The Conditions of Entangled Work
Practical Ways to Start Leading when things feel Overwhelmed, Confused and Burdened
“The most important thing to remember about unity is — that there is no such thing. There is only unifying.”
— Mary Parker Follett, On Coordination
This chapter explores the conditions of entangled work by starting with entangled loads: the way different kinds of organisational demand are folded into the same people, roles, and teams without enough clarity, sequencing, or protection. Leaders are increasingly overwhelmed by expectations to keep things running, respond to shifting stakeholder demands, and drive change at the same time. Different types of work carry different logics, tempos, and standards, yet are often fused together as though they naturally belonged in one bundle. What results is a form of lived contradiction: work that is difficult to read, difficult to prioritise, and difficult to carry without absorbing tension privately.
Those contradictions show up in two linked ways. Organisationally, they appear as Confusion Tax: the hidden cost in interpretation, reassurance, delay, duplication, and repair required to keep underdesigned work moving. Socially, they appear as hidden burden, especially in the coordinating middle, where leaders are expected to create coherence across boundaries without sovereign authority. The chapter argues that these conditions cannot be meaningfully alleviated through dominant leadership development models, which remain too generic, too self-heavy, and too weakly fitted to the realities of entangled loads and hidden integrative work. What is needed instead are more serious distinctions, more grounded diagnosis, and more practical ways of reducing confusion and burden within the work itself.
In this Sub:
Entangled loads create leadership overwhelm
The burden is not simply volume, but the fusion of Run, Serve, and Change inside the same roles without enough distinction, ranking, or protection.Confusion Tax undermines organisational effectiveness
When work is hard to read and hard to carry, organisations pay in hidden work, visible churn, delayed decisions, and rising ethical strain.The coordinating middle carries the heaviest hidden burden
Leaders asked to integrate across teams, functions, and priorities often absorb the contradiction most acutely, without sovereign authority to resolve it cleanly.Current leadership development misreads the burden
The dominant offer remains too generic, too individualised, and too weakly fitted to the hidden integrative work carried by the coordinating middle.What entangled leaders need is better fit, not more uplift
Better distinctions, better diagnosis, and more practical coherence-building are the first steps toward a more serious developmental response.
Maya: The First Hundred Days
Maya had decided, a week before starting, that she would treat her first hundred days as an opportunity to make sense of the organisation.
She had been in enough large organisations to know that the official story was never the whole story. The town halls, values statements, operating models, leadership frameworks, and strategy decks all told you something. They told you how the company wished to see itself. They told you how it wanted to be seen. They did not tell you where the work actually lived, what people feared, what got rewarded, what got quietly ignored, or how much unseen effort it took to stop things falling apart.
So, she watched and listened.
In the first few weeks, the formal language was impossible to miss. Transformation. Agility. Growth. Leadership. Collaboration. Culture. Capability. Customer centricity. Accountability. The company wanted to become faster, more integrated, more people-focused, more innovative, and more disciplined all at once. That last phrase stayed with her, not because it was unusual, but because of how familiar it was. In a single sentence it managed to sound sensible, ambitious, and impossible.
What most interested Maya was the way the work seemed to be arranged beneath the language. Almost every senior conversation contained some version of the same demands. Improve delivery. Grow revenue. Simplify governance. Strengthen culture. Build capability. Reduce duplication. Increase customer responsiveness. Standardise more. Adapt more locally. Move faster. Protect quality. Control costs. Innovate. Develop leaders. Keep people engaged. Keep the top team aligned. Clarify roles. Embed change. Stabilise the basics. While the list changed slightly depending on who was speaking, it always remained the same in spirit. Everything sounded legitimate. Almost nothing was clearly ranked.
That, she realised, was the first clue. The problem was not simply that there was a lot to do. It was that different kinds of work were being folded into the same people and teams without enough distinction. Delivery demands, stakeholder demands, and change demands kept arriving together, as though they naturally belonged in one bundle. Keep things running. Adapt constantly. Redesign the future. Nobody seemed especially surprised by this. Nobody could say, with any consistency, which logic should govern when they collided.
The second clue was what it cost.
Her inbox filled with reports, dashboards, commentary packs, status trackers, steering decks, summary notes, pre-reads, follow-ups, and revised follow-ups. Some of it was useful. Much of it looked like insurance. It seemed designed less to improve the work than to make the work politically survivable: evidence that the right people had been informed in the right sequence, that enough visibility had been created, that if the question resurfaced later nobody could say they had been left out.
Meetings often served a similar function. There were meetings before meetings, decks before conversations, alignment rounds before decisions, and then fresh rounds of circulation to confirm what had or had not really been decided.
