We’ve come to the end of the Leadership in Context series, at least for now.

Those essays were my attempt to bring better lenses to ordinary organisational problems: how to lead, how to train leaders, how to think about hybrid work, how to design roles and workplaces without drifting into management fashion or leadership cliché. I hope they’ve been useful. Better still, I hope some of them have helped you name a problem you were already living but didn’t yet have proper language for.

I’ll keep adding to that series under the LiC tag when something half-formed, fashionable, or oddly underthought catches my attention on Substack, LinkedIn, in business academia, or in the wider management media.

Alongside those essays, something else has been taking shape.

I’ve been rewriting the core Maya storyline into book form. In the process, the project has become more than a series of standalone essays. It now has a proper spine. Seven chapters are fully drafted. Three more are close. For the first time, I can see the book clearly enough to start publishing it in public.

To test each chapter, I use a slightly eccentric editorial standard.

First, I see whether the core argument can be rewritten simply enough for a child to follow without becoming stupid. Then I ask my daughter, who is eleven, to read it. If she can explain the chapter back to me, it passes. If she can’t, I redraft.

That test turns out to be surprisingly unforgiving. It is very good at detecting prose that sounds intelligent while quietly failing to be clear.

So this is what I’m going to do.

I’m going to start publishing those shorter, clearer, more accessible versions here on Substack. They will be the front door to the project: readable, compressed, and faithful to the main idea.

But I’m also going to start publishing the deeper layer of the work.

That means full book chapters, plus the practical tools that sit behind them: self-diagnostics, role diagnostics, system and climate diagnostics, case cards, Monday-morning application sheets, ritual templates, and occasional micro-clinic pieces for readers trying to think through a live challenge.

In other words: the free tier will carry the ideas in accessible form. The paid tier will open up the full architecture.

Before I switch that on, I’m going to publish one full chapter in the clear, so you can see the difference for yourself.

After that, paid subscriptions will open.

Many of you have already pledged support before I’ve asked for it properly. I’m genuinely grateful. It suggests this work may be useful not just as writing to read, but as something to think with and use.

More soon.

The Three Axes (Core Organisational Physics Triad)

• Structural Load – where the work actually lives; how burdens accumulate; where Run/Serve/Change loads are misplaced.

• Regulatory Grammar – the real coordination logics (“axioms”) in force (hierarchy, bureaucracy, markets/contracts, platforms, professional norms, algorithmic control), and where they clash.

• Moral Universe / Legitimacy – in whose world the system feels “right”; who benefits vs who absorbs risk/harm; why compliance happens or doesn’t.

Load of Work-Portfolio Concepts

• Run / Serve / Change (R/S/C) – the fractal work taxonomy; used as a low-friction load map.

• Hidden Change / Change-on-top-of-Run – transformation bolted onto saturated BAU.

• Invisible Serve / Orphaned Serve – translation, glue work, stakeholder holding, emotional labour that “doesn’t count” until it fails.

• Disguised Run at senior levels – escalation cultures where leaders do firefighting instead of redesign.

Cost and Health of the System

• Confusion Tax – cumulative cost of incoherence (rework, meetings, duplicate forums, shadow structures, exhaustion of “good citizens”).

• Coherence (vs neatness) – “enough alignment that people can do good work without heroic effort.”

Power/Legitimacy Mapping

• Five Estates – Meaning & Morality; Structure & Order; Enterprise & Livelihood; Narrative & Legitimacy; Emergence & Disruption (who holds what kind of authority/power).

• Estate imbalance and risk distribution – which estate dominates; which is suppressed/outsourceable; who carries downside.

• Narrative & Legitimacy dynamics – story control, “immune response” to truth, and how theatre substitutes for change.

Sense-Making Characters of Organisational Incoherence

• The Naive Hero — sees the truth and tries to force it through the system by willpower.

• The Emotionally Exhausted — feels the moral fracture too long; capacity collapses.

• The Cognitively Confused — trapped between contradictory demands and metrics; sensemaking fragments.

• The Ambitious Game-Player — masters the performance regime; optimises legitimacy signals.

• The Adaptive Role-Actor — shape-shifts into whatever the system currently rewards; can stabilise or enable.

