drains out.

Refusing the editing is the daily discipline of catching this in real time. Not afterwards, when the meeting is over and the moment is gone. In the moment itself. The pause before you speak, where you notice you are about to say the cleaner version, and then you say the other one instead.

I have a board pre-read open on my desk as I write this. The first time I drafted it, I was spending more time massaging the message than working on the points I most needed to make. I caught myself. I rewrote it. The version that went out is harder for the room to read. It is also closer to the truth.

The discipline is unglamorous. There is no triumph in it. You will not always get it right. The first few times you refuse the editing, you may notice that the room reacts the way the imagined committee said it would, which makes the next refusal harder, not easier. This is normal. The committee inside your head was trained on real data. The reactions are real. What you are learning is that the reactions are survivable, and that the work does not require their absence.

This is the move that turns recognition into practice. Without it, the seeing becomes a private ache. With it, the seeing turns into a way of moving through the day.

Reclaim wildness.

The first two moves are practical. The third is existential.

To edit yourself moment by moment is one thing. To live, year after year, as the edited version of yourself is something else. That is the half life. Partial. Attenuated. A leader operating at half their real authority, the rest quietly traded for comfort, security, and the smooth running of the institution they serve.

The half life is the most successful product of the Machine. Most senior leaders are living it. The Machine prefers it that way. A leader at half life is predictable, manageable, available for whatever the system requires. They are also slowly disappearing.

Reclaiming wildness is the decision to stop accepting the half life as the price of senior leadership. Not by leaving. Though some will leave. By staying and doing the work differently. By making the ordinary decision, cleanly, that you would have made before you were trained out of it.

The clearest example I can think of is the work of Wild Leadership itself. It could have sat in my head and as scribbled notes for years, as I got on with business. But here it is, growing in real time, right in front of you. You are reading this, and now you cannot unknow it.

This is where Wild Leadership lives. Not in the dramatic resignation. Not in the bold statement to the board. In the ordinary decision, made cleanly, that you would have made before you were trained out of it.

This is also where the leader becomes dangerous again. Not reckless. Not loud. Difficult to bend away from what they know to be true. The system can manage a leader at half life. It cannot manage one who has come back.

Rewilding

There is a biological metaphor for this work that is closer than any management analogy.

In rewilding, the deliberate practice is to remove the management that has shaped a domesticated landscape, so that the land can return to its own intelligence. It is not the absence of stewardship. It is a different kind of stewardship. You stop intervening in the ways that produced the domesticated outcome, and you allow the latent ecology to reassert itself.

The land remembers what it was. You just stop overwriting it.

Rewilding is, in practical terms, mostly a discipline of not doing. Not mowing. Not spraying. Not draining. Not replacing what falls. The land does not need new interventions. It needs the old ones to stop.

What returns is not designed. The hedgerows thicken. The soil rebuilds. Species return that nobody planted. At Knepp, in West Sussex, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell let three thousand five hundred acres of intensively farmed land go. Within twenty years, the land had become one of the most biodiverse places in southern England. Nightingales returned. Turtle doves. Purple emperors. None of it was planted. None of it was managed back into being. It was already there, latent, beneath the management. The work was the deliberate withdrawal of the work.

Wild Leadership is the same.

The leader, like the land, is not being built into something new. They are returning to a coherence that was always there, obscured by management. The three moves are the deliberate withdrawal of the editing. Recognise what has been done. Refuse to keep doing it. Reclaim what was buried under the management.

What returns is not designed. It is what was always there.

What was true before

The leaders I now work with, the ones who are doing this work, are not becoming new people. They are not adding skills. They are not finding their voice. They are returning to a voice that was theirs before the organisation taught them to speak in another one.

Wild Leadership is the work of becoming dangerous again. Not reckless. Grounded. Brave.

Wild Leadership is what was true before you were edited.

Recognise. Refuse. Reclaim. That is how you find your way back.

You already know which of the three you are avoiding.

You have known for some time.

The work starts there.

I was very young, and now I am a lot older, as this story will reveal.

We were sat in the dark. My family, my cousins, aunts and uncles. We had been promised this with huge excitement, and it was the reason we had been invited round that Sunday to drink tea, fizzy lemonade, eat white bread sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and sit in the dark.

We were about to watch a slide show.

Of my cousins’ summer holiday.

The projector whirred and the first (of a seemingly never-ending) carousel of blurring images hit the sheet pinned to the wall over the family photographs.

It was a performance. And not a very good one.

So, what has this to do with AI?

Let’s skip forward a few decades and think about movie making.

Actors, directors, editors, producers. Each plays a distinct role in bringing a movie into the world.

Start with the actor, because this is where the argument against AI actually lives.

AI is the actor. It performs fluently, at scale, on cue. Give it a prompt and it delivers. Words, images, music, code, spreadsheets. Whatever you ask of it.

This is where the argument against AI is wrong. Because it is based on an entirely mistaken belief.

The comforting criticism of any AI performance is that it is hollow. Technically present, emotionally absent. Not real work.

The moral high ground is staked, and creators carry on. Underneath, the unease grows. Because the threat is real, and it is pointed at their jobs and their income.

The mistaken belief is that humans are better than AI.

AI can act better than most humans who call themselves writers, designers, analysts. Not better than the best. But better than average.

Nobody likes to think they are average. Most of us are. That is what average means.

The threshold for quality content, spreadsheets, code, has already been met, at scale, at speed. AI will continue to get exponentially better. And it doesn’t require its ego massaged.

AI is inevitable. Its shape is not.

You will hear a counter-argument. That AI produces slop. That the output is generic, repetitive, obviously machine-made. And it is true, when AI is used badly.

Prompted well, it is not.

Directed carefully, given context, challenged, refined, AI performs above average with striking consistency. The slop is not the ceiling. It is what happens when no one is doing any of the other roles.

Which means the comparison that matters is not AI versus human. It is well-directed AI versus average human. And in that comparison, the human is losing.

So, if what you do for a living is act, generating competent output on demand, you are in trouble. Not tomorrow. Now.

Which raises the harder question. If the actor is no longer a defensible role, what is?

Direction is one answer. The director shapes the performance: its tone, its atmosphere, how it sits in the world. A director works with the actor to bring out the best in their performance. It’s a collaboration: ideas, challenges, and reframes flowing backwards and forwards. The work evolves. This is a healthy, creative relationship between director and actor. AI or not.

But direction alone is not enough.

The editor is the most underweighted role in creative work, and the most exposed by AI. The editor decides what stays and what goes: refuses material that is technically fine but does not belong; removes the line you love because it flatters the writer rather than serving the work.

Refusal is the editor’s work. And refusal erodes when working with AI. When output arrives well-formed, the instinct to cut weakens. There is less ego attached and therefore less resistance. Which sounds like freedom. It is, in fact, corrosion.

What is left on the cutting room floor matters as much as what appears in the final edit. Sometimes more. When AI can show you everything, what you refuse defines the work.

Then there is the producer. The producer decides whether the work should exist at all. Which idea earns its place. Whose name it goes out under. The producer asks the question that comes before all the others. Does the world need this?

In a world where AI generates without limit, this is the most important question. The scarce resource is no longer output. It is judgement about what deserves to be brought into the world.

People are calling the flood of AI-generated work “slop”. The problem is not the tool. It is that only the actor is at work.

Director, editor and producer. These roles are not a hierarchy. They are an ensemble. Direction without editing is bloat. Editing cannot save work that should not exist. The producer’s judgement is tested against the expertise of the whole ensemble. Including the actor. Together they hold the work up.

AI cannot do this because it involves intangible — and so uncodable — human intuition, relationship, experiences, and values.

The question is not whether AI can create and put you out of work. Nor is it its companion question of whether we should let AI create in the first place.

AI creation is a simulacrum. It is pattern recognition taking your prompt and delivering something based on what has been done before. An act. Something it can do better than most people.

The question is which role you are actually playing.

If you are acting, generating competent material on demand, AI has caught up. The ground you stood on is no longer yours.

