“We buy junk and sell antiques. Some fools buy, some fools sell.” It struck me as a witty metaphor for leadership’s obsession with transparency. So I wrote about what distinguishes effective leaders is not radical transparency, but radical judgment. The ability to curate. To decide what to reveal, when, and how. To filter out the junk and highlight the valuable insights that can actually drive trust, motivation, and performance.
But what surprised me was what happened next. 

 

We like to imagine unethical behaviour as the domain of “bad apples.” But the research and the case studies tell a more unsettling story. It is often good people in bad systems who commit ethical violations without even noticing. As the professors put it, ethical blindness is not a character flaw; it’s a contextual failure of awareness. Under the pressure of strong situations: hierarchy, fear, conformity, and narrow framing, reason can simply switch off.

 

As a leadership coach, I found myself reflecting deeply on how context shapes behaviour in organisations. I’ve seen high-performing professionals make ethically ambiguous decisions, not because they lacked values, but because the system rewarded results more than reflection. The course provides a vocabulary and a framework to analyse those situations: framing, routines, temporal dynamics, institutional pressures. It shows how bounded rationality and bounded morality go hand in hand.

 

Last weekend someone asked me mid-coffee, “What’s your passion?”

 

And I stumbled because the question felt too small for what it was trying to contain. I hesitated, aware that whatever I said would sound either glib or incomplete. Passion, for me, isn’t a single statement. It’s something far messier: an ongoing relationship with life, with work, with the people I meet through it.

 

The day before, I’d had another conversation with someone in a difficult situation, caught between a demanding manager and a worse boss. We weren’t talking about passion at all. We were talking about survival, about finding composure when the system you’re in seems designed to take it away.

 

I realised: passion sometimes feels very far away. When you’re just trying to hold yourself together, passion can sound like a luxury as I wrote before. And yet, it’s often in those gritty, unglamorous stretches of endurance that the seeds of real passion take root: in the act of staying present, of not turning away, of finding meaning even in discomfort.

 

These two conversations were about the same thing.

 

Systemic Constellations workshops must be experienced. Description does not do them justice. I held a Conflict Theatre workshop at the end for September. The group’s reflections on the evening included:
1 Saying sorry did not look or feel like giving up power, despite what some participants expected.
2 Literally standing in another person’s place revealed their priorities in a way analysis never could.
3 Talking 'as' the other is far more powerful than talking 'about' them.
4 It was difficult to sustain an argument when both parties were voiced by the same person.
5 From the facilitator’s perspective, participants had a backstage pass to the struggles of others.
6 Stepping back from the constellation and advising the two parties as if they were present opened yet another layer of insight.

 

In November, I'll be launching a LinkedIn Newsletter on Personal Effectiveness. Please send me your questions about managing yourself, your relationships or your communication. I'll feature some answers there.

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