• The Third-Way Ironist (Maya) — sees the truth and the system, and redesigns carriers so truth can survive.

We hope this essays have been enjoyable and prompted some deep thinking. We’ll return to these essays in the near future, to explore how to do the developmental and architectural work in tandem.

For now, this is the best resource for anybody who wants to read these essays (in whatever order best supports your thinking): Axion: Essays and Working Paper — Synexia — Clarity. Coherence. Fit

I will use the OP tag to make them more navigable within my Substack.

The Leadership-in-Context Series

While we’re working on the new content, I will return to the series of essays I interrupted to collaborate with Stefan on the above. They focus on effective leadership being contextual rather than universal. They will provide a clear pathway and loop into the developmental and architectural essays that are coming. This are tagged LiC (Leadership in Context).

For anybody who needs to cacth up, here are the first three essays in the series:

The next one - Leading in the Dark: Collaborative Sense-Making Before You Decide - is coming tomorrow.

He’s organised them around different themes so you can focus on the areas that are of specific interest to you. Or, if you have the time and inclination, there’s also a chronological list of everything we’ve written.

My next contribution to the series - Blockers and Ironists - will be out tomorrow.

Over the last month, I’ve been collaborating with my colleague Stefan Norrvall on a series about how organisations actually carry complexity – not in theory, but in real operating models.

You’ve seen my side of that work in recent essays on:

• Buurtzorg and Haier as two very different “post-managerial” architectures

• Run / Serve / Change as the three loads every system has to carry

• The Five Estates as a way of seeing moral gravity and power, not just structure

• Lewin, Rewritten as a proto-complexity thinker

Today, I want to point you to Stefan’s latest essay, which (in my view) pulls these threads together in a very sharp way:

The Confusion Tax – the hidden surcharge organisations pay when structure, rules and values don’t line up.

This isn’t another “leaders need a new mindset” take.

Stefan’s argument is that confusion is manufactured by design:

• Responsibility domains that are blurred or overlapping

• Multiple “grammars” (hierarchy, markets, projects, platforms) pulling decisions in different directions

• Purpose and people-talk that doesn’t match how budget, risk and recognition are actually allocated

The cost of that misalignment shows up in your calendar and inbox as:

• repeated escalations

• shadow decision-making

• endless meetings to “align”

• and leaders who spend more time translating the system than leading in it

That’s the Confusion Tax.

If you’ve ever felt that your organisation is full of clever, well-meaning people and yet everything still feels weirdly hard, this essay will give you a language – and a diagnostic lens – for why.

👉 You can read Stefan’s piece here:

Stefan’s Substack

The Confusion Tax

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water…

Read more

5 months ago · Stefan

Leadership, Rewritten will soon pick up the Maya storyline again – exploring different leadership concepts and contexts that connect with this work, and connecting these ideas directly to how she designs her team, and how “good” leadership can still be punished by legacy systems.

Stefan and I might also continue this series as new ideas and thoughts emerge.

In the meantime, I’d be very interested to hear:

Where do you see Confusion Tax being paid in your own organisation?

Hit reply if anything in Stefan’s article resonates (or irritates). Those are usually the most interesting spots to work with.

Warmly,
Richard

A quick note to say: we’re taking a short detour from the Maya universe.

Over the last few days, my good friend and one-time colleague Stefan Norrvall published an essay on Buurtzorg, the Dutch community nursing organisation, that I haven’t been able to shake. It’s one of the clearest, sharpest pieces I’ve seen on what so-called “flat” organisations are actually doing with complexity and hierarchy.

That essay is here. It’s an amazing read. Arguably the best article on organisational design I’ve read in years:

Stefan’s Substack

The Hierarchy of Work Complexity Is Inescapable (Even at Buurtzorg)

The Hierarchy of Work Is Inescapable (Even at Buurtzorg…

Read more

6 months ago · 24 likes · 4 comments · Stefan

It triggered an immediate and incisive response from Otti Vogt, the co-founder of the Global Society for Good Leadership, who argued that while the organisational physics are right, the underlying social ontology and moral frame are too thin – Buurtzorg is not just a clever operating model, but a solidaristic, post-neoliberal project grounded in care ethics and community.