The company was busy, certainly. But this did not feel like ordinary busyness. It felt like a system paying for unclear work with more work. Similar problems were being solved repeatedly in parallel. Country heads spoke often of shared challenges, but there was remarkably little real learning between them. Functions coordinated constantly, but often without growing more coherent. Decisions did not vanish so much as hover. They slowed, recirculated, and returned, accompanied by perfectly reasonable requests for more refinement, more realism, more confidence, or more socialisation.
The third clue was who seemed to be carrying the burden.
The people Maya found herself respecting most were rarely the most overtly visible. They were often the ones doing the least theatrical and most necessary work: the department lead who knew exactly where three supposedly separate workstreams were colliding; the regional operator who could translate strategic language into something a local team might actually use; the project lead who absorbed contradictory demands with more patience than anyone should have needed and still protected her team from the worst of the churn. Such people were serious in a way the system did not reliably reward.
Two types of people were much more celebrated. Some leaders generated movement through force of personality, pressure, and ambient threat. Others exported ambiguity downward while sounding pleasant, modern, and empowering. Maya didn’t find either type effective. The forceful style produced brittle compliance. The other produced unmanaged sprawl.
Some of each type were also consummate political performers: fluent in the language of leadership, highly legible upward, loosely attached to whatever the latest priority happened to be, and curiously insulated from the hidden repair work on which much of the organisation seemed to depend.
Maya also kept hearing one phrase in slightly different forms from many of these leaders: my people aren’t good enough. It came dressed up as concern about capability, or as frustration about ownership, resilience, or strategic thinking. Occasionally, it was fair. It more often did a useful political job. It converted contradictory demands, poor prioritisation, weak developmental support, and badly mixed work into a deficiency located safely below the speaker.
By the middle of the second month, the pattern was hard to ignore. The company was more than overloaded. It was entangled. Different kinds of work were being folded into the same roles without enough ranking, enough design, or enough permission to simplify. The resulting confusion was then being paid for in reporting, coordination, delay, and hidden repair. That burden was falling most heavily on the very people the system seemed least able to see clearly.
Maya then found herself in a conversation about leadership development.
Over coffee after a steering meeting, a senior executive rolled his eyes when the latest leadership programme came up and said, with the tired irritation of someone who had made the point before, that it was “fine if what you need is more confident PowerPoint and slightly better eye contact.” Then he added, more quietly, “But it has almost nothing to do with how this place actually runs.”
That was the moment the final piece clicked for Maya. The problem was not just that the work was difficult, or even that the work was entangled. It was that the organisation was asking people to carry these burdens while offering them development built for something cleaner, simpler, and far less contradictory. The people doing the hardest integrative work were being left to learn by osmosis, personal stamina, or private improvisation. Development sat over here; the work sat over there.
She sat with that for a while after most of the floor had emptied one evening, the low hum of the air-conditioning louder than the office itself.
If the work was entangled, and the development offer was not designed for entangled work, then waiting for the organisation to solve the problem for her felt naïve. The question became more practical, and more serious.
How do I not just survive in conditions like these, but create a way of working in which value creation and development happen together — and where the burden on other people is lighter because the work itself is clearer?
That question stayed with her. It would soon become the first useful move she made.
1. Entangled Work: How Entangled Loads Create Leadership Overwhelm
Leadership is increasingly described not just as demanding, but as overwhelming. DDI’s research and commentary have repeatedly pointed in that direction: leaders describe transitions as overwhelming or very stressful, and more recent reporting suggests stress often rises rather than settles once they enter the role. The question, then, is not whether leadership feels overwhelming, but why. This chapter argues that the answer lies less in raw volume than in entangled loads: different kinds of work being folded into the same people, roles, and teams without enough distinction, ranking, or protection. What results is not simply pressure. It is a more disorienting form of overwhelm: work that is hard to read, hard to prioritise, and hard to carry without absorbing contradiction privately.
1.1 Difficult Work v Entangled Work
Overwhelm is not always caused by sheer difficulty. Much important work is difficult. It can be urgent, politically exposed, emotionally demanding, or technically complex and still remain coherent enough for serious effort to make sense. People may feel stretched, but they can still answer the basic orienting questions: what is this work for, what matters most, and what would count as a good outcome? Difficulty alone does not necessarily produce overwhelm.
Entangled work is different. It becomes overwhelming because the work is hard to read and hard to rank. Several demands arrive at once, each reasonable on its own terms, but confusing when forced together without enough distinction. A leader is asked to keep current performance stable while driving change. A team is told to respond more flexibly to stakeholders while also standardising more tightly across the system. A manager is expected to cut costs, improve collaboration, speed up decisions, build capability, and protect morale in the same period, without any clear rule for which demand governs when they interfere with one another.
Entangled work becomes overwhelming because it weakens coherence. It becomes hard to tell what kind of work this is, what standard applies, what should take priority, and which trade-off is legitimate. Leaders are carrying pressure amplified by contradiction.