If you are directing, editing, or producing, if you are deciding what the work means, what it needs, and whether it should exist, AI does not threaten you. It extends you.

Most of the anxiety in the current moment comes from a truth creators are not ready to say out loud. A lot of what has been called creative work was never really creative. It was performance dressed as authorship. Acting instead of originality.

I am not writing this from a distance. Many of my friends work in creative industries. They are dealing day-to-day with AI reducing and replacing their work and their income. The impact on them, their families, and their mental health is real. A threat does not go away if you ignore it. Which is why I am exploring this in public, and why this essay does not end with reassurance.

So what does this mean for you?

If you are an average actor you need to get better at your craft. In the words of Steve Martin who ruthlessly worked on his stand up comedy for years before he hit the big time, “So good they can’t ignore you.”

If you can’t or don’t want to do that, then you need to find something else to do.

That might start with the honesty to admit you have been acting, and the realisation that you have other roles available. Director. Editor. Producer.

It might start with the decision to partner with AI, rather than fighting a battle you will lose.

If you are a leader, then it’s time to get Wild. That means facing up to reality and choosing to collaborate.

In the Forest when a tree is attacked by a virus, disease, or insect, trees nearby collaborate by diverting resources to the ailing tree and sharing them through the fungal mycelium network that interconnects everything rooted in the forest. The embattled tree does not fight alone.

As a leader you can decide to collaborate with AI. You can decide your role at any one time: director, editor, or producer. You can model this behaviour, and encourage others to do the same.

You can decide. You can move.

Or you can stand alone. Refuse collaboration. Perhaps because this partnership is new and strange.

And if you do, you will come to see this time as your “Kodak Moment” — the time when Kodak threw away market leadership because they stuck to what they knew, rather than embrace digital photography.

When it comes to AI, Wild Leadership involves embracing it — with eyes open — exploring, making decisions on how to use it, and getting on with it.

I have given you a new way to think about it. How you act on it is yours to decide.

I work in creative industries. Many of my friends are dealing day-to-day with the impact of AI reducing and replacing their work and income. The impact on them, their families, and their mental health is very real. But a threat doesn’t go away if you ignore it.

As much as I am a lover of nature I am also a technology enthusiast, not blindly so, and that is why I am exploring this in public. Please join me in this by sharing your thoughts and comments.

If the question of how leaders should navigate AI interests you, my earlier essay Wild Leadership in the Age of AI explores the barbell between nature and technology, and why the dangerous ground is the middle.

Magnus,
My garden in Kent, April 2026

Here is an irony worth starting with.

One of the most precise accounts of machine thinking begins not in a factory, but in a forest.

In the nineteenth century, European states began reforming their woodlands. The goal was rational management. Timber yield was measured. Species were reduced to the most productive. Trees were planted in rows, at intervals, for efficient harvest. The old tangled forest, with its layered complexity, its interdependencies, its slow accumulations, was replaced with something that could be counted, planned, audited, and controlled.

For a generation, it worked.

Then the forests started dying.

The simplified system, optimised for legibility, had quietly stripped out the complexity that kept it alive. Soil degraded. Disease spread without the resistance that diversity had provided. Yields collapsed. The Germans, with their precision for naming what others only feel, eventually found a word for it: Waldsterben. Forest death. The word arrived decades after the forestry had made it inevitable.

The lesson is not that management is foolish. It is that a particular kind of management, one that treats a living system as if it were a machine, produces results that are temporarily impressive and eventually hollow.

This pattern did not stay in the forest.

The Model That Won

The Machine model is not just a metaphor. It is a design stance.

It treats organising as an engineering problem: break work into discrete components, optimise each component, control the interfaces between them, and extract predictable output. It assumes the world is legible enough to be managed from above. It privileges what can be counted, compared, audited, and standardised. Everything else, the tacit, the relational, the adaptive, gets quietly set aside.

In the early twentieth century, this was a powerful response to a genuine problem.

Frederick Winslow Taylor looked at how work was being done and saw waste everywhere, not from laziness, but from habit. Workers had inherited methods from their predecessors. Nobody had measured them. Nobody had asked whether there was a better way. Taylor asked. He timed. He standardised. He named the result Scientific Management, and the name tells you the ambition: to bring the certainty of science to the chaos of human labour. Find the one best way. Apply it everywhere.

Henry Ford took the logic and built it into architecture. The moving assembly line, first operated in 1913, was not primarily a mechanical achievement. It was a structural one. Work was decomposed into steps so small and so repeatable that the entire factory could function as a single coordinated machine. The Model T fell from $850 to $260. Fifteen million were built. Ownership of a motor car shifted from the wealthy to the ordinary.

These were not small gains. The Machine model compressed decades of progress into years. It created the conditions in which modern economies became possible.

Taylor and Ford were not villains. To see them as that is to lose the argument against the Machine before we have really begun. They were not wrong. Their tools worked, in the environments and for the problem-types those tools were designed for.

The error was not the model itself. The error was the assumption that every problem is the same kind of problem.

Some problems are tame. They are complicated, perhaps, but tractable. They have known solutions. They yield to process, expertise, and the application of the right method. A tame problem can be solved, handed off, and closed.

Other problems are wicked. They have no clear cause-and-effect relationship. Every attempt to address them changes the nature of the problem. They cannot be solved, only navigated, with judgment, patience, and continuous adaptation. Wicked problems do not close. They evolve.

The Machine model was built for tame problems. For the first half of the twentieth century, much of the work of industrial economies was, in this sense, tame. Repeatable. Optimisable. The model fit the problem.

The machine was the right answer. To a question we are no longer asking.

When the Problems Changed

The Machine model did not fail because leaders became complacent. It began to fail because the nature of the work changed beneath it.

For most of the industrial era, the dominant problems of organisational life were tame. How do you produce more units at lower cost? How do you coordinate thousands of workers across a factory floor? How do you move goods reliably from one place to another? These were complicated problems, but tractable ones. They had knowable solutions. The Machine model was built for exactly this terrain, and on that terrain it performed.

Then economies grew more complex. Globalisation lengthened supply chains until causes and effects were separated by continents and months. Organisations scaled until the relationships between their parts became too numerous and too dynamic to map. Markets moved faster than planning cycles. Technology changed the nature of work faster than management theory could follow.

The proportion of genuinely wicked problems in any leader’s day, problems without clear causes, without clean solutions, without any stable ground to stand on, increased steadily, structurally, and without announcement.

This would have been manageable if human perception were well-suited to complex systems. It is not.

We are wired for linear thinking. We see objects, actions, immediate consequences. Feedback loops, time delays, emergent effects, the grammar of complex systems, do not register naturally. We perceive what is visible and proximate. The rest remains, as far as our instincts are concerned, invisible.

So we fix what we can see.

The Machine model is, above all else, a technology for making things visible. It converts complexity into metrics, relationships into reporting lines, judgment into process. But the picture it creates is not the organisation. It is a version of the organisation in which everything that resists measurement has already been removed. Leaders manage from that picture, confidently, without knowing what it left out.

The bias and the model reinforce each other. Leaders who struggle to perceive complex systems reach for tools that simplify them. The tools produce a version of the organisation that feels knowable. The knowable version gets managed. The rest accumulates, quietly, as the gap between what the organisation measures and what is actually happening inside it.

That gap is where most of the important problems now live.

The Model That Digitised

It is tempting to treat the Machine model as a relic, something that belongs to the factory floor and the era of time-and-motion studies. This is a comfortable story. It is not accurate.

The Machine model did not retire. It was upgraded.

From the 1980s onwards, information technology gave machine logic new infrastructure. Work that had previously resisted standardisation, customer service, administration, professional knowledge work, could now be tracked, scored, and managed with an industrial precision that Taylor could only have imagined.

Call centres are the clearest early example. Agents follow scripts. Calls are timed. Performance is scored across quantitative and qualitative dimensions simultaneously, in real time. Management does not sit on the floor watching. Management is built into the software. The logic is Taylor’s. The implementation is digital.