That response is here:
👉 Otti’s response

Those two pieces set up a question I couldn’t leave alone:

If complexity can’t be eliminated, only redistributed, how do we design organisations that handle that reality structurally – without losing sight of what they’re for and whom they serve?

Rather than just chatting with each other in the comments, Stefan and I decided to collaborate.

Over the coming days, I’ll publish a short series of longform essays here on Substack that build on his original piece, Otti’s critique, and my own work. They are significantly longer than my usual posts – closer to mini-chapters than quick essays – so consider this your early warning.

What’s coming (in the next few days)

We’ll be releasing three essays in quick succession (tomorrow, Friday, Monday):

1. Where Does the Work Really Live? Translating Buurtzorg’s Organisational Physics into Run / Serve / Change

   • Builds on Stefan’s original essay and Jaques’ Stratified Systems Theory to show why Buurtzorg doesn’t eliminate complexity at all – it relocates it into small whole-task teams, architecture, and the Dutch welfare ecosystem.

   • Introduces Run / Serve / Change as a simple way for executives to see where complexity actually lives in their own organisations.

2. Organizational Physics, Moral Gravity: Buurtzorg, Haier, and the Moral Complexity of Organisational Design

   • Puts Buurtzorg alongside Haier (and its RenDanHeYi model) to show how the same organisational physics can power very different projects: post-managerial welfare care on one side, internal-market ecosystem capitalism on the other.

   • Uses the Five Estates and WEIRD / non-WEIRD logics to map how culture, regulation and economics shape what “post-hierarchical” really means in practice – especially for professional services and tech firms.

3. The Three Axes of Organisational Coherence (working title)

   • A joint piece in which Stefan pulls the whole conversation together into a meta-framework:

     • Axis 1 – Organisational physics: where complexity must live.

     • Axis 2 – Regulatory architecture: how authority and coordination actually work (DP1 vs DP2 done properly).

     • Axis 3 – Meaning-making / axiology: the cultural and moral logics that make these arrangements feel legitimate or intolerable.

   • We then translate those axes into very practical questions for CEOs, CHROs and heads of transformation who are tempted by “self-management”, agile, or operating-model redesign.

All three are longer and denser than my usual Leadership, Rewritten / Maya instalments. Think multiple cups of coffee, not a five-minute scroll between meetings. They’re written, though, with the same intent: to give practitioners language and structure for things they can already feel but can’t yet describe.

What this means for the Maya series

Maya, Jo, Anil, Priya and Kieran will be back very soon.

This is a brief pause, not a pivot. The collaboration with Stefan sits in the same universe as Maya, Praxis Q and the Leadership Gym – it just zooms out to the architectural layer:

• How complexity is distributed (Run / Serve / Change),

• How roles and systems regulate that complexity,

• And how all of that intersects with the moral projects we’re actually pursuing, whether we admit it or not.

If Stefan’s Buurtzorg essay and Otti’s response hadn’t been so strong, I wouldn’t have interrupted the Maya arc. But they opened a door I’ve been trying to push open for years: a way of talking about organisational design that honours both physics and ethics, without collapsing into ideology or vague “culture” talk.

If that sounds like your kind of detour, watch out for the first essay in this mini-series in the next day or two.

If you’d rather stay in the narrative world of Maya and the team, feel completely free to skip these and rejoin when we’re back in that story. I won’t be offended. I’ll just be quietly pleased that a few of you followed us down this more technical rabbit hole.

More very soon,
Richard

The Power series was one of those. What started as “a quick essay on power motivation” turned into six lenses, a small framework, and a lot of DMs from people saying, “Why didn’t anyone teach us this earlier?”

We’re about to do it again.

This time, the theme is context – not as a polite footnote (“of course it depends on context…”) but as the main character of leadership.

Because here’s the quiet problem underneath most leadership advice:

We teach leaders to act in general,
while they actually need to act in a situation.

Frameworks are sold as universal. Case studies are stripped of history. “Best practices” arrive pre-polished, as if they weren’t invented for very specific problems in very specific eras.

So this new series asks a (slightly annoying) question:

What happens if we put context back at the centre of leadership and treat the last 100+ years of leadership theory as a series of attempts to read changing conditions?