This is also why overwhelm under entangled conditions so often looks like hesitation, over-clarification, and unfinished closure rather than simple collapse. Strong teams keep talking but struggle to settle. Capable leaders work hard but feel increasingly unable to stabilise the work. Serious people begin to doubt their own judgment because the situation no longer presents a clear object of judgment. Entangled work is not just difficult work at higher volume. It is work whose contradictions have become hard to hold without absorbing them privately.
1.2 Entangled Loads v Run, Serve, and Change
The source of that overwhelm becomes clearer once the work is distinguished into three recurring loads: Run, Serve, and Change. They are different logics of work that appear across roles, teams, functions, and levels. Leadership becomes overwhelming when these loads are fused together without enough distinction, because each asks for a different kind of attention, judgment, and legitimacy.
Run work is about continuity, reliability, and control. It keeps the existing operation functioning. It values discipline, repeatability, standards, and dependable execution.
Serve work is about responsiveness to stakeholders. It depends on interpretation, adaptation, and practical judgment. It asks people to read what the situation requires and maintain trust without collapsing into rigidity or over-accommodation.
Change work is about redesign, experimentation, and movement toward a different future. It asks people to challenge current arrangements, test alternatives, and work under conditions where certainty is limited and proof often comes late.
A role built mainly around Run can become overwhelming when Serve and Change demands are repeatedly layered into it without enough protection or redesign. A role oriented toward Change can become overwhelming when it is still judged by Run standards of reliability and short-term control. A team carrying a strong Serve load can become overwhelming to work in when it is simultaneously expected to standardise tightly and transform quickly. The problem is not that several loads are present, but that they are fused together and assessed as though they belonged to a single logic.
That is why these are best understood as entangled loads rather than simply as categories of work. The burden does not come only from the amount of Run, Serve, or Change in the system, but from the collisions between them when they are not clearly distinguished. Leadership becomes overwhelming when people are asked to carry different work logics at once without enough help in knowing which one the situation actually calls for.
1.3 Entangled Roles v Privatised Contradictions
Entanglement becomes most acute when these different loads are fused into the same roles without enough design, sequencing, or protection, and the resulting contradiction is privatised inside the people carrying them. A role may be described in broad and sensible terms, but what the person actually inherits is a contradictory bundle: protect current performance, satisfy diverse stakeholders, absorb strategic shifts, improve collaboration, reduce cost, develop people, and drive change. None of these obligations is absurd on its own. The problem is that they arrive fused together, with weak ranking and little guidance about which should govern when they collide.
This is where leadership overwhelm becomes lived. The contradiction is no longer just a feature of the environment; it is carried inside the role itself. The person must decide, often privately, whether to protect local relationships or enforce a new standard, whether to preserve reliability or make room for experimentation, whether to satisfy one audience now or preserve legitimacy with another later. The organisation presents these tensions as if they were normal demands of leadership. The leader experiences them as constant trade-offs without stable rules for resolving them.
That is how entangled roles so easily produce privatised contradictions. What begins as a structural problem is recoded as a personal burden. The more conscientious the person, the more likely they are to treat the collision as their responsibility to absorb. They work longer, clarify more, translate more carefully, and hold together tensions that have never been properly named at the level of the role or system. The contradiction does not disappear. It becomes private, and that private carrying is one of the main ways entangled work turns into leadership overwhelm.
1.4 Entangled Systems v Expanding Workload
One of the most difficult features of entangled systems is that the burden does not stay where it starts. What begins as contradictory loads inside roles spreads outward into the wider organisation as expanding workload. More meetings appear to manage unresolved priorities. More reporting appears to reassure people that things are under control. More translation is required between functions, levels, and geographies that look aligned on paper but operate to different practical logics. Overwhelm grows not only because there is more to do, but because entangled systems generate more work around the work.
This is especially visible in flatter, matrixed, and multinational settings. A project lead depends on functions they do not control. A country leader must reconcile local realities with global expectations. A department head is accountable for outcomes that depend on cooperation from peers with different incentives. In such systems, a great deal of what gets called leadership is really hidden integration labour: translating priorities, smoothing contradictions, protecting teams from churn, and keeping several partially incompatible agendas moving at once.
Much of this labour is indispensable. The problem is that as entanglement spreads, more and more effort goes into carrying the consequences of confused design rather than reducing the confusion itself. The organisation becomes busier at holding itself together. Serious operators spend increasing amounts of time on repair work that never counts as core work. The system pays for unclear work with more work.
Once that happens, overwhelm is no longer just a private experience inside difficult roles. It becomes an organisational condition. The work expands, the system thickens, and the burden begins to reproduce itself.
2. The Confusion Tax: How Entanglement Undermines Organisational Effectiveness
Once work becomes entangled, the problem is no longer confined to individual strain. It begins to affect organisational effectiveness more broadly. Time is consumed, decisions slow, coordination thickens, and serious effort is redirected away from the work itself and into making the work less confusing than it was designed to be.
