Leading into the future

Chapter 4 - Leading into the future

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Wisdom is rarely owned by one person alone.

Welcome to the Leading into the future page

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Peter Drucker

Management is doing things right

Leadership is doing the right things

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Dive deeper into Why?

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The goal of Leading into the future

Creation of the proper physical and intellectual context so all internal and external stakeholders can contribute to realising the company's strategy regarding the global environmental and social situation.

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Science about (wrong) dominant idea’s in leadership

• Some of us are born leaders, have 'it' and others do not
  • Research has shown that certain personality traits are helpful, but above all, effective leadership behaviour can be learned and leaders are shaped by life
• A good leader is masculine, dominant, charismatic, assertive
  • Research has shown that teams that have to work on complex assignments (such as your daily business work) are not served by an extroverted, confident, dominant leader
• Individuals with power or hero stories are leaders
  • Research has shown the need for a more open definition of leadership, as an organization and society we need the leadership of many, narrowing leadership down does not help with this
• The importance of 'motivation to lead' is crucial for taking on leadership
  • Research has shown the equally importance of the focus on the group interest
• Leadership is about daring to appropriate leadership for yourself (the process of claiming and granting)
  • Research has shown that leadership is also about the group and their favourability factor towards you
• Leadership is fixed, here and now
  • Research has shown that leadership is something dynamic and shared – ideally leadership is picked up and passed on depending on context and time, but it is important that people continue to discuss what is expected of the leader of the team and the leaders in the team

Content source
Antwerp Managment School

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Dive deeper into How?

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The dynamics of Leading into the future comes from long-term thinking and ethical decision-making

To overcome paralysis and inaction, decision-making for the long-term needs:

• Stepping back and consider all options, both near term and long term
  • This is because gathering information in our environment can cause us to become so focused on the immediate situation that we overlook the broader possibilities
• Rather than focus on binary outcomes, which rarely play out, we should consider the full spectrum of possible effects and assign probabilities to each
  • Embrace paradoxical and probabiltic ways of thinking
• "Possibilities always exist." Even in the worst of situations, opportunities and ethical choices can be made

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Dive deeper into What?

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Your leadership is embedded in your current real situation

(The enterprise elements related to the Leading into the future framework)

On the Inner focus level, from the Leading point of view, you will have to deal with elements of Organisational futuring:

• Motivation
• Collaboration
• Managing
• Governance

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And, of course the inner elements of Corporate futuring:

• Long term thinking
• Supporting
• Steering
• Appreciation

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Two questions are key:

• Where are we now?
• What is the direction to take?

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A third 'upward' dimension emerges

On the Other focus level, the question arises about personal and organisational values

The affiliation exists with Organisational futuring:

• Talent development
• Learning organisation
• Process management
• HR management

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Two questions are key:

• How do we grow together?
• What relationships do we enter into?

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On the Outer focus level, an affiliation exists with Corporate futuring:

• Operational Strategy
• Financial management
• Commercial management
• Business model

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The Key question is:

• What is the next step to take?

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Leadership practice

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Modern leadership development has been colonised by a WEIRD, individualised psychological worldview, rooted in humanistic and positive psychology and amplified by I/O psych, then exported as if it were universal. This essay traces how that happened, contrasts it with older, more system- and role-aware traditions, and argues for a post-WEIRD, self-in-role-in-system approach grounded in psychosocial and systems thinking.

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Current reality (2025 ... )

Lina ran operations for a state-linked utility in Southeast Asia. She was sharp, quietly respected, and somehow managed to keep both the regulator and the unions just on the right side of annoyed. When the global “Future Leaders” programme opened nominations, Lina was an obvious choice.

The brochure read like a greatest hits album of contemporary leadership development:

• “Lead from your purpose.”
• “Unlock your authentic voice.”
• “Cultivate resilience and growth mindset.”
• “Coach, don’t command.”

Two weeks later, Lina dialled into the first module from a hotel room in Singapore.

They did values cards and life maps. There were breakout rooms on “What do you really want?” and “A time you were most alive at work.” A visiting faculty member encouraged everyone to “redraw your role around your deepest strengths.” One afternoon was devoted to resilience and self-care. The capstone was a session on “leading through coaching,” practising open questions and withholding advice.

Lina found it strangely moving. Parts of it spoke to things she’d never had language for.

But she was also doing mental arithmetic.