Subscribe now

The Context Series: Seven Essays (for now)

Here’s what’s coming, roughly in order. Each essay stands alone, but together they tell a story: how leadership models have shifted as the state of work has moved from clear and industrial to tangled, digital, and politically fraught.

I’ll keep Maya and her universe running through them, so these aren’t just theory dumps but grounded in the messy organisational life many of us recognise.

1. Production vs People: The First Context War

We start with the early leadership studies: Ohio State, Michigan, the Blake & Mouton grid.

The world was framed as a simple toggle:

• You could focus on production (task, output, control), or

• You could focus on people (relationship, morale, consideration).

We’ll connect this to the origins of management science – Taylor as engineer, Lillian Gilbreth as psychologist – and show how a new professional class built leadership in its own image.

Then we watch what happens when the field moves from traits (“she’s a production leader, he’s a people leader”) to behaviours and styles (“you can learn to shift”). It’s the moment leadership theory takes a small but crucial step towards development and context-toggling.

2. Kurt Lewin and the Dangerous Comfort of Delegation

Lewin is often reduced to a schoolroom experiment with boys and leadership styles: autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire.

We’ll widen the lens:

• Place him in his actual historical moment – a German–Polish Jewish intellectual watching authoritarianism up close.

• Show how his work creates some of the everyday language you hear in organisations now (field, group dynamics, unfreezing, participation).

• Explore how his three styles map neatly onto modern decision contexts:

  • Directive/autocratic in clear and chaotic conditions,

  • Delegative/“laissez-faire” in complicated ones,

  • Participative/democratic in complex ones.

We’ll also look at what happens when contemporary leaders are told to “delegate more” in complex conditions – and why that often goes badly wrong.

3. From Mythical Heroes to Moral Leaders: Seven Ages of Leadership

This one zooms out across centuries, using the 7Ms:

• Mythical – chiefs, shamans, tricksters, cosmic order vs chaos.

• Magnificent – divine-right monarchs, three estates, nation-building.

• Manly – Enlightenment gentlemen, merchants, revolutionaries.

• Macho – industrial tycoons, Taylorist managers, hard science and steel.

• Mastery – expert bureaucrats, planners, professional managers.

• Motivational – leaders as inspirers, coaches, engagement engines.

• Moral – leaders as ethical exemplars, guardians of values.

The aim isn’t a neat teleology. It’s to show that each “age” is a contextual answer to changing conditions – and that we’re currently trying to do Moral leadership in systems designed for Macho and Mastery.

4. Sense-Making: How Leaders Decide What Kind of Thing This Is

Before you decide what to do, you have to decide what you think you’re looking at.

This essay pulls together:

• Ackoff’s “messes” vs problems,

• Schön’s swampy lowlands vs high ground,

• Argyris’s single-loop vs double-loop learning,

• Weick’s sensemaking,

• Senge’s mental models.

We’ll follow Maya through the quiet moment where leadership really happens: when a team decides, “This is just an execution problem,” or “This is a strategic puzzle,” or “This is a culture mess.”

And we’ll talk about small, doable rituals that turn sense-making into a shared practice instead of a heroic solo act.

5. Machines and Shamans: Morgan’s Metaphors and the Chief/Trickster Dance

Here we get properly weird (in a useful way).

Using Gareth Morgan’s images of organisation, we split the metaphors into two camps:

• Order-keeping (the Chief’s side):
  Machine, Organism, Brain, Culture.

• Order-disrupting (the Shaman’s side):
  Flux and Transformation, Political System, Psychic Prison, Instrument of Domination.

We’ll explore how most leaders, teams, and functions are stuck on one side:

• Always stabilising and optimising, or

• Always critiquing and unsettling.

Then we play with a simple rule:

For any serious issue, try to look through at least one metaphor from each camp before you act.

It’s a playful essay with fairly serious consequences.

6. The State of Work: Cynefin and Four Kinds of Ground

Not all work is created equal. Some of it is:

• Clear – known problems, known solutions.

• Complicated – knowable with analysis and expertise.

• Complex – emergent, unpredictable, only obvious in hindsight.

• Chaotic – no perceivable order (yet).

Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework gives a clean language for this.

We’ll map how different eras of management thought grew up in Clear and Complicated worlds – then were dragged into Complex and Chaotic ones.

And we’ll look at why Lean, BPR, Agile, design thinking, and war rooms keep fighting each other inside organisations… when they’re really just different answers to different domains.

7. From Production vs People to Customer vs Change

Finally, we circle back to where we started.

The old tension was:

• Production vs People.

The modern tension, for many leaders, is:

• Customer vs Change.
  (Whose needs do you prioritise when the environment itself won’t sit still?)

We’ll look at:

• How 1990s movements like BPR and customer-centric design tried to reorganise around the customer as the core context.

• How that collided with transformation-as-a-permanent-state.

• What contemporary leaders might still learn from the old production/people debates – and where they need entirely new moves.

This essay will probably have the most direct implications for your own strategy and org design work.

Why This Series, Now?

Because a lot of leaders are being held to account as if they’re operating in a Clear, Macho/Mastery world… while actually living in a Complex/Chaotic, Moral-tinged one.

They are told to:

• Deliver efficiency,

• Inspire meaning,

• Navigate politics,

• Handle crises,

• “Lead culture,”

• and “Be authentic,”

…without ever getting decent language for the contexts they’re toggling across.

This series is my attempt to offer that language:

• Historically grounded enough to be honest.

• Practically grounded enough to use in a Tuesday meeting.

• Reflexive enough that you might rethink how you’re reading your own system.

If you’d like these essays as they land:

• Make sure you’re subscribed (quietly) to Leadership, Rewritten.

• Feel free to forward this to the colleague who always says “it depends on context” and then gets talked over.

First essay – on production vs people, and why those early leadership grids still haunt us – will be out shortly.

Why the detour

1. A partial break from the Maya arc. We’re pausing the main developmental storyline to zoom in on one thing that keeps surfacing in responses to the content: power.

2. A deep dive into theories of power. We’ll strip the jargon and make the best of McClelland, Follett, Weber/Parsons, Lukes/Clegg — usable.

3. Straight from the classroom and the field. These pieces come directly from my commercial workshops and executive programs, tightened for Substack.

4. Prompted by a real request. A friend asked for resources to help her cohort of aspiring leaders learn to use power cleanly. I figured many of you would benefit, too.

5. Aim: brief theory → practical moves. Each essay ends with a tiny action you can ship within 72 hours.

Schedule (one per day, Asia/Singapore time)

Wed, Nov 5 — The Achievement Trap: Why High-nAch Breaks Leadership
Why achievement is great for personal performance but terrible as a leadership fuel — and how to swap to socialized power in the moment.

Thu, Nov 6 — Power, Four Ways: How to Stop Treating Influence Like a Dirty Word
Power over / with / to / through in plain English, when each is useful, and how to avoid their failure modes.

Fri, Nov 7 — Seen and Unseen Power: Spot the 4 System Moves
The 1D–4D map (coercing actors, shaping agendas, controlling agency, crafting selves) with a 5-minute “X-ray” checklist for your next meeting.

Sat, Nov 8 — Build Power Without Politics: Six Levers You Already Own
Your power portfolio (people, expertise, information, rewards, connections, collegial conditions) and two micro-experiments to shift from “over” to “with/to.”

Sun, Nov 9 — A Clean Path to Power: Six Moves That Work
Pfeffer, practiced with integrity: a 72-hour power plan (assets, rules, allies/arenas, one-sentence story) you can run on Monday.

If you’re here for Maya’s journey—don’t worry. This series is a runway back into the main narrative: once you can see and use power cleanly, Maya’s choices make a lot more sense.

If you’re coaching or facilitating, feel free to adapt the exercises. And if you try any of the “One Thing Before Friday” moves, drop a note in the comments.

Enjoy the reads.

Richard

Over the next two weeks, I’ll be travelling in China. Connectivity can be unpredictable, so I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to access Substack. But everything for this period is already uploaded and scheduled.

Here’s what’s coming:

• Wed 15 Oct – “The Ordinary Rhythms That Build Extraordinary Adaptability”
  How adaptability actually develops through design and rhythm, not slogans or personality.