2.1 Hidden Work v Visible Activity
Confusion Tax is the hidden organisational burden created when the work is not clear enough to travel cleanly. People are left to work out what is really being asked, which audience matters most, what standard applies, and what has to be translated or softened before anything can move. They repair misunderstandings, duplicate updates, hold pre-meetings before formal meetings, and prepare the same issue for several audiences who each want something slightly different from it.
What makes this costly is that the hidden work often sits beneath highly visible activity. Calendars are full, decks circulate, meetings happen, dashboards update, and the organisation appears energetic and well-managed. But much of that visible activity is compensating for work that has not been made coherent enough in the first place. The result is a serious effectiveness problem: effort is being spent not only on advancing the work, but on making the work manageable at all.
Confusion is not a soft issue. It consumes real organisational capacity. Attention is fragmented, judgment is diluted, and capable people spend increasing amounts of time on labour that keeps the system moving without necessarily helping it perform better.
2.2 Coordination v Coordination Theatre
Some coordination is necessary. Entangled organisations do require more cross-boundary discussion, more translation, and more careful sequencing than simpler ones. The problem begins when coordination stops improving the work and starts standing in for that improvement. That is the point at which coordination becomes Coordination Theatre.
Coordination Theatre appears when the organisation responds to confusion by multiplying the visible signs of alignment rather than improving the underlying conditions of work. More meetings are held. More stakeholders are consulted. More updates are circulated. More governance is layered on. On the surface, this can look responsible and mature. In practice, it often becomes symbolic. Meetings demonstrate inclusion rather than settle trade-offs. Consultation rounds extend because no one wants to move too soon. Decks are written to satisfy several audiences at once, each wanting a different performance from the same material.
This damages organisational effectiveness because activity begins to replace clarity. The organisation becomes busier at being seen to coordinate than at making the work more coherent. Calendars fill, ownership blurs, and visible participation starts to masquerade as progress. Coordination remains necessary; coordination theatre is what happens when the performance of alignment begins to undermine the effectiveness it is supposed to support.
2.3 Deliberation v Decision Latency
Not all delay is dysfunctional. Some decisions should take time. Complex conditions often require thought, consultation, and the refusal of premature certainty. But organisational effectiveness depends on the difference between useful deliberation and delayed judgment. The problem begins when delay is no longer serving decision quality but replacing it. That is the point at which deliberation becomes Decision Latency.
Decision Latency appears when decisions slow, recirculate, and return because authority, legitimacy, and trade-offs remain unresolved. More socialisation is requested. More refinement is needed. More input is deemed prudent. The language stays reasonable. The effect is that nothing lands. The organisation cannot move cleanly because no one can settle the collision cleanly enough to absorb the exposure that comes with it.
This is where the unranked priority list becomes so damaging. When everything matters, every decision becomes politically and morally expensive. Delivery matters. Stakeholders matter. Cost matters. Change matters. Consistency matters. Local adaptation matters. The question is not whether these claims are valid, but which one governs here, now, under these constraints. If that ranking remains vague, hesitation becomes rational and effectiveness degrades. The organisation loses pace, builds workarounds instead of judgment, and starts hovering where it needs to decide.
2.4 Stress v Moral Injury
The deepest threat to organisational effectiveness is the damage confusion does to the people on whom the work depends. There comes a point when leaders are not merely strained or frustrated. They begin to feel that the work is asking them to act in ways they cannot fully respect. That is where stress tips into Moral Injury.
This term should be used carefully. Not every compromised preference or irritating process qualifies. Organisational life always involves compromise. The term matters when compromise hardens into repeated participation in arrangements that violate a person’s standard of responsible action, good work, or honest care. A leader endorses a plan they do not believe is executable. A manager blames a team for weakness when the deeper problem is contradictory demands and poor support. A serious operator watches political performers advance while those carrying real complexity are sidelined. A team keeps producing reports everyone knows add little value because reporting has become the only available proxy for control.
Stress says, “This is too much.” Moral injury says, more quietly, “This is not right, and I am being asked to act as if it is.” Once confusion reaches this point, the organisation is no longer just losing efficiency. It is corroding judgment, trust, and commitment at the same time. That is not simply a human cost alongside effectiveness. It is one of the clearest signs that organisational effectiveness itself is beginning to fail.
3. The Coordinating Middle: Where Contradiction Becomes Leadership Burden
These costs do not fall evenly. Entangled work can appear anywhere in an organisation, but the burden often lands most densely on the people asked to coordinate across boundaries without fully controlling the wider system. This is the broad, under-recognised middle of organisational life: the leaders and operators expected to align, broker, interpret, and keep things moving across semi-autonomous worlds.