Warehousing followed. In logistics operations across Europe and beyond, studies document what researchers began calling neo-Taylorism: work instructions delivered through handheld devices, performance tracked continuously, deviation from optimal routes recorded and fed back. The worker’s body moves through space according to an optimisation algorithm. Judgment, where it existed, is engineered out.

Platform work completes the picture. Platform work is the model behind companies like Uber, Deliveroo, and the broader gig economy: individuals working through digital platforms rather than as direct employees, their tasks assigned, monitored, and evaluated entirely by software. Algorithmic management, control through code, executes the functions that managers once performed: directing workers, evaluating their performance, adjusting their rewards. Much of what a manager used to do is now done automatically, invisibly, and at scale. Platform workers are directed, rated, and disciplined by systems they cannot see, cannot question, and cannot appeal to.

The scale of this is worth sitting with. EU-wide survey data from recent years finds the majority of workers using digital devices as a core part of their work, and digital monitoring, of hours, activity, location, and output, common across sectors. During the pandemic, remote monitoring accelerated sharply. Keystroke tracking. Webcam analysis. Email monitoring. The office became a factory. The home became a workstation. The distinction between managed and unmanaged time quietly collapsed.

This is the modern face of the Machine model. It is not nostalgic. It is not declining. It is being refined continuously, by organisations that have more data about worker behaviour than Taylor could have collected in a lifetime.

And yet the failure modes have not changed. They were visible almost from the beginning, and in the place you would least expect to find them, which is precisely the point.

The Machine model is not a product of capitalism. It is not a Western habit or a corporate pathology. It is a logic. And wherever that logic has been applied, regardless of ideology, geography, or era, the same patterns have emerged. No example makes this clearer than what happened in 1935, when the Soviet Union, the ideological opposite of Ford’s America, launched a mass movement built on identical principles.

The Machine Model and the Domesticated Leader

In 1935, the Soviet state celebrated a coal miner named Alexei Stakhanov, who had reportedly mined 102 tons in a single shift, fourteen times his quota. His image went on posters. His name became a movement. Across Soviet industry, workers were urged to match him, then surpass him. Records kept falling. Targets kept rising.

The numbers, it later emerged, were fiction. Stakhanov had worked with a team of helpers whose output was credited to him alone. The movement had optimised for the metric, not the mining. Targets escalated until they became impossible, and workers who could not meet them faced consequences. Those who questioned the system risked being labelled wreckers. What had begun as propaganda ended in resentment and resistance, the predictable result of a system that rewards compliance until compliance becomes impossible.

George Orwell captured what this looks like from the inside. In Animal Farm, the Stakhanovite is Boxer the horse, whose response to every setback is the same:

I will work harder.

It is not a portrait of laziness or rebellion. It is a portrait of a creature who has so completely internalised the machine’s demands that nothing of the original animal remains. Boxer is devoted, tireless, and entirely lost. He works himself to exhaustion in service of a system that will, in the end, send him to the knacker.

Nobody broke Boxer. Nobody needed to.

The system simply rewarded the parts of him that were easiest to manage, and over time those parts consumed the rest.

His tragedy is not that he was exploited. It is that he could no longer tell the difference between what the farm wanted and what he wanted. He had forgotten he ever wanted anything else.

This is not only a story about Soviet industry or talking animals. It is the story of what the Machine model does to people, at every level, in every era. The forces that shaped Boxer, comfort, belonging, the accumulated weight of small instructions, the habit of answering difficulty with more effort, operate on leaders inside organisations today with the same quiet persistence. The Machine model and the domesticated leader are not separate problems. They are the same problem seen from different angles. I wrote about this in more depth in The Domestication of Leaders.

The Machine model does not require villains. It requires only that people learn, as Boxer did, to measure their worth by what the system measures, and to stop asking what the system is actually for.

Three failure modes follow from this, and they repeat at every scale.

The first is the corruption of measurement. When a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring the thing you cared about. This is not an accident or an abuse of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed. People are rational. They optimise for what is tracked. What is tracked becomes detached from what matters. The metric captures the behaviour without capturing the meaning. Management reads the numbers and mistakes the map for the territory.

The second is the misalignment of reward. Incentive systems produce the output they incentivise, not the output they intend. Design the system wrong and it will perform exactly as designed, which is to say, badly. This is not a human failing. It is a mechanical one. The machine runs as built. The error is not in the people. It is in the architecture.

The third is the self-defeating nature of control. Intensive monitoring produces, over time, the very conditions it was built to prevent. Research consistently links high surveillance to higher stress, lower trust, greater resistance, and higher turnover. The organisation tightens its grip. The grip accelerates the decline. The response is to tighten further. More control creates less of the thing control was meant to produce.

The Machine model, applied to the wrong problem, does not fail dramatically. It fails gradually, in the way the forests failed. Through the slow failure of everything it mistook for irrelevance.

Why Leaders Keep Reaching For It

If the failure modes are visible, why does the model persist?

Not from ignorance. From structural gravity.

The first force is legibility. Organisations must be readable from a distance, by boards, by shareholders, by regulators, by ministers. Complex realities that resist measurement make leadership look uncomfortably opaque. Machine-like designs solve this problem. They produce the numbers, the dashboards, the auditable processes that allow oversight from above. Complexity that cannot be measured gets quietly removed from the picture, not through cynicism, but through the cumulative pressure of having to explain yourself to people who are not in the room.

The second force is accountability. Since the early 1980s, audit culture has expanded from finance into medicine, education, social services, environmental practice, almost every domain of organisational life. Audit cultures reward what can be verified. They naturally select for explicit processes, traceable decisions, and measurable outputs. The Machine model is not just convenient in this environment. It is the mechanism by which accountability is performed.

The third force is capital. When ownership and control are separated, which is the condition of almost every large organisation, investors require a substitute for direct oversight. Measurement becomes that substitute. Trust is emotionally expensive and hard to verify. Metrics are cheap and auditable. The Machine model is not imposed on leaders by investors. It is the language that the relationship between them requires.

None of these forces are irrational in isolation. Each one, in context, makes sense. Together they form an environment that continuously selects for machine-like leadership, regardless of what leaders believe in private, regardless of what they know about how organisations actually function.

This is why framing the Machine model as a failure of leadership imagination misses the point. Most leaders who reach for control, metrics, and process are not lacking vision. They are responding to a system that rewards them for doing so, and makes the alternative genuinely costly.

The Machine model persists because it is the rational response to the world that surrounds it.

The question is whether that world is changing faster than most leaders are prepared for.

The Third Wave

I knew something was off when I sent it.

Sarah was prickly. The request was complicated. I had a lot of information to convey and not enough time to think carefully about how to frame it for her, specifically. So I gave the information to ChatGPT and let it construct the email.

It did the job cleanly. I sent it.

She replied within the hour. Not to the request. To what she had noticed. The email didn’t sound like me. The information was there but the thinking wasn’t. She knew I had used an AI. And if I couldn’t be bothered to make a proper case, she said, she couldn’t be bothered to engage with it.

She was right.

I hadn’t handed the machine the information. I had the information. What I had handed over was the part that required judgment: how to approach someone I found difficult, what she actually needed to hear, what kind of argument would land with her. The thing that was mine to carry.

ChatGPT assembled the words accurately. It had no idea who Sarah was.

This is what the third wave feels like from inside it. Not dramatic. Not a single moment of surrender. An afternoon when the thinking felt like too much, and the tool was right there. I told myself I was being efficient. What I was actually doing was letting the machine into territory I hadn’t noticed I was handing over.

The first wave of machine logic reached the body. Taylor and Ford turned physical labour into a system of optimised, repeatable actions. The worker’s hands and movements were brought under management. The gains were real and visible: scale, speed, affordability. The cost, deskilling, the removal of judgment, the reduction of a person to a component, was easier to ignore when the alternative was poverty.