• Wed 22 Oct – “How Real Change Travels”
  The continuation: how adaptability moves through networks, learning, and trust.

• Sat 25 Oct – Supporting Podcast
  A short conversation exploring how these rituals become visible in real organisations.

Between those two essays, I’ll also release a Leadership Critique essay on Sat 18 Oct — a deeper, more academic reflection that connects adaptability to contemporary sociology. It draws on the late-modern thinkers who shaped much of Leadership, Rewritten: Beck, Giddens, Sennett, Appadurai, and Bauman.

If you enjoy diving into the background architecture of these ideas — risk society, reflexive modernity, corrosion of character, liquid life — this one is for you.

If you prefer to stay with Maya’s story and the practical rituals, feel free to skip it and rejoin on the 22nd.

Either way, everything’s lined up. I’ll be somewhere between Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Chongquin — and reading your comments when I can.

— Richard

Three weeks in, Leadership, Rewritten has just passed 1,000 subscribers.

That’s not a marketing milestone. It’s a signal.

A quiet vote from a growing group of people who care about what leadership might become if we stopped performing it and started rewriting it.

Many of you have subscribed silently. Some of you have forwarded the essays to friends. Others have replied with stories, reflections, and provocations that have already shaped what comes next.

Thank you.

About the pace…

Right now, I’m publishing one long-form Maya Essay a week. However, I already have a full year of material pre-written, including essays, diagnostics, reflections, and frameworks. I want to make sure the rhythm works for you.

Would you prefer:

• One essay per week (current pace)?

• A second, shorter midweek post?

• Occasional PDFs, diagnostics, or notes between essays?

To let me know, just hit reply. I’d love your perspective before I accelerate or adjust.

Now live: The Maya Podcast

Alongside the essays, I’ve begun publishing a companion podcast.

Each episode explores a pair of Maya Essays, drawing from the deeper, book-length chapters behind them, with much more context, research, and nuance than I can fit into a single Substack post.

The voice in the first few episodes?
It’s AI-generated, but the script is entirely mine. Think of it as a narrated version of the underlying thinking, not a performance.

Eventually, I’ll move into real interviews with leaders and thinkers I find genuinely interesting. But for now, the podcast is another way to enter Maya’s world. I’d love to know how it lands with you.

Coming soon: The Ironist’s Archive

If Maya is the narrative voice of this project, The Ironist is her deeper reflection — a future self exploring the ideas, tensions, and theories that shaped her journey.

It’s more philosophical than narrative, and it’ll start surfacing soon.

Your input, please

A few things I’m exploring and where you come in:

Leader diagnostics
Want to see a deep analysis of a well-known leader, living, dead, or fictional? Send me your suggestions. If there’s enough data, I’ll decode their leadership using the frameworks behind Maya.

Role-based diagnostics
Are you hiring for a tricky leadership role? Or trying to work out if you're ready to step into one? Let me know. I can share tailored diagnostic questions to support the process.

Something to forward
If one of these essays helped you reframe how you think about leadership, feel free to pass it on. You don’t have to convince anyone. Just offer them a door.

I’ll be back Thursday with the next Maya Essay. Until then, thank you again for reading, reflecting, and shaping this space with me.

—Richard

Thanks for signing up to Leadership, Rewritten.

I wasn’t expecting such a strong start - over 175 of you in the first day. I'm grateful you're here.

This space is for people who are serious about leadership, but increasingly unconvinced by the way it’s usually taught or performed. If that’s you, you’re in the right place.

Rather than offering a fixed model or method, I’ll be sharing ideas, stories, and tools to help reframe what leadership actually is, especially under pressure in systems that don’t make it easy.

If you haven’t seen it yet, this post introduces Maya — a figure who will show up throughout this project:
→

She’s not a mascot. She’s a mirror.

Quick question:
To make sure future posts and resources are useful, I’d love to know what brings you here.

Are you:

• A leader navigating complexity?

• A coach, educator, or OD/HR professional?

• A strategist or consultant?

• A researcher or writer working on similar themes?

• None of the above, but interested?

Just hit reply with a quick note. Even one word is useful.

This project will grow as the people around it become clearer. Thanks for being part of that from the beginning.

More soon,
Richard