3.1 Maximum Contradiction v The Coordinating Middle
The coordinating middle is where organisational contradiction becomes most concentrated. This broad band includes project leads, programme leaders, team-of-teams managers, portfolio heads, department and function leaders, regional operators, chiefs of staff, deputies, and other integrative roles whose formal titles rarely capture the complexity of what they carry. They sit close enough to delivery to feel operational consequences directly, yet senior enough to absorb strategic pressure, stakeholder demands, and organisational ambiguity.
That position places them at the point of maximum contradiction. They are not simply running a bounded team, nor are they shaping the whole system from above. They are holding together several partially incompatible demands at once. Delivery cannot stop. Stakeholders cannot be ignored. Change cannot be postponed indefinitely. The contradiction is therefore lived rather than abstract. It arrives as saturated calendars, unresolved dependencies, reputational exposure, emotional containment, and the repeated need to keep several agendas moving without a clear rule for resolving collisions.
This is one reason leadership at this level feels so hard to finish. The work keeps spilling beyond the formal boundary of the role. These leaders are not only doing tasks. They are carrying the gap between the amount of coherence the organisation actually has and the amount it still expects to see. Where contradiction intensifies, hidden burden accumulates. The coordinating middle is usually where it accumulates first.
3.2 Full Accountability v Partial Control
A central feature of entangled leadership is the gap between what people are held accountable for and what they actually control. Leaders in the coordinating middle are often responsible for outcomes that depend on levers dispersed across the wider system. They may carry the timeline, the service issue, the implementation risk, or the stakeholder relationship, while authority, resources, and decision rights sit elsewhere. In that sense, the role is full in its exposure but partial in its control.
This is familiar matrix territory. Formal accountability may sit in one place, operational dependency in another, budgetary power in a third, and legitimacy with a fourth actor altogether. The person in the middle has to create coherence across these partial holdings. When the work succeeds, that complexity often remains invisible. When it fails, the same leader can quickly be read as insufficiently strategic, too political, too soft, too controlling, or simply not strong enough. Full accountability remains; partial control is forgotten.
The burden is practical and interpretive at once. These leaders must constantly judge what kind of authority they really have, how far it will travel, and where it will run into someone else’s claim. The contradiction is not between responsibility and irresponsibility, but between being held fully answerable in roles that are only partially sovereign.
3.3 Back-Stage Effectiveness v Front-Stage Confidence
One of the more dispiriting features of entangled systems is that they do not reliably reward the people doing the most important coherence work. Much of that work happens in the organisational back-stage: in translation across boundaries, in the quiet reduction of churn, in the patient clarification of competing demands, and in the countless small acts by which serious operators stop the system from fragmenting more visibly. This is back-stage effectiveness. It is indispensable, but it rarely looks dramatic.
By contrast, front-stage confidence is easier to recognise and reward. Some leaders generate movement through force of personality, pressure, and ambient threat. Others generate very little structure at all while sounding agreeable, modern, and empowering. One style produces brittle compliance. The other produces unmanaged sprawl. Both, however, can remain more publicly legible than the quieter integrator whose contribution lies in making difficult work more doable. The system sees confidence, movement, and rhetorical fluency more easily than it sees repair, translation, and burden reduction.
Political operators also do well in such conditions. When priorities are weakly ranked and symbolic fluency matters, it becomes possible to look highly aligned while carrying relatively little of the actual integrative burden. This does not mean political skill is inherently illegitimate. It means that poorly designed systems often reward the wrong kind of legibility. They promote people who perform coherence convincingly on the front stage while exhausting those who are trying to create coherence in the back-stage conditions where the work is actually held together.
3.4 Simple Leadership v Complex Needs
Leadership theory has long preferred simpler figures than the work now requires. The first-line manager with a bounded team is relatively easy to model: visible people-management tasks, clearer lines of authority, and a plausible connection between behaviour and outcome. The apex leader is easy to mythologise: strategic vision, symbolic authority, enterprise direction. Both figures suit a simpler picture of leadership.
The coordinating middle does not. Its work is messier, more relational, more contingent, and less easily reduced to either a competency list or a heroic image. It sits in the overlaps: between functions, between levels, between local and central, between delivery and change. Complex needs are being carried in roles that simple leadership theory struggles to see.
This is where the book stands. If leadership in modern organisations is to be understood seriously, it has to be understood here: where hidden burden accumulates, where accountability exceeds control, and where coherence has to be built without sovereign authority. It is also here that the gap becomes most visible between the burdens carried by the coordinating middle and the development they are typically given. The next section turns to that gap by asking what leaders in these entangled, integrative roles currently get.
4. Leadership Development: What Entangled Leaders Currently Get
What entangled leaders currently get is usually a poor fit for the work they are actually doing. They are carrying contradiction, hidden burden, blurred authority, and weakly ranked demands, yet the development on offer is often generic, symbolic, or aimed at cleaner roles than theirs. The result is not no development, but the wrong kind.
