HumanWORKS

Tag: leadership

  • The Age Ban as Confession: Why Our Response to Social Media Proves We’re Already Lost

    There’s a particular species of policy announcement that functions less as solution and more as an indirect-but-inadvertent confession. The UK’s proposed ban on social media access for under-16s belongs to this category – not because protecting children from psychological exploitation is wrong, but because the measure’s spectacular inadequacy reveals something far darker about our collective situation.


    We’re not implementing insufficient protection because we haven’t grasped the scale of harm. We’re implementing insufficient protection because we’ve lost the capacity for an adequate response. The regulatory theatre itself proves the dependency it claims to address.


    It’s rather like watching someone with late-stage addiction announce they’re cutting back to weekends only whilst their hands shake reaching for the bottle to celebrate this triumph of self-control.

    The Regulatory Confession


    Every policy reveals assumptions about what’s possible, what’s necessary, and what’s absolutely off the table. The age ban confesses several things simultaneously, though only one gets stated explicitly.


    What we admit openly:


    Children lack psychological defences to resist platform manipulation. Their impulse control isn’t fully developed. They’re vulnerable to exploitation designed by teams of behavioural psychologists specifically trained to defeat human resistance. Therefore: restrict access for the vulnerable population.


    Reasonable. Protective. Entirely inadequate.


    What we admit implicitly:


    The platforms themselves are too valuable/profitable/embedded to consider shuttering. Adult populations either possess adequate defences (demonstrably false) or their vulnerability doesn’t warrant protection (closer to actual position). The business model of attention extraction can continue operating at scale provided we check IDs at the entrance.


    What we confess accidentally:


    We lack collective capacity to choose systemic solutions even when the harm is obvious, the mechanisms are understood, and the inadequacy of half-measures is predictable. Not because we’re stupid. Because we’re dependent.


    The age ban isn’t evidence of protective governance beginning to address social media harm. It’s evidence of civilisational addiction constraining regulatory response to measures that won’t threaten the supply of cocaine water we’ve all been drinking for twenty years.


    (I’m going to lean heavily on the cocaine water metaphor throughout this piece because it captures something viscerally true that sanitised language obscures: we’re dealing with engineered dependency operating at population scale, and our inability to name it honestly contributes to our inability to address it systemically.)

    The Adequate Response We Can’t Choose


    Let’s establish what an adequate response would look like, not as fantasy but as a logical conclusion from accepted premises.


    If we accept that:


    ∙ Social media platforms are built on business models requiring psychological harm to generate sustained engagement
    ∙ The harm isn’t incidental but foundational (attention extraction demands defeating user resistance)
    ∙ Children lack defences against industrial-scale manipulation
    ∙ Adults exhibit identical vulnerability despite physical maturity
    ∙ Twenty years of operation has produced catastrophic individual and systemic consequences
    ∙ The platforms are specifically engineered to prevent voluntary cessation


    Then the adequate response is obvious: shutter the platforms entirely.


    Not as punishment. Not as Luddite rejection of technology. Rather as recognition that we’ve conducted a civilisational-scale experiment in psychological exploitation that has produced precisely the catastrophic results the original warnings predicted, and continuing the experiment serves no legitimate purpose beyond shareholder value.


    We don’t allow casinos to operate in primary schools even with age verification. We don’t permit tobacco companies to design cigarettes specifically optimised for youth addiction then rely on ID checks at point of sale. We recognise that some business models are incompatible with human wellbeing regardless of age restrictions.


    Social media platforms operating on attention extraction represent that category. The business model requires harm. Age verification doesn’t change the fundamental equation.


    So why can’t we choose the adequate response?


    Because we’re fucking addicted.


    Not metaphorically. Not as some sort of rhetorical flourish. Instead, this is an accurate description of our collective neurological situation after twenty years of systematic dependency creation.

    The Addiction That Constrains Response


    Here’s where the analysis gets uncomfortable, because it requires examining not just the platforms but our own relationship to them – and more specifically, our inability to imagine existence without them.


    Try this thought experiment: Imagine the government announced tomorrow that all social media platforms would cease UK operations in six months. Given the debacle of what’s going on within the US, this could happen if felt they were no longer a trusted ally.

    Imagine it. A complete shutdown. No Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, no Twitter/X, no LinkedIn. Gone.


    Notice your immediate reaction.


    Not your considered philosophical position after some careful analysis. Your immediate reaction. The one that arose before any sort of intellectual justification.


    For most people – including those who intellectually recognise the platforms’ harm – that immediate reaction includes some variation of panic, loss, resistance. How would I stay in touch with people? How would I know what’s happening? How would I maintain professional connections? How would I fill the time on the train? What would I do when I’m bored?


    That’s the language of dependency talking.


    Not “I find these platforms useful and would prefer to keep them.” That’s preference. This is “I can’t imagine functioning without them” despite the fact that you – yes, you reading this – somehow managed to function perfectly well for most of your life before they existed.


    Many of the platforms aren’t even twenty years old. If you’re over 40, you spent more of your life without them than with them. Despite this, the immediate reaction to their removal is a feeling of existential threat rather than one of mild inconvenience.


    That neurological response – the panic at imagined loss – constrains what regulatory responses feel possible. We can’t choose to shutter the platforms because we’ve lost the capacity to conceive of existence without them. Not at a policy level but at somatic level.


    The age ban represents the maximum intervention our collective dependency permits. Anything more aggressive triggers the same resistance as suggesting to the profound alcoholic that perhaps complete cessation might be healthier than switching to 4% ABV beer on weekdays.

    The Regulatory Capture By Dependency


    Traditional regulatory capture involves industry influence over regulators through lobbying, revolving doors between industry and government, the funding of sympathetic research, and other mechanisms of institutional corruption.