The second wave reached the voice, the presence, the service relationship. Digital Taylorism turned customer interaction, knowledge processing, and information work into something that could be tracked, scored, and standardised. The worker’s behaviour was brought under management. Call scripts. Performance dashboards. Productivity metrics applied to work that had previously resisted them. The logic was identical. The territory was new.

The third wave is reaching the mind.

Artificial intelligence is extending machine logic into cognitive work, the territory that, until recently, seemed genuinely beyond the model’s reach. Professional judgment. Creative synthesis. Analysis. Writing. Strategic thinking. These were the last domains where the complexity of thought provided a natural defence against standardisation. That defence is eroding.

This is not a distant prospect. It is already the direction of travel in professional services, consultancy, law, and medicine. AI systems do not replace judgment overnight. They fragment it. They take the components of knowledge work that can be standardised, retrieval, summarisation, pattern-matching, drafting, and automate them. What remains is meant to be the higher-order work. In practice, the higher-order work often gets compressed too, squeezed into the gaps between automated outputs that need reviewing, approving, and sending.

The deeper change is structural. When AI handles the tame components of cognitive work, what is left is not automatically elevated. It is simply more exposed. The parts of the work that require genuine judgment, navigating ambiguity, building trust, making calls that cannot be fully explained, become visible as the parts the machine cannot reach. Most organisations will respond by trying to systematise those too: building frameworks around judgment, processes around culture, metrics around meaning. This is the pattern. It has repeated at every wave.

The Machine model, in other words, is about to receive its most powerful upgrade yet. And the upgrade will look, as it always has, like progress.

For tame cognitive work, repeatable analysis, standard documentation, structured problem-solving, this will produce real gains. The model still fits. The tools still work. There is no virtue in resisting automation of work that is genuinely mechanical, even when that work sits inside a professional role.

But the problems that matter most in leadership are not tame. They are wicked. They involve culture, trust, purpose, the development of people, the navigation of genuine uncertainty. These are not problems that yield to the right algorithm, however sophisticated. They require the qualities that machine logic systematically undervalues: presence, judgment, relational depth, the capacity to sit with ambiguity without reaching prematurely for resolution.

As AI colonises the tame, the wicked becomes the only territory that genuinely requires human leadership. The tragedy would be if leaders, surrounded by more machine infrastructure than ever before, responded by becoming more machine-like themselves, optimising for what the system measures, deferring to what the algorithm recommends, managing the metrics rather than the meaning.

That trajectory is available. It requires no particular decision. It simply requires not noticing.

What This Has To Do With You

The Machine model does not announce itself.

It arrives gradually, through reasonable-sounding decisions. You introduce a performance framework because clarity helps people know what is expected. You add a reporting layer because the board needs visibility. You standardise the process because consistency reduces error. You track the metrics because you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

Each step makes sense in isolation. None of them feel like a capitulation. Taken together, over months and years, they produce an organisation that has been engineered for legibility and optimised for what can be counted, while the things that cannot be counted, the things that actually determine whether the organisation is alive or merely functioning, slowly lose ground.

The process is invisible from inside it. That is the point.

Ask yourself where you actually work.

Not the organisation you describe in your strategy documents. Not the culture deck, or the values on the wall, or the all-hands presentation about purpose. The organisation as it operates on a Tuesday afternoon, when someone flags a problem that does not fit neatly into the process, or raises a question that the framework does not cover, or suggests an approach that would be harder to measure but might be more true.

What happens in that moment?

Does the question get taken seriously, even though it slows things down? Or does the system absorb it, file it, redirect it, translate it into something more legible, and move on? Does the person who raised it feel heard, or do they learn that raising things like that is not how things work here?

If the system is absorbing the question, you are working in a machine. A sophisticated one, perhaps. A well-intentioned one. One that almost certainly has good values written somewhere near the entrance. But a machine.

This is not a judgment. It is a description of what happens when the structural pressures described in this essay are stronger, as they almost always are, than any individual’s desire to resist them. Most leaders who run machine organisations did not set out to do so. They set out to deliver results, to satisfy their boards, to hold things together under pressure. The Machine model is what that looks like, at scale, over time.

The Machine model does not require a tyrant. It does not require bad people or bad intentions. It requires only that the system’s appetite for legibility is stronger than any individual’s appetite for complexity. In most organisations, it is. The appetite for complexity is personal and costly. The appetite for legibility is institutional and rewarded.

And now AI is in the room, ready to service that appetite at a scale and speed that was previously impossible. More legibility. More measurement. More of the organisation made visible, trackable, and comparable. The machine is about to become more machine-like. Leaders who are not paying attention will find themselves, two or three years from now, managing something that looks impressively optimised and feels strangely inert.

The forest died not because the foresters were cruel. It died because the system surrounding them rewarded yield and punished ambiguity. The foresters were rational. The forest bore the consequences. And when the consequences arrived, when the soil degraded and the disease spread, the response was not to question the model. It was to intensify it.

That is the move to watch for. Not the dramatic failure, but the quiet doubling down.

The question is not whether the Machine model is present in your organisation. It is. The question is whether you have noticed where its reach ends, and what lives, or struggles to live, in the territory beyond.

That territory is not inefficiency. It is not the unmanaged residue of a system that has not yet been fully optimised. It is the part of your organisation that is genuinely alive: the relationships, the judgment, the adaptive capacity, the culture that cannot be mandated, the values that only survive when they are lived rather than posted, the institutional wisdom that cannot be specified in a process document but determines almost everything about whether the work matters and whether the people doing it are still in it, rather than just going through it.

The Machine model will not protect that territory. It will not see it, cannot value it, and given sufficient time and sufficient pressure, will colonise it.

What remains, when that territory is gone, is an organisation that functions. That hits its numbers. That can be audited and reported and compared. An organisation that has optimised itself, quietly and thoroughly, for everything except the things that made it worth building in the first place.

That is not a future problem. For many leaders reading this, it is a present one.

For a long time, the trees still looked like trees.

The Germans called it Waldsterben. Forest death. Not collapse. A slow withdrawal of the conditions that kept the system alive.

Ask yourself whether that is happening in your organisation.

And whether you would know if it was.

I threatened to turn up in a Batman costume.

I’d just received yet another rejection from an advertising agency for a graduate position. Notoriously difficult to get into (the careers counsellor at university told me she couldn’t help), I had received rejection after rejection from top-tier London advertising agencies, and I’d had enough.

So I wrote back and threatened them that, if they didn’t interview me, I would turn up one day dressed as Batman.

I got the interview. I got the job.

I displayed more authority in that letter than I would have at any point in the years that followed. I had nothing behind me then. No title and no track record that meant anything to anyone. What I had was grounded in my own self-belief, my creative and communications instincts, and a complete refusal to accept the agency’s verdict.

Threatening to turn up in a Batman costume was grounded authority in its purest form. I just didn’t know it yet. And I had no idea what was coming.

You’ve had a moment like that. Before the first job. Before the first title. A time when you operated entirely from yourself, when no one had yet told you whose judgement counted more. It may have looked nothing like a Batman costume but the quality was identical.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Something happened to that quality. This essay is about what happened and how.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A few years into my career, I was lucky enough to have a job where I worked for a week each month in San Francisco. I loved it. I was doing some of the best work of my career: building deep relationships with the client, generating ideas that landed, earning genuine trust. By any measure of what good work looks like, I was delivering it.

Then I had a review with my new boss back in London.

He said: “You’ve done great work for San Francisco. But not for London. And that’s a problem for us, and for you.”

I had spent months becoming great. In the wrong country.

What followed taught me something I didn’t fully understand at the time. Determined to prove myself in London, I identified a creative opportunity and persuaded the client to run it. The campaign went on to become one of the most awarded of that year.

They fired me anyway.

I didn’t understand it at the time. But the problem that got me fired was never the quality of my work. I had misread what the machine was actually measuring. I thought it measured results. It measured something else entirely: fit, alignment, manageability. Whether you were the right shape for the organisation, visible to the right people, operating within the right geography of power. I had spent months being great in San Francisco and then delivered an awarded campaign in London. It made no difference.