Her minister wanted fewer outages and no scandals. The regulator wanted stricter compliance and cheaper tariffs. Her extended family expected her to continue supporting a small village of relatives. Her direct boss had once told her, kindly but firmly, “Lina, don’t overcomplicate things. Your job is to deliver. Leave the big ideas to us.”

On the flight home, she sketched an action plan anyway:

• Share more of her personal story with her team.
• Ask her boss for space to reshape her role.
• Introduce coaching conversations with frontline supervisors.

Within a month:

• Her boss listened politely to the “purpose and role” conversation, then sent her a revised KPI sheet with the comment, “Let’s focus on what matters first.”
• A senior colleague warned her, off the record, that being “too open” with staff could backfire politically.
• Supervisors responded to coaching questions with nervous silence. One later said, “Madam, please just tell us what you want. We don’t want to say the wrong thing.”

Lina began to split herself in two.

There was “programme Lina,” who believed in authenticity, purpose, and growth mindset. And there was “real-world Lina,” who knew exactly how far she could move before someone important felt threatened.

When Maya checked in and asked how she was applying the learning, Lina smiled and said all the right things about “small steps” and “working on my mindset.”

Privately, she wondered if perhaps the problem was her. Everyone else on the programme seemed so enthusiastic. Maybe she just wasn’t courageous enough. Maybe her mindset really was too fixed.

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What “WEIRD” Really Means for Leadership

Psychologists have a slightly awkward secret: for decades, most of what we’ve called “human nature” has actually been “WEIRD nature.”

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. The bulk of psychological experiments were run on people from societies that are:

• highly individualised,
• relatively affluent and urban,
• organised around formal institutions rather than kinship,
• and shaped by ideas of personal choice, rights, and self-expression.

Out of that soil grew a particular psychological worldview:

• The individual self is the basic unit.
• Internal states—beliefs, emotions, mindset—are the main levers.
• Relationships are often seen as contracts between individuals.
• Rules, metrics, and explicit agreements are preferred to tacit, relational norms.

Leadership psychology drank from the same well.

It made perfect sense, in that context, to say:

• “Know yourself.”
• “Find your why.”
• “Lead from your strengths.”
• “Own your mindset.”
• “Be authentic and vulnerable.”

In Lina’s programme, all of this showed up as obvious, almost morally self-evident. Who could be against authenticity or purpose?

The trouble is not that these ideas are wrong. It’s that they are not universal.

In many parts of the world—and in many parts of the same multinational—people do not experience themselves primarily as free-floating individuals optimising their inner lives. They experience themselves as role-holders in dense webs of obligation, nested inside systems where hierarchy, history, and politics matter at least as much as mindset.

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Lina’s programme assumed a WEIRD logic on every row:

• Her self is a project to be authored.
• Hierarchy should be gently challenged in the name of authenticity.
• Relationships are arenas for emotional honesty, not just duty.
• Suffering at work is largely a mindset and coping challenge.

Her system runs on something closer to the right-hand column.

So where a WEIRD programme sees “empowering authenticity,” her minister might see “inappropriate informality.” Where the faculty sees “growth mindset,” Lina’s colleagues might see “not understanding how things work here.”

The leadership development industry tends to treat this misfit as a deficiency in the individual: lack of courage, lack of resilience, lack of “ownership.”

A post-WEIRD view says: no—this is a context clash.

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How WEIRD Is Your Leadership Model?

You don’t need a full academic analysis to see where your own programmes sit. A few blunt questions will do:

1. When you talk about “the leader,” what picture is implicit?
   • A largely autonomous individual crafting their path?
   • Or a role-holder whose actions are tightly coupled to obligations and constraints?
2. How do your programmes treat hierarchy?
   • As something to be flattened and challenged?
   • Or as a structure of legitimacy that must be read and worked with carefully?
3. When people are distressed or stuck, what’s your first explanatory move?
   • “We need to build their resilience / mindset / EQ”?
   • Or “We need to examine their role load, system pressures, and the contradictions they’re holding”?
4. Whose reality do your case studies centre?
   • Silicon Valley founders, Western CEOs, high-autonomy environments?
   • Or leaders navigating ministries, family enterprises, SOEs, and hybrid systems?

If most of your answers lean toward the first option in each pair, you’re probably exporting a strongly WEIRD model of leadership—even if most of your leaders, like Lina, are not living in WEIRD worlds.

The rest of the essay is about where that model came from, why it became so psychologised, and how we might gently but firmly move beyond it—without losing the genuine gifts of humanistic psychology that made work a little more humane in the first place.