    All of that is happening with social media platforms. Obviously. The usual suspects doing the usual dance.
    However, there’s a second, more insidious form of capture operating here: the regulators themselves are dependent.


    The MPs drafting age restriction legislation are scrolling Twitter during parliamentary debates. The civil servants implementing policy are checking Instagram between meetings. The ministers announcing protective measures are maintaining LinkedIn profiles for professional positioning.


    They’re not corrupt in any traditional sense – such as those who are taking bribes to protect industry interests. They’re dependent in the neurological sense – their own relationship to the platforms constrains what interventions feel possible.
    You can’t design adequate response to addiction when you’re currently using. The alcoholic makes excellent arguments for why complete cessation is unnecessary, extreme, or otherwise disproportionate to the actual problem. They’re not lying – they genuinely believe the rationalisations their dependency generates.


    Social media generates the same mechanism operating at a policy level.


    The regulatory response to social media platforms is constrained not primarily by lobbying (though that’s happening) but by the regulators’ own inability to conceive of systemic solutions that would threaten their own access to the cocaine water. So instead, we’ll just ban the kids.


    This isn’t intended as conspiracy. It’s the predictable outcome of twenty years of systematic dependency creation encountering attempt at self-regulation. The addict announces they’re cutting back. The specifics of how they’re cutting back reveal they have no intention of actually stopping.


    You can check IDs at the entrance to the casino, but the house keeps operating.

    The Civilisational Bind


    Individual addiction is a story of tragedy. Civilisational addiction has existential consequences.


    When an individual becomes dependent on substances or behaviours, intervention is theoretically possible – family, friends, medical professionals, legal system, employers can potentially combine to create conditions forcing confrontation with dependency.


    When entire civilisations become dependent, who exactly is positioned to intervene?


    The mechanisms that might force confrontation with collective dependency are themselves composed of dependent individuals. Governments full of scrolling MPs. Regulatory bodies staffed by Instagram-checking civil servants. Media organisations whose business models now depend on social platform distribution. Educational institutions using the platforms for “engagement.” Healthcare systems offering mental health support via Facebook groups.

    We live in an addicted world – one where, with no hint of fucking irony, there are people suggesting a LLM is an effective therapist, and an algorithm as a suitable replacement to friendship.


    The entire institutional apparatus that might address the problem is thoroughly infiltrated – not by malicious actors but by the dependency itself.


    It’s rather like discovering the immune system has been compromised by the very pathogen it’s supposed to fight. Who mounts the immune response when the immune response is infected?


    This creates what I’ll call the Civilisational Addiction Bind:


    ∙ The harm is obvious and systemic
    ∙ Adequate response requires systemic intervention
    ∙ Systemic intervention requires collective capacity for voluntary cessation
    ∙ Voluntary cessation becomes impossible after sufficient dependency creation
    ∙ Therefore: inadequate responses that preserve access whilst performing concern


    The age ban is Exhibit A. We’ll implement symbolic protection for children whilst carefully preserving the infrastructure that created the problem, because adequate response – shuttering the platforms – triggers existential panic in the dependent population proposing the regulation. The kids are safe whilst the adults play with matches and wonder why everyone keeps getting more and more burned.

    What Recovery Would Require


    Let’s be unflinchingly honest about what an adequate response – civilisational recovery from social platform dependency – would actually require.


    It wouldn’t just policy change. Nor merely regulatory reform. Instead, it would need to be something approaching collective withdrawal from engineered dependency operating at neurological level across entire populations.


    At the individual level:


    ∙ Sustained periods without access to algorithmic feeds
    ∙ Relearning capacity for boredom, sustained attention, genuine human connection
    ∙ Confronting whatever emotional/social needs the platforms were medicating
    ∙ Rebuilding psychological architecture systematically eroded over twenty years
    ∙ Accepting that some neural pathway damage may be permanent


    At an institutional level:


    ∙ Restructuring every system now dependent on platform infrastructure
    ∙ Finding alternative mechanisms for communication, coordination, information distribution
    ∙ Accepting significant short-term disruption to operations built around platform integration
    ∙ Developing new approaches to problems we’ve forgotten how to solve without algorithmic mediation


    At civilisational level:


    ∙ Collective tolerance for extended discomfort during withdrawal period
    ∙ Sustained political will despite inevitable backlash from dependent populations
    ∙ Acceptance that recovery timelines are measured in years or decades, not quarters
    ∙ Recognition that some capabilities lost may not return in currently living generations


    Look at that list. Really examine it.


    Now consider: Do we have collective capacity for voluntary embrace of that process?


    Or are we like the late-stage alcoholic who recognises the bottle is killing them but can’t imagine Friday evening without it, Monday morning after it, the family gathering surviving exposure to it, the work stress managed absent its chemical assistance?


    The adequate response requires collective capacity we’ve systematically destroyed through the very process we’d need that capacity to address.


    We can’t choose to shut down the platforms because we’ve lost the neurological and institutional capacity to function without them. The dependency has become load-bearing infrastructure. Removing it triggers collapse fears – justified or not – that make removal psychologically impossible.


    So we’ll implement age bans. Start to check IDs. Announce we’re protecting the vulnerable whilst carefully preserving access for everyone else. Declare victory over harms we’re actively perpetuating.

    Success! Alas, no – it’s more of the same with a thin veneer of consideration for younger people whilst the rest of the adult population says it’s fine for us.

    The Tobacco Parallel That Terrifies


    You know and I know that we’ve been here before. Different substance, but remarkably similar patterns.


    The tobacco industry created:


    ∙ Obvious harm visible for decades
    ∙ Industry suppression of evidence
    ∙ Regulatory