Leadership has become theatre - performative rather than legitimate. Trust has become transactional. Cultural systems, once designed to hold meaning and cohesion, are collapsing under a weight of complexity they were never built to carry.  Post industrial systems of work have collided with digital tech and leeched our bandwidth for community and connection. We need a reckoning, because our systems have made it near impossible to be human.

It’s not incompetence, it’s incoherence Workplaces today are not struggling because of incompetence, but because of incoherence.  From multigenerational tension to mass disengagement, identity friction to burnout, what appears as dysfunction is often something deeper: humans struggling to metabolise complexity inside systems never designed for post-industrial, post-identity, AI-accelerated life. We treat Gen Z’s disruptive entry to work as a generational pathology instead of

Gallup’s 2025 Global Workplace report shows just 21% of employees are engaged . And manager disengagement is the major driver (74% of outcomes hinge on this). Disengaged leaders create disengaged teams and disengaged teams don’t build better futures. They spend all their energy running the system gauntlet of today. We talk a lot about “good vs bad” leadership, but in my work, I see: High-performing subject matter experts promoted into leadership without scaffolding Exhausted

The problems in today’s workplaces - burnout, disengagement, AI atrophy, attrition, multigenerational tension - are not disconnected symptoms. They are structural feedback loops that reveal how leadership and workplace systems have lost moral imagination, trust, psychological realism and operational coherence.

Why your culture, people, or performance problem is probably a system design issue. Leaders are now managing five generations within three different operating systems of work - each with a distinct social contract around trust, safety, and merit. This is why managers are burning out. They’re wedged within multiple human realities, trying to translate between systems that were never designed to coexist. The good news is that all models of work (and the generations attached to