Hello, and welcome to this edition of The Scribbler. This month I peer beneath the polished surface of organisational life to uncover the silent dissonance between what we say, what we mean, and what we dare not admit. But first, a bit of trivia.
Trivia question: On this day in 2003, a fleet of Concorde aircraft were retired. From which airline? Answer at the bottom of this scribbling.
Dispatches from the Frayed Edge of Organisational Sanity
There's a moment in every leader's week—somewhere between the third strategy slide and the fifth meeting about employee engagement—when one thinks: surely, this isn't what leadership was meant to feel like.
And no, it's not. Leadership, if recent weeks have made anything clear, has become a theatre of the absurd: populated by oracles of optimism, avatars of purpose, and middle managers clutching culture decks like life vests on the Titanic. The organisation says it wants change, but only if the PowerPoint animations are smooth. It wants feedback, but only if it's phrased like a TED Talk and accompanied by a GIF.
In short, reality has been escorted from the premises.
This month's writing has been a modest attempt to bring reality back in.
Let's begin with the obvious: messaging has escaped orbit. In When Messaging Slips the Bonds of Reality, I explored how communication in many organisations no longer serves to inform, but to pacify. It's theatre. What once was a tool of clarity has become a cover for strategic drift, an exercise in what Ashforth and Gibbs described as "symbolic management." We issue statements about agility while organisational cholesterol clogs every decision point. We reassure staff about their future while quietly plotting restructuring under code names that sound like Cold War operations.
And like Baghdad Bob before them, the messaging mandarins press on, describing bold futures as metaphorical tanks roll down the high street.
But this is not merely a communications problem—it is a moral one. When leaders lose the ability (or the courage) to speak plainly, they also lose the ability to think clearly. Discernment—the forgotten virtue in leadership circles—is not a matter of speaking slowly while clasping your hands. It's about the difficult work of aligning words with truth. If you can't admit when a plan is off-track, when a culture is dysfunctional, or when an initiative is more ceremony than substance, then you're not leading—you're narrating. Poorly.