Only later did the lesson become clear: results are not sufficient protection. What protects you inside an organisation is positional authority — the right relationships, the right visibility, the right alignment with the people who decide whose judgement counts.

I carried that lesson forward.

Most leaders do. The machine delivers it early enough that it feels like growing up. You get better at what the organisation actually requires. More politically aware. More careful about visibility. More attuned to whose judgement counts and when. It feels like maturity. Like knowing how the world works.

What it actually is, is the beginning of domestication.

And somewhere beneath that adaptation, the person who once operated entirely from themselves gets a little quieter. Not gone. Not yet. But quieter.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Some years later I was in a meeting when a senior colleague from the project management department came in and began to rip into my team.

Joel was his name. He said my team was cutting corners, didn’t know how to work properly with his department.

What he said was untrue. I knew it. My team knew it.

But I sat there and watched.

It was, without doubt, one of the lowest points of my career. And although I didn’t know it then, it was the beginning of the end of my time at that company.

Because that day I lost my team. They were deeply bruised by these unfair comments and accusations. My failure to speak up for them broke trust. They left the meeting not knowing where they stood, or whether I was much use to them.

Why didn’t I act?

I could tell you it was because Joel was on the Board. That he had a ‘reputation’. That he behaved this way with everybody and got away with it. All of that was true.

But the real reason was simpler. And more troubling.

I had been told — by my boss, before anything had happened — that if Joel acted up like this, I should just let him get away with it and recover things with my team afterwards.

That instruction. That quiet, managerial instruction, delivered before the meeting, before Joel, before any of it — that was the moment. Not the meeting. Not Joel.

By the time I sat down in that room, I had already been told how to respond. My authority had already been handed over. The machine had got there first.

I just didn’t know it yet.

I went on to become a Chief Strategy Officer. I learned that to succeed at that level was all about the internal. The relationships, the politics, the careful management of how you were perceived by the people who mattered. I got good at it. Good enough to reach the top of my function.

And then something shifted. I lost interest in the practice of the work itself and became more interested in something the machine didn’t measure — helping my team grow. My billable hours dropped. My focus on people didn’t fit the CEO’s view of what a senior leader was for.

He fired me.

Looking back, I understand it differently now. The machine didn’t eject a domesticated leader who had stopped performing. It ejected a leader who had started, quietly and without quite knowing it, to reject the machine and become less domesticated. The sparky individual who once threatened to turn up in a Batman costume had begun, after years of silence, to stir.

The organisation noticed before I did.

This is how it works.

What I have just described is domestication. Not metaphor. The same process that reshapes a wild animal into something manageable, predictable and easy to contain — operating on leaders, inside organisations, across careers.

In the 1950s the Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev began selecting silver foxes for a single trait: tameness. Each generation he kept only the foxes that showed least fear of humans. Within forty years the result was not just behavioural compliance but physical transformation — floppy ears, mottled coats, altered physiology. The animal had been completely reshaped by what the system consistently rewarded. No single fox chose it. No dramatic intervention imposed it. The system simply kept selecting, generation by generation, until wildness had been bred out.

The machine operates on leaders the same way.

The system doesn’t need to break you. It only needs to reward the parts of you that are easiest to control.

Not through dramatic intervention. Not through a single moment of surrender you could point to and say: that was when it happened. Through what it consistently selects for. The leader who fits, who aligns, who delivers predictable outcomes and minimises disruption — that leader is retained, promoted, rewarded. The leader who doesn’t fit is managed out. Over time, what remains is a population shaped by the machine’s preferences. And the leaders inside it have been so thoroughly formed by that selection that they can no longer tell the difference between the organisation’s judgement and their own.

That is the domesticated leader.

Not a weak leader. Not a failed leader. A leader whose instincts have been so thoroughly shaped by the organisation that the machine’s logic has become indistinguishable from their own thought.

If you felt something shift as you read that, a flicker of recognition, a quiet discomfort, that is not weakness announcing itself. That is memory. Something that happened to you, without your conscious consent, over years you thought you were simply getting better at your job.

That recognition has a name now.

Domestication.

And a name is the beginning of something.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Domestication operates through four external forces.

Comfort. The salary, the familiarity, the quiet confidence of knowing how to operate in this world. It works through the body before it reaches the mind. The somatic alarm habituates. What once felt wrong begins to feel normal. The leader stops registering as alarming the things that should alarm them, because the environment has been stable long enough that the alarm has been trained quiet.

Status. The title, the recognition, the subtle pleasure of being taken seriously in a room. It works through substitution. The machine’s promises quietly replace the leader’s hopes. They stop asking what they are actually trying to build. The question becomes: how do I protect what I have become here. Domestication through status is particularly invisible because it feels like success.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Fear. Not dramatic threat. The stories a leader tells themselves about what happens if they leave. That they might become irrelevant. That the world outside might not value them in the same way. That they might never work at this level again. Nobody needs to threaten the leader. They do this work themselves. The cage, at a certain point, is entirely self-maintained.

Institutional gravity. The accumulated weight of small instructions. “Pick your battles. Not the right time. That’s not how we do things here.” Each reasonable. Each sensible in context. The grammar of domestication, delivered so consistently it stops sounding like instruction and starts sounding like reality. This is what my boss delivered before Joel walked in. Not malice. Just the organisation’s logic, passed down through the hierarchy the way it always is — quietly, reasonably, dressed as good advice.

These four external forces create the conditions for domestication. But they don’t complete the work. That is done from inside, by three forces the leader rarely sees because they arrive in their own voice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The four external forces prepare the ground. Then three internal forces do what the external forces cannot.

Ground project erosion. There are commitments so central to who you are that abandoning them isn’t a change of mind — it is a loss of self. The philosopher Bernard Williams called these ground projects: the things that give a life its individual character, without which it is unclear why you would go on at all. Domestication erodes them incrementally. Each trade is sensible in isolation. No single exchange feels decisive. But they accumulate. And what they accumulate into is a leader several transactions away from the person who wrote the Batman letter. Still using their own words, still believing they are weighing things on their merits, but operating from a set of commitments that are no longer entirely theirs.

Moral space colonisation. Every leader starts with a sense of what they are for. What matters. What they will and will not do. The machine substitutes its own categories for the leader’s without the switch being noticed. Output replaces meaning. Alignment replaces conviction. Metrics replace judgement. But beneath all of that is something more personal and more costly: values erode. Not dramatically. Not through a single act of compromise the leader could point to and say, that was when I stopped believing in that. Through the same incremental substitution. The leader who once cared about developing people finds themselves focused on billable hours. The leader who once cared about doing work that mattered finds themselves focused on work that sells. The colonisation is complete not when the leader submits to the machine’s values but when they start caring about what the organisation cares about, and stop noticing that their own compass has gone quiet. This is the deepest form of domestication. The leader isn’t obeying anyone. They have simply come to want what the machine wants. And they have forgotten that they ever wanted anything else.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Complicity. The point at which domestication stops being done to the leader and the leader begins doing it themselves. Pre-empting challenges before they arise. Editing instinct before it surfaces. Anticipating the machine’s preferences without being asked. By the time I sat in that meeting with Joel, I wasn’t being coerced. I was completing the domestication the organisation had begun. My compliance wasn’t incidental to the system. It was part of the mechanism.

The costs of domestication are paid at two levels simultaneously, and at both levels they arrive quietly, dressed as something else.

The personal cost. The domesticated leader doesn’t experience their loss as loss. They experience it as maturity. Pragmatism. Knowing how the world works. The work becomes technically competent, professionally successful, yet internally hollow. Boredom arrives first: the signal that something essential has been disconnected. Then something quieter and more unsettling: the inability to locate what you actually think, separate from what the institution needs you to think. The less I saw of myself, the more I lost interest in my work. That sentence took years to understand fully. The loss is invisible from the inside. It only becomes visible — if it becomes visible at all — from outside the machine, looking back. And by then, a significant portion of a working life has been organised around someone else’s measures.