4.1 Leadership Language v Developmental Direction
Many organisations have no shortage of leadership language. They talk about capability, culture, talent, behaviours, and future-ready leaders. They run programmes, circulate competency frameworks, and make development visible in strategy decks. Yet beneath that surface there is often remarkably little developmental direction for the people carrying the actual burden of coordination. Leadership language is abundant; developmental direction is thin, especially for the coordinating middle.
That is the gap the irritated executive in Maya’s first hundred days had in mind. His complaint was not with development in principle, but with development that bore little relation to how the organisation actually worked. The programme existed, but the work it was supposed to support remained weakly described. The people carrying contradictory loads, weak ranking, hidden burden, political ambiguity, and the practical work of making things cohere across boundaries were still being offered generic uplift.
What was missing, in other words, was not developmental activity but developmental fit. The organisation could point to programmes, frameworks, and capability language, but not to a serious account of what these integrative roles were actually being asked to carry. When leadership language outruns developmental direction, the coordinating middle is left to improvise where it most needs specificity.
4.2 Cleaner Models v Messier Realities
A great deal of leadership development is built around cleaner figures than the coordinating middle. It assumes either the bounded first-line manager, whose main task is to lead a visible team, or the apex leader, whose task is to set direction and shape the whole. Both are real. Neither captures the actual burden of the project lead, regional operator, function head, or team-of-teams leader trying to hold together semi-autonomous worlds without sovereign control.
This creates a predictable misfit. First-line material is stretched upward and becomes too local. Apex material is translated downward and becomes aspiration theatre. People are developed as though they are either still learning the basics of team leadership or preparing for a more strategic role later, when in practice many are already carrying some of the most structurally demanding work in the system.
That is why so much development feels faintly anachronistic. It still carries assumptions from a world of clearer hierarchies, firmer boundaries, and stronger links between authority and execution. The work has changed faster than the models.
4.3 Broad Competency Demands v Thin Structural Insight
Mainstream leadership development is also heavily skewed toward the individual. Sometimes this appears in the familiar language of mindset, resilience, emotional intelligence, strengths, and self-awareness. Just as often, it appears in a more businesslike form: write better plans, manage people better, solve problems faster, communicate more clearly, think more strategically, lead change more effectively. Much of this is useful. Leaders do need judgment, commercial sense, people-management skill, and the capacity to carry pressure without passing it downward carelessly.
The problem begins when both psychological development and competency development are asked to explain burdens that belong, in large part, to the role and the system. Under entangled conditions, leaders are often struggling because of what the role is demanding and what the wider system is making difficult. Development repeatedly translates contradiction into deficiency. If the work is blurry, improve communication. If trade-offs are impossible, improve decision-making. If authority is partial, improve influence. If priorities collide, improve strategic thinking. Broad competency demands are being piled onto roles that are still being diagnosed with thin structural insight.
This creates an increasingly totalised image of the leader. The list expands: strategic thinking, commercial acumen, stakeholder management, coaching, adaptability, execution, innovation, change leadership, people development, communication, resilience. Taken one by one, these all sound sensible. Taken together, they imply a near-impossible individual: psychologically robust, interpersonally fluent, commercially sharp, politically deft, operationally reliable, and strategically expansive all at once. The question is whether this produces excellence or just well-rounded mediocrity — leaders expected to be competent across everything, but rarely given the chance to become truly distinctive at anything, because the system keeps converting structural contradiction into one more demand for personal range.
Even culture work is often psychologised in the same way. Organisational culture becomes a test of selfhood: the outer self must display the right behaviours, while the inner self must appear to hold the right values. Collaboration, accountability, inclusion, courage, and ownership are recast as personal traits to be performed and affirmed, rather than as outcomes of work design, power, legitimacy, and structural coherence. Structural contradiction is then privatised. If the system is fragmented, the person must collaborate harder. If authority is blurred, the person must show more ownership. If incentives clash, the person must embody the values more sincerely.
This is what structurally thin development looks like: role flattened into behaviours and competencies, system reduced to vague context, and the person left trying to become a more versatile carrier of incoherence. It does not ignore business capability. It individualises it.
4.4 Programmes v Practice
Leadership development often fails not only because the offer is weakly fitted, but because it sits inside organisations that reward something else. Programmes may speak the language of trust, development, judgment, and empowerment, while the wider system continues to reward symbolic confidence over serious judgment, visible performance over invisible repair, and political fluency over coherence-building. Programmes point one way; practice points another.
That is why development itself can become another form of Coordination Theatre. The organisation demonstrates seriousness about leadership in public while leaving the daily conditions of leadership substantially untouched. People are taught one vocabulary in the programme room and another in the advancement system. They hear that good leadership means developing others, exercising judgment, and building coherence, while watching quieter integrators carry the real burden and more theatrical figures advance more easily.
