Leadership Incompetence or Organisational Incoherence?

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 what it actually is: a structural signal revealing brittle, dehumanised systems that hold little appeal or hope for younger workers who should be at the peak of their idealism and optimism.

We pathologise burnout, disillusionment with outdated social contracts and roll our eyes at demands for inclusion, flexibility and meaningful contribution amidst AI-driven insecurity, rather than redesigning the systems that produce dissonance.

Executives aren’t unclear. They’re exhausted.  Wedged between board directives and frontline workers.

Many recognise that the current system no longer fits the cultural and economic reality but don’t know how to redesign without risking control, capital or credibility. In that vacuum, leaders often revert to outdated playbooks, empty generational tropes and surface-level reforms that preserve the status quo rather than transform it. 

The problems in today’s workplaces - burnout, disengagement, AI paralysis, Gen Z 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.

My take is that human coherence is not a vulnerability, or a ‘nice to have’, but the next strategic advantage. 

What do you think? Woo woo? Time to toughen up? Or are we headed for a rehumanised reckoning?

The most important leadership work of our time is learning how to be human again.