The organisational cost. Domesticated leaders don’t only cost themselves something. They cost the organisations they lead something critical — the honest assessment, the uncomfortable question, the willingness to say what is actually true rather than what the machine needs to hear. Organisations full of domesticated leaders become progressively less able to see themselves clearly. They optimise for internal coherence and lose contact with reality. They mistake the absence of dissent for the presence of alignment. Joel was the organisational cost made visible. He was sustained by a system in which enough people had been domesticated into compliance that his behaviour could continue without friction. My silence in that room wasn’t just my loss. It was the system’s loss. It was my team’s loss. The machine that domesticates its leaders doesn’t just diminish the people inside it. It diminishes its own capacity to be told the truth.

What makes all of it possible, what allows domestication to operate across years and careers without being named, is that none of it announces itself.

Each adjustment feels like judgement. Each compromise feels like pragmatism. The leader isn’t aware of obeying anything. By the time domestication is advanced, they have genuinely come to see the world the way the machine does. The gap between what they see and what they are willing to act on has grown so quietly it no longer registers as a gap. It simply feels like thought.

This is the domestication that is hardest to see. Not the leader who knows they have compromised and lives with it. The leader who no longer knows the difference. Whose instinct has been so thoroughly re-routed that the machine’s logic arrives in their own voice, in the first person, sounding exactly like their own.

That is what happened to me. I didn’t sit in that meeting with Joel and choose compliance. I had already been taught, instruction by instruction, that compliance was judgement. By the time it mattered, I couldn’t tell the difference.

In the 1950s the psychologist Solomon Asch ran a series of experiments on conformity. He put people in a room with others who gave obviously wrong answers to simple questions. Most participants went along with the group, even when they knew the group was wrong. But when participants were asked to write their answer down privately before the group responded, conformity dropped sharply.

The protective mechanism wasn’t courage. It was simply having given your own answer before the room got involved.

That is what resists domestication. Not defiance. Not rebellion. The answer you gave before the machine arrived to recalibrate it. The conviction you held before the first instruction told you whose judgement counted more. The thing you knew before you learned to be careful about what you knew.

You are still reading this essay. Which means something in you is still asking. Still looking for the answer you gave before all of this began.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, everything.

Which brings us to the question of where that answer lives, and what happened to the authority it once came from.

There are two kinds of authority a leader can carry into a room.

Positional authority is conferred by the organisation. It is real. It gets things done. But it exists only as long as the organisation continues to grant it. And because it can be revoked, it produces a specific anxiety in the leader who depends on it. A background vigilance, barely conscious, always running. Am I still in favour? Am I managing this correctly? What does the Board think of how I handled that? The leader operating primarily from positional authority is always, somewhere beneath the surface, managing the risk of losing it. Their judgement is never quite free.

Grounded authority comes from a different place. From what you actually see. What you genuinely know. Your own values, and your willingness to act from that place regardless of what it costs. No one confers it. No restructure can remove it. It is not a function of the organisation’s view of you. It is a function of your own relationship with what you know to be true.

The graduate who wrote the Batman letter had only grounded authority. He had nothing else. And it was enough.

What domestication does, over time, is collapse grounded authority into positional authority. Not through a single decision you could point to. Through the accumulation of the forces described above, until the leader is operating from the machine’s logic and experiencing it as their own judgement. The machine hasn’t taken anything from them. They handed it over, in exchange for comfort, status, and the avoidance of a fear that turned out to be largely self-generated.

The question is not whether this happened. For most leaders who have spent serious time inside serious organisations, it happened. The question is what remains. What is still there, beneath the adaptation, beneath the years of operating from someone else’s logic. What answer did you give before the room got involved, and can you still hear it?

Bronnie Ware spent years as a palliative care nurse, sitting with people at the end of their lives. The regret she heard most often was this: I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

These were not people who had failed. Many had succeeded by every measure the machine provided. But positional authority is, by definition, living according to what others confer and what others can revoke. A life organised around it is a life organised around someone else’s measures. The domesticated leader who reaches the end of their career, or is ejected from it as I was, may discover that the measures they were delivering against were never theirs.

This essay is not a warning. Warnings arrive before the event.

This is a mirror held up after the fact. And a door, left open.

You already know this story. You lived it. You just didn’t have a word for what was happening while it was. That word is domestication.

You had what you needed before any of this began. Not just confidence. Not just authority in the abstract. Something more specific than that. A particular way of seeing. A particular instinct. The unrepeatable combination of experience, character and outlook that made you the person who walked into that first job, or wrote that letter, or said the thing nobody else in the room was willing to say. That specificity was your strength. It still is. The wisdom you have gathered across your career doesn’t replace it. It layers on top of it, deepens it, gives it weight and judgement it didn’t have at the start.

The machine’s work was patient, invisible, and entirely without malice. No single person decided to sand you down. No meeting was called to make you more manageable. The system simply rewarded predictability and filtered out what it couldn’t contain. It didn’t want to destroy you. It just needed you to be a little less yourself.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The call is not to rebellion. Not to burning anything down. Not to dramatic resignation or performative defiance.

It is simpler and harder than any of that.

It is a return to yourself. To the specific, unrepeatable person you were before the machine began its work. To what made you dangerous. To what makes you alive.

That is Wild Leadership.

The question is not whether that person still exists.

They do.

The question is whether you are willing to find them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Related Reading

The Joel story, told from the inside: How I Became Domesticated

The same forces operating on founders: The Founder's Dilemma is Really About Domestication

The alternative model for organisations: The Forest

Most thinking about the future of work and leadership in the age of AI fails for the same reason most people lose money in volatile markets.

It tries to be sensible. It aims for balance. It spreads risk evenly. It assumes the middle is where safety lives.

Consider what happens when a market stops being stable — when the old correlations break, when the instruments that were supposed to hedge each other start moving together, when the diversified portfolio turns out to have been a single concentrated bet wearing different clothes. The middle, which looked like prudence, reveals itself as accumulated fragility.

Work is now that market.

Volatility is normal. Non-linearity is normal. Regulatory pressure, technological acceleration, moral exposure, reputational fragility — these are no longer interruptions to the system. They are the system.

If organisations are living systems rather than machines — as explored in The Forest — and if leaders themselves are living systems rather than projects, then a practical question follows. How should a leader operate in a world that is increasingly unstable, technologically accelerated, and impossible to predict with confidence?

Wild Leadership begins with a different answer from the one modern work usually offers.

The goal is not harmony. It is survivability and upside.

The barbell

Wild Leadership approaches unstable environments by deliberately separating what must remain deeply human from what can be radically amplified by technology.

A useful analogy comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s barbell strategy. In investing, the barbell avoids the illusion of safety that lives in the middle. Instead, it places weight at two extremes: one end designed to protect against ruin, the other designed to capture asymmetric upside.

This is not really a financial idea. It is a posture towards uncertainty.

In volatile environments the task is not to optimise beautifully across the whole system, but to structure life and work so that what is fragile is minimised, what is durable is protected, and what is powerful is used deliberately.

Applied to leadership, that barbell has two ends.

At one end sits Nature.

At the other sits AI.

Nothing essential sits in the middle.

Nature: the unbreakable base

Nature belongs on one end of the barbell not as metaphor, not as lifestyle branding, and not as a soft counterweight to digital intensity.

It belongs there because it is one of the few things in modern life that remains biologically grounding, cognitively clarifying, ethically anchoring, and tested beyond the fashions of institutions and technologies.

Here is what it specifically does that nothing else does. Time in nature interrupts the feedback loops that modern work depends on — the notifications, the metrics, the social signals that tell you how you are performing at every moment. Strip those away and something quieter becomes audible: the difference between what you actually think and what the system has been rewarding you for thinking. That gap matters enormously in leadership, and most professional environments are specifically designed to close it.