Under those conditions, programmes struggle to gain traction because they are competing with a more powerful teacher: the organisation’s reward logic. It does not matter how often people are told to lead well if the system repeatedly shows that advancement depends at least as much on legibility, sponsor attachment, or performative certainty as on the difficult work of reducing confusion and building coherence. What entangled leaders currently get, then, is not just a poorly fitted developmental offer, but an organisation whose everyday practice keeps teaching against it.
5. Leadership Practice: What Entangled Leaders Actually Need
What entangled leaders actually need is not a more polished version of the same developmental offer. They need a better fit between practice and condition. They need ways of seeing, judging, and acting that match the real burden of contradictory loads, hidden integration work, blurred authority, and rising Confusion Tax.
5.1 Better Distinctions v Generic Prescriptions
The first need is better distinctions. Many organisational problems remain stubborn because they are described too vaguely. Everything becomes leadership, alignment, communication, collaboration, accountability, or change. Those words are too broad to guide serious judgment under pressure. Generic prescriptions then rush in to fill the gap: communicate better, be more decisive, build trust, show resilience, think strategically.
For the coordinating middle, sharper distinctions especially matter. These roles are where contradictory demands are most densely carried, and where vague language is least helpful. Leaders here need to distinguish Run from Serve from Change; useful coordination from theatrical coordination; personal strain from structural strain; and real priorities from accumulated demands. Without those distinctions, everything collapses into one undifferentiated mass of urgency, and the people holding the most entangled work are left trying to absorb contradiction privately.
This matters all the more because Run, Serve, and Change are recursive. They are not just categories for teams or departments. Every role at every level carries some mix of all three. What changes across roles is not whether they are present, but the proportion, scale, and consequence of the mix. Lower-level roles are often more Run-heavy, with bounded Serve and smaller-scale Change. As roles become broader and more system-facing, direct Run usually decreases while Serve and Change increase. Run does not disappear, but is carried more through stewardship, prioritisation, and design than through direct execution.
Seen this way, development is already embedded in practice. The question is not simply whether someone is “ready for leadership,” but whether they can recognise and carry the Run / Serve / Change mix their role actually demands. Much role strain in the coordinating middle arises when that mix has shifted but the person, the programme, or the organisation is still treating the role as though it belonged to an earlier and simpler pattern.
This is why the chapter is already practical, not merely preparatory. For many leaders in these entangled middle-band roles, simply learning to distinguish Run, Serve, and Change will be a significant step forward. It turns vague pressure into diagnosable load, makes hidden contradiction discussable, and gives teams a first usable way of seeing what kind of work they are actually in.
5.2 Confusion Tax v Coherence-Building
Once entanglement is more visible, the next task is practical: reduce the Confusion Tax. That does not mean eliminating uncertainty altogether. Serious organisational life will always involve ambiguity and difficult trade-offs. The aim is simply to stop making people pay for confusion that could be reduced.
In practice, this often begins with modest but consequential moves. Priorities have to be ranked rather than endlessly accumulated. Trade-offs need to be surfaced rather than buried in polite language. Decision rights have to become clearer. Redundant work needs permission to stop. Reporting has to be simplified where it has become reassurance rather than judgment. Lateral learning needs to become more real so that similar problems are not solved repeatedly in parallel.
These are not glamorous interventions, but they are often among the most serious forms of leadership available. A leader who helps a team separate Run, Serve, and Change is not just improving workflow. A leader who ranks competing demands, simplifies a decision forum, or removes duplicate reporting is not just being efficient. They are giving time, attention, and moral energy back to the work.
Coherence-building starts here: not with grand redesign, but with reducing avoidable confusion where the work is actually being carried.
5.3 Isolated Development v Self–Role–System Diagnosis
Leaders in the coordinating middle also need a broader diagnostic frame. One of the main weaknesses of mainstream leadership development is that it isolates self, role, and system too quickly. The self becomes psychology. The role becomes tasks or competencies. The system becomes vague context. Under entangled conditions, that separation breaks down most sharply in the integrative middle, where contradiction is carried across all three at once.
A leader may feel personally inadequate because the role is carrying contradictory demands. A role may feel impossible because the system has normalised weak ranking, blurred authority, and hidden burden. A system may appear dysfunctional because large numbers of people have adapted privately to conditions they cannot name publicly. If development focuses only on the self, it psychologises a role-and-system problem. If it focuses only on role design, it misses the inner consequences of sustained contradiction. If it focuses only on the system, it becomes too abstract to guide action.
That is why better leadership here requires leaders to read self, role, and system together. They need to notice what the work is doing to them, what the role is requiring, and what the system is making difficult or rewarding invisibly. For the coordinating middle in particular, that kind of diagnosis is not a luxury. It is one of the few ways the burden becomes legible enough to work on.