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Three Psychological Lineages

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Psychodynamics & Behaviourism

Freud and his descendants weren’t thinking about high-potentials; they were thinking about anxiety, repression, trauma, the ways people defended themselves against unbearable feelings. When those ideas moved into organisations—through the Tavistock tradition, socio-technical systems thinking, and group relations work—they brought a blunt message:

Work hurts.

Systems can be crazy.

Roles are places where institutional anxiety gets dumped.

Early organisational psychoanalysts didn’t do “purpose workshops”. They sat in factories, hospitals, bureaucracies and asked:

• What is this system defending itself against?
• Why is this team constantly scapegoating one person?
• How is this role becoming a lightning rod for everyone else’s fear?

Their focus was not “flourishing” but containment: how to design roles, teams, and authority so that necessary pain didn’t turn into destructive madness.

Alongside them, behaviourists like Skinner were doing something equally unromantic: looking at how environments shape behaviour.

• Reinforcement and punishment.
• Schedules, quotas, incentives.
• How to get rats (and then workers) to keep pressing the lever.

Cruel, often crude—but again, they took seriously that conditions matter. People don’t just “choose their response”; they respond to structures.

Both lineages, in very different ways, noticed:

• Industrial and bureaucratic life generates anxiety, boredom, alienation, moral injury.
• You can’t wish that away with a better attitude.
• If you want less suffering, you have to redesign roles, relationships, and systems.

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Humanistic Psychology

Maslow, Rogers, May and others were tired of rats, neuroses, and pathology. They wanted to study:

Growth, not just illness.

Self-actualisation, not just survival.

Meaning, not just mechanism.

Humanistic psychology said:

• People are not just bundles of drives and defences.
• They have agency, creativity, and a longing for authenticity.
• Under the right conditions—empathy, congruence, unconditional positive regard—they can grow.

In organisational life, this was a breath of fresh air.

• T-groups and sensitivity training tried to humanise rigid hierarchies.
• OD pioneers wanted workplaces where people could be more than cogs.
• Early “participative management” drew on humanistic ideas to argue that people should have a voice.

Seen in its original context, this was not fluffy. It was a counter to dehumanisation.

Instead of seeing workers as problems to be controlled or cases to be analysed, humanistic psych invited managers to see them as whole people with hopes, fears, and potential.

That move mattered. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.

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Positive Psychology & I/O (Industrial and organisational psychology)

Positive psychology promised to be “the science of flourishing”:

Strengths instead of weaknesses,

Optimism instead of helplessness,

Resilience instead of fragility,

Happiness and engagement as measurable outcomes.

In parallel, mainstream I/O psychology, especially in corporate settings, leaned into what could be:

• tested with surveys and experiments,
• rolled out in programmes,
• tied to performance metrics.

Leadership development became a familiar mix:

• competency models and 360s,
• strengths and personality tools,
• resilience and mindset modules,
• coaching skills and psychological safety workshops.

The intentions were often good. But three distortions crept in.

1. Suffering got individualised.
   • Burnout? Build resilience.
   • Chronic overload? Time management and boundaries.
   • Moral distress? Mindfulness and reframing.
   • Systemic injustice? Inclusive leadership skills and allyship workshops. The message, however gently wrapped, was: “The system is the weather. You are responsible for your umbrella.”
2. Systems and roles faded out of view.
   • The psychodynamic and socio-technical traditions, which understood anxiety, projection, and systemic madness, were sidelined as too “woolly” or “negative.”
   • Argyris, Schon, Lewin, and others who treated organisations as fields of tension rather than neutral containers were skimmed, not soaked in.
   • The unit of analysis slid quietly back to “the individual leader and their mindset.”
3. Positivity became compulsory.
   • You should be engaged, optimistic, growth-minded.
   • You should process your distress privately with a coach, then show up as constructive.
   • Cynicism, anger, grief—signals of systemic harm—became “derailers” to be coached away.

It is not an accident that many I/O psychologists now say, “We need a more systemic approach.” They can feel the limits of the current frame. But the shelves behind them are already full of systemic, role-aware, psychosocial work they were never trained to read.

The result is a kind of pathological positivism:

• Humanistic warmth without psychodynamic depth.
• Strengths and resilience without role and system analysis.
• A genuine desire to help people flourish, wired into apparatuses that often can’t acknowledge how much the system itself is breaking them.

When that package is exported into places like Lina’s organisation—and sold as “best practice leadership”—the fractures become very visible, very fast.

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Source
Richard Claydon

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