Nature also reintroduces consequence at a human scale. A miscalculation in a meeting can be walked back. A missed footing on a hillside cannot. There is something in that directness — the unambiguous feedback of the physical world — that recalibrates judgement in ways that no dashboard or debrief can replicate. It sharpens discernment not by adding information but by removing insulation.

This end of the barbell protects against burnout, moral drift, identity collapse, and the strange hollowness of succeeding at something that has quietly severed you from yourself.

It is harder to break when you can still see clearly.

Nature therefore does not sit in this model as an indulgence.

It sits there as infrastructure.

AI: the asymmetric bet

At the other end of the barbell sits AI.

AI is fast, inhuman, and unevenly understood — which is precisely why it offers nonlinear advantage.

Used deliberately, it collapses time, surfaces patterns human beings would miss, absorbs cognitive drudgery, and creates scale without requiring equivalent exhaustion.

It can extend reach, sharpen synthesis, and amplify capability in ways no team of unassisted humans can easily match.

But its power is also the reason it must be handled with precision.

AI does not merely fail; it can fail quietly, fluently, and with plausible confidence. It can sound right while being wrong. It can produce coherence without truth, speed without wisdom, and synthesis without accountability.

Wild Leadership does not pretend AI is neutral.

It treats AI as a high-upside instrument, used where the gain vastly outweighs the cost of error.

AI belongs at the edge — not everywhere.

Why the middle is dangerous

Between Nature and AI lies the zone modern work finds most seductive.

This is the zone of blended optimisation, where every human function is lightly technologised and every technological function is lightly humanised.

It feels balanced. It feels pragmatic. It feels like progress.

It is also where confusion thrives.

In this middle, humans become managers of systems they no longer properly understand, while machines quietly inherit influence without inheriting responsibility. Optimisation replaces judgement. Performance replaces discernment. Agency thins out — not through any single decision, but through the slow accumulation of small delegations, each of which seemed entirely reasonable at the time.

The middle is dangerous because it dilutes both ends of the barbell simultaneously. It weakens the grounding power of Nature and domesticates the leverage of AI into something administrative and half-alive. Instead of creating resilience and upside, it produces a leader who is permanently assisted and subtly disoriented — capable in every direction, sovereign in none.

What AI is — and is not

The technology writer Kevin Kelly has made a useful distinction here.

Intelligence, he argues, is not a single thing but a compound of different cognitive capacities.

Among them are knowledge reasoning, world sense, and continuous learning.

Modern AI systems are astonishingly powerful at the first of these.

But the other two — embodied understanding of the real world and adaptive learning through lived experience — remain deeply human.

Leadership does not happen in the abstract. It happens in live environments, with incomplete information, moral consequence, and real-world responsibility. It requires not only analysis but orientation. Not only pattern recognition but judgement.

Machines can think faster. Humans must see more clearly.

Wild Leadership is not about choosing between Nature and AI.

It is about holding the barbell correctly — Nature at one end, AI at the other, and a leader clear-eyed enough to know which end is which.

It is eleven o’clock at night, and you are reviewing your sleep data.

Not because something is wrong. Because something might be. There is a number on the screen and it is not quite where you wanted it to be, and somewhere in the back of your mind the quiet supervisor is already composing a list of adjustments. Sleep earlier. Less caffeine. Try the breathing protocol again.

This is the sound of a life being managed.

Modern existence runs on optimisation. Sleep is measured, time is audited, calories are counted, habits are engineered. We refine our routines, upgrade our productivity systems, and endlessly adjust the architecture of our days in the hope that somewhere inside these improvements we might finally become the person we believe we ought to be. It is a cultural posture that writers such as Oliver Burkeman have begun to question more openly.

The assumption beneath this activity is rarely stated directly, but it is unmistakably present. It suggests that a human being is something like a system in need of management: a set of processes that can be refined, corrected and improved until performance finally meets expectation.

Improve. Adjust. Fix.

It is the machine metaphor again, only this time applied inward.

The industrial age did not simply shape organisations; it shaped how we think about ourselves. When leadership is understood as the operation of a system, the leader begins to imagine that the same logic must apply to their own life. Discipline becomes optimisation. Reflection becomes performance analysis. Rest becomes recovery in service of productivity.

Gradually, almost without noticing, we become both employee and supervisor of our own existence. There is always something to review, something to adjust, some small inefficiency that needs correcting. Even the most ordinary parts of life begin to feel like inputs in a performance equation.

The problem is not discipline. The problem is the posture from which discipline arises.

Because human beings are not machines any more than organisations are.

We are living systems.

Living systems do not improve in the way machines improve. They grow. They adapt. They respond to conditions. They move through seasons. A forest does not attempt to optimise every tree, nor does it run performance reviews on the saplings struggling in the shade. Instead it grows towards light, renewing itself through cycles of growth, decay and regeneration. This is a perspective long explored by systems thinkers such as Margaret Wheatley and Fritjof Capra.

The health of the forest depends not on control but on conditions: soil, water, diversity, space. When those conditions are present, life organises itself. When they are absent, control cannot compensate.

Human beings are not so different. We do not become wiser through relentless correction. We become wiser through experience, through relationships, through effort, through failure, through rest, through the slow accumulation of understanding that only time can bring. Growth happens when the conditions of a life allow it.

Seen this way, the modern obsession with self-improvement begins to reveal something darker beneath its surface. Not the ambition itself — that can be healthy, even beautiful — but the emotional engine driving it. Many forms of personal optimisation carry an undercurrent of quiet dissatisfaction, something philosophers such as Alain de Botton have written about in the context of modern ambition. A persistent, low-grade sense that we are not yet acceptable in our current form. That the present self is a rough draft. That approval — our own, at least — is always one more adjustment away.

From that posture, discipline becomes a form of self-repair. The goal is not to live more fully but to correct what is wrong. And the work is never finished, because the standard keeps moving. The quieter we become, the more clearly we can hear it: the voice that says not yet, not quite, nearly there.

Yet discipline can arise from an entirely different place.

Consider two leaders. Both rise early. Both train, read widely, pursue ambitious goals. From the outside, they are indistinguishable — same habits, same rigour, same apparent self-possession. But ask each of them what would happen if they missed a week, and you would hear two very different answers. One would feel relief and guilt in equal measure — the guilt winning. The other would feel something closer to curiosity. A week off. Let’s see what that teaches me.

The difference is not discipline. It is motivation. One is trying to fix a defective machine. The other is tending a living system.

Wild Leadership rejects self-contempt as a strategy for growth.

Not because growth is unnecessary, but because contempt is a terrible gardener.

How we treat ourselves inevitably shapes how we lead others. Leaders who view themselves as systems to optimise often build organisations that function the same way. People become resources. Culture becomes a performance lever. Strategy becomes a mechanism of control.

But organisations, like the people inside them, are living systems. They do not thrive under relentless optimisation alone. They require attention, trust, shared purpose, and the conditions that allow capable people to organise themselves around meaningful work.

Wild Leadership therefore begins with a quieter shift than most leadership models suggest. It asks leaders to move from control towards attention, from optimisation towards cultivation, from self-critique towards self-trust — closer to the humanistic view of growth articulated by thinkers like Carl Rogers.

In that shift, discipline does not disappear. It simply changes character. It becomes devotion rather than punishment. Ambition becomes expression rather than proof. Leadership becomes steadier because it is no longer rooted in the fear of being insufficient.

To say that you are not a project is not to reject growth. It is to reject the idea that your worth arrives only after improvement. It is to refuse the belief that a human life is a problem waiting to be solved.

You are a living thing.

Which means you will change. You will learn. You will fail and renew and begin again, as all living systems do.

Not through optimisation.

Through living.

Wild Leadership begins with a simple change in metaphor. Organisations are not machines. They are forests. And the same is true of the people who lead them.

You are not a system to be engineered.

You are a living system.

Which means your task is not to optimise your life, but to steward the conditions in which it can grow towards light.

You are not a project.

You are a life.

And like every living thing, you are meant to grow.

Most enduring ideas travel on a single image.