5.4 Heroic Leadership v Practices of Sensemaking
Once the burden is understood in this way, a different picture of leadership begins to emerge. Leadership under entangled conditions is not first heroic, charismatic, or motivational. It is first a set of practices of sensemaking. Leaders have to work out which logics are colliding, where confusion is being generated, what burden is hidden, and what kind of work the situation is actually demanding. The first task is not to perform certainty, but to make conditions more readable.
That sensemaking begins with interpretation. Leaders have to notice whether a problem is primarily about Run, Serve, or Change, whether a coordination problem is substantive or theatrical, whether a delay is thoughtful or symptomatic, and whether a strain sits mainly in the self, the role, or the wider system. Without that interpretive work, action easily becomes generic: more communication, more meetings, more resolve, more pressure. Sensemaking slows that reflex and gives the leader a better description of the difficulty before intervention begins.
Sensemaking is equally navigational. Once a leader can see the situation more clearly, they have to move through it: working with legitimacy, audience, sequence, and constraint. Who needs to understand this differently? Which groups have to be brought into relation? Where can a trade-off be made discussable? What can move now, and what needs different sponsorship first? Sensemaking, in this fuller sense, is not private reflection. It is the disciplined practice of making complexity sufficiently legible that movement becomes more intelligent.
It is also experimental. Under entangled conditions, leaders rarely get to redesign the whole organisation in one move. What they can often do is run better local tests: a cleaner decision process, a sharper distinction between kinds of work, a reduced reporting loop, a more honest trade-off, a small redesign that lowers burden and improves coherence. Taken together, these interpretive, navigational, and experimental moves form a more serious alternative to heroic leadership. They shift the question from “How do I become the kind of leader who can carry all this?” to “What practices help me and others make better sense of what we are actually in?”
5.5 Cope to Survive v Cohere to Thrive
The final shift is from coping to cohering. People can survive for quite a long time by becoming better at carrying confusion privately. They become more politically alert, more emotionally controlled, and more flexible in how they absorb contradiction. Sometimes that looks like maturity. But coping, on its own, is a low bar. It often means the person has become a more effective container for systemic strain without changing the conditions producing it.
Cohering is different. It means using growing sophistication not only to endure the work, but to make the work more intelligible, more discussable, and more governable for other people as well as oneself. The move from survive to thrive does not depend on perfect control, and it does not require grand transformation from the outset. It begins wherever a leader can create a little more clarity than was there before: clearer priorities, cleaner ownership, less duplicate reporting, better lateral sharing, more honest trade-offs, or a team that can distinguish its Run work from its Serve and Change work.
Thriving should not be confused with personal optimisation. It is not about becoming endlessly adaptable while the system remains incoherent. It is about creating pockets of greater coherence in which better judgment, better work, and better development become possible. A leader who helps people stop paying unnecessary Confusion Tax is already doing something developmental. A leader who clarifies the mix of work in a role, reduces symbolic churn, or creates one cleaner place for a decision to land is already improving the conditions under which others can contribute.
That is the turn into the rest of the book. Entangled leaders do not first need more slogans or another abstract model of what good leaders are like. They need ways of seeing and acting that move them from coping with contradiction to creating coherence within it. Before that work can be done well, however, the trouble has to become more visible in lived experience. Before the causes can be diagnosed, the symptoms have to be seen.
Coda: The First Untangling
Maya did not try to fix the company.
That would have been theatre of another kind: one more ambitious gesture made too early, before the work had been properly read. What she did instead was smaller, and therefore more serious. She began with her own team.
In one of their early sessions, she asked a set of questions that felt almost embarrassingly simple once they were on the table.
· What work here is genuinely about keeping things running?
· What work is really about serving stakeholders and adapting to their needs?
· What work is actually change work?
· What has become fused together simply because no one has separated it clearly enough?
At first the conversation was untidy. People described tasks, complaints, frustrations, and bits of inherited process. But as they kept sorting, some patterns became visible. Certain reports existed mainly because they had always existed. Some meetings were duplicating work done elsewhere. Some priorities were not priorities at all, just unexpired requests no one had felt authorised to rank lower. Some work that looked urgent turned out to belong to a different category entirely once the team asked what kind of demand it really was.
Nothing miraculous happened. The wider organisation did not suddenly become coherent. But within that small space, confusion eased a little. A few redundant demands were removed. A few ownership questions became cleaner. With that came something else. Maya and her team could feel the difference almost immediately: less noise, less circling, and more attention returning to the work that actually mattered
Maya knew that local clarity was only a start. But it was enough to show her team entanglement was not fate, and that reducing the Confusion Tax within the boundary of her team was possible. The bigger task now was to understand how these conditions were showing up more broadly — in people, in roles, and across the system itself as lived symptoms.