Don’t be Darth Vader if you want effective organisation — but don’t be a Rebel either…

Don’t be Darth Vader if you want effective organisation — but don’t be a Rebel either…

The more we tighten our grip, the brittler our organisations become — and the faster reality slips through our fingers.

Join the discussion on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_leadership-systemsthinking-complexity-activity-7380691276305965056-HRf5

A moment of clarity hit me early in my career. I watched a team see its work afresh, spot the constraint that mattered, and rewire a whole service in a morning. Since then, I’ve tried to help leaders see what’s really going on: patterns held in place by habits, incentives and stories, with just enough stability to look permanent and just enough flux to break when stressed in the right way. That’s where practical systems | cybernetics | complexity lives.

Here’s the stance. Organisations are BOTH traps for the human soul and the means by which we consensually coordinate meaning to get valuable work done. Push for certainty, and you harden a worldview that shatters at the first shock. Loosen everything, you lose coherence. The real craft is balancing boundaries and freedoms so discretion can flow to the edge where purpose meets reality. That is not methodology theatre. It’s disciplined sensemaking, error-correction, and action learning.

Two anchors help.

First, treat problems as human-complete: there are always many valid ways to carve the pattern, so epistemic humility beats ontological swagger.

Second, build viable structures that translate signals between worlds — frontline, management, policy, board, futures — so each can understand enough of the other to act together.

This is management as a verb, not a noun, and it’s what leadership looks like day-to-day.

If you work in public services, where duty, legitimacy and lived experience collide daily, this is not optional; it is your operating system. If you work in tech, where brittle programmed structure meets the messy needs of people, it’s the real challenge.

The question is not whether you adopt a framework, but whether you can learn faster than your context is changing — and do so without breaking trust. Where could a small loosening of one constraint in your system increase coherence rather than chaos, and how would you know without falling back on comforting business or innovation slogans?

All this and more in my conversation with Laksh Raghavan on the Cyb3rSyn Labs podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/laraghavan_leadership-systemsthinking-complexity-activity-7380636728950259712-mTUe