Not a framework. Not a model.

An image people can see.

For Wild Leadership, that image is simple:

The forest.

The Machine

For more than a century we have designed leadership as if organisations were machines.

The industrial age needed coordination, predictability and control, and management theory evolved to provide exactly that. In the early twentieth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s scientific management broke work into timed, optimised tasks, treating organisations as systems to be engineered and measured. Henry Ford‘s real innovation was not the motor car but the assembly line — work broken into tiny, repeatable actions so that the entire factory could operate as a precisely engineered machine, with workers reduced to replaceable components within it.

Machines are predictable. Controllable. Optimisable. Linear.

If an organisation is a machine, the leader’s role becomes obvious: design the system, optimise the parts, eliminate inefficiency and control the outputs.

For decades this worldview shaped management thinking. It produced extraordinary progress.

But it also embedded a fundamental mistake.

Organisations are not machines. They are living systems.

Modern complexity science increasingly reaches the same conclusion: living systems cannot be tightly controlled. They evolve through relationships, feedback and adaptation. They cannot be commanded into health.

They must be cultivated.

The Forest

A forest is not controlled. Yet forests organise themselves.

Balance, resilience and renewal emerge without any central planner deciding where every tree should grow. A forest is adaptive, interconnected, evolving and partially unknowable. Its health depends far less on control than on conditions — soil, water, light and diversity. When those conditions are right, the system becomes generative. When they are disturbed — by drought, disease or pests such as bark beetles — the forest responds and rebalances.

Beneath the soil, trees are connected through fungal networks known as mycorrhiza. Through these networks they exchange nutrients and chemical signals — what is sometimes called the “Wood Wide Web.” Older “mother trees” can support younger trees by sending nutrients through these underground connections, helping new growth establish itself.

There is no central authority directing this vitality.

The forest thrives because the conditions allow life to organise itself.

Forestry — the deliberate stewardship of woodland — has been practised for thousands of years. At its best it is not an attempt to command the forest, but an act of regeneration: tending the conditions in which life can flourish.

This is the deeper task of leadership.

Why the Forest Matters

The forest metaphor resonates because similar ideas are emerging across multiple fields.

In economics, Kate Raworth‘s model of Doughnut Economics reframes prosperity as the ability to meet human needs while remaining within planetary boundaries. In ecology, Isabella Tree‘s rewilding work at the Knepp Estate in Sussex demonstrates what happens when control gives way to stewardship — when natural processes were allowed to return, ecosystems began to regenerate in surprising and remarkable ways.

Across economics and ecology, a similar insight is emerging:

Living systems thrive not through tighter control, but through stewardship of the conditions that allow life to organise itself.

Wild Leadership brings this insight directly into the practice of leadership.

What Changes When You See the Forest

Once the metaphor shifts, leadership changes with it. Not slightly. Fundamentally.

A forester does not control every tree. Their task is to protect the health of the ecosystem so that growth and renewal can occur naturally. Wild Leaders do the same. They focus less on controlling activity and more on shaping the environment in which people work. Clarity of purpose, trust between colleagues and shared responsibility become the soil in which performance grows.

The contrast between plantations and forests offers another lesson. A monoculture plantation can be highly efficient — but it is fragile. One disease, one drought, one shock, and the entire system can collapse. Forests endure because they are diverse. Wild Leaders therefore optimise not for perfect efficiency, but for resilience.

And just as mycorrhizal networks connect trees across the forest floor — carrying nutrients, signals and support — healthy organisations depend on relationships rather than hierarchies. The heroic individual is not the source of forest vitality. The network is.

Wild Leadership therefore emphasises networks, collaboration and ecosystems — not heroic individuals.

The Work of a Wild Leader

A Wild Leader does not attempt to control everything. They focus on something harder and more important.

They steward the conditions of the system.

This idea is not new. In the 1970s, Robert K. Greenleaf began describing leadership as stewardship — a responsibility to care for people and institutions so they can grow beyond the individuals currently leading them. Wild Leadership applies this idea directly.

In practice, it often begins with recognising how much of our instinct for control is driven by fear. When uncertainty rises, leaders frequently tighten their grip. But many of the things we try to control are precisely those where control is neither possible nor appropriate.

A wiser posture rests on a simple distinction:

You are responsible. But you are not in control.

Some things must be held tightly — ethics, values and the behaviours that define a culture. Other things must be held more lightly — especially how capable people solve problems and achieve results.

So ask yourself a simple question:

Where is my desire for control limiting the people around me?

And then, where possible, step aside.

The best leaders plant trees whose shade they will never sit under. Short-term thinking gives way to legacy thinking. Over time, the organisation becomes less like a machine and more like a forest — less fragile, more alive, and far more capable of renewal.

As the proverb reminds us: “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”

Wild Leadership also requires recognising something more uncomfortable.

In the end, leadership is not the work of commanding the forest, but of caring for it.

Wild Leadership is a return to nature — to your own untamed centre that makes you quietly dangerous in the right way, and a reconnection with Nature itself as something to stand beside, not stand above.

Wild Leadership is a philosophy and a practice for founders, CEOs and leaders carrying real responsibility in uncertain times.

You are succeeding.
But the pace is relentless.
The stakes are real.
The room is watching.

You are expected to be decisive, visionary, commercial, calm — always.

And somewhere beneath the dashboards and delivery plans, you feel it: not failure, not weakness — just distance.

Distance from instinct.
Distance from clarity.
Distance from something steadier.

It is not about becoming softer.

It is about becoming harder to shake.

It is not about slowing growth.

It is about growing without fragmentation.

In a world of optimisation and permanent acceleration, Wild Leadership restores grounded authority — the kind that does not need theatre, because it carries weight.

Not louder.
Deeper.

Why Wild Leadership Matters Now

We are living through acceleration without integration.

AI compresses timelines.
Capital demands velocity.
Boards expect clarity at speed.
Teams expect empathy and certainty — simultaneously.

The old models — hustle, heroics, relentless optimisation — scale activity.
They do not scale coherence.

And so something fractures.

Burnout rises.
Boardrooms polarise.
Strategy becomes reactive.
Culture erodes quietly.

Wild Leadership is not nostalgia.
It is adaptation.

Nature survives through integration, not exhaustion.

The leaders who will endure this era will not be the loudest.
They will be the most regulated.
The most coherent.
The least brittle.

Who This Is For

Wild Leadership is for leaders carrying real weight.

Not symbolic leadership.
Not advisory theatre.
Not personal brand ambition.

Real responsibility.

• Leaders who have achieved success — and refuse to let it cost them their coherence

• People who sense fractures forming before they surface

• Founders scaling through complexity

• CEOs navigating board strain

• Anyone who wants to live a full life and leave a positive legacy

It is not for everyone.

It is not for motivational uplift.
It is not for those unwilling to examine themselves.

Wild Leadership requires private courage.

If something in you settles while reading this, you are likely who it is for.

Grounded in Practice

This work is shaped by lived executive responsibility.

I have led at board level in private equity–backed environments where growth, margin and accountability were not theoretical — where capital had a clock and alignment failures had consequences.

I have sat in boardrooms under strain.

Rebuilt fractured commercial engines.

Aligned narrative, strategy and systems so companies could scale without losing coherence.

Wild Leadership exists because I have seen what happens when leaders disconnect from themselves under growth stress.

And I have seen what becomes possible when they recalibrate.

What You’ll Find In My Writing On Wild Leadership

Provocations.
Reflections.
Field notes.
Stories.

Some pieces are polished.
Some are early fragments of a book taking shape.

All are written in the hope that leaders reconnect with the steadier centre beneath the noise.

A Final Word

You do not need another framework.

You do not need to become someone else.

You need to remove what is distorting you.

The wild is not chaos.

It is coherence.

Most leaders try to outrun strain.

Wild Leadership teaches you to stand inside it — steady, regulated, dangerous in the right way.

If something in you has gone quiet while reading this, that is not coincidence.

It is recognition.

And recognition is usually the beginning.