"Leaders are in control"

Organisations need strong leaders — that's not in question. The fantasy is control itself.

Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework (articulated in Harvard Business Review) maps the situations a leader faces by how cause and effect behave: the obvious (clear rules, follow the recipe), the complicated (needs an expert to analyse), the complex (too many shifting human variables; outcomes only emerge as you go), and the chaotic (pure crisis, act to stabilise).

Most real leadership work — building a new product, shifting a culture, navigating a volatile market — lives in the complex zone, where no manual and no expert can guarantee a result. The heroic "I have the answer" style only works in the obvious zone. Take it into complexity and you're not showing strength — you're "guessing loudly, and dragging everyone off a cliff with conviction." Yet the corporate ladder is built to reward exactly those loud guessers.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic ("Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?") shows organisations systematically confuse confidence with competence — our brains take the shortcut that certainty signals ability. The traits that get people promoted (self-promotion, projected certainty) are often the opposite of the judgment, humility, and emotional intelligence that complex work actually requires. This is reinforced by Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y (1960): executives claim they operate under Theory Y (people are self-motivated), but the infrastructure — monitoring software, activity-based KPIs, rigid hierarchies — reveals a Theory X belief that people must be controlled. And now AI is exposing the whole illusion.

Gartner projects that through 2026, around 20% of organisations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their middle-management roles — and manager headcount is already falling faster than the wider workforce. Why so fast? Because much of middle management was coordination: tracking, collating, routing, synthesising — the controlling work AI now does instantly. Which reveals the real point: control was never the valuable part of human leadership. Strip it away and what's left is the only thing that needed a human all along — judgment, empathy, and the ability to lead through uncertainty.

Lead the situation, not a script — there's no universally good style (Hersey & Blanchard's situational leadership). Be directive in a genuine crisis; convene, facilitate, and experiment when the problem is complex. Misreading the context is the fatal flaw.

Promote for competence, not confidence — stop rewarding the loudest voice. Look for judgment, good questions, and a track record of developing others. If your promotion process is an audition for a heroic-CEO movie, it's broken.

Learn to say "I don't know" — in complex work, false certainty makes teams stop thinking and follow you off the cliff. "I don't know, but here's how we'll figure it out together" creates the psychological safety for collective intelligence to work.

Flex, explain, and adjust — match your style to the moment, and tell people why you're leading that way right now. Explained leadership builds trust; arbitrary command builds malicious compliance.

Get good at what AI can't do — don't defend the coordination work you'll lose to an algorithm. Focus on judgment under uncertainty, developing people, mediating conflict, building trust, and asking the right questions instead of having the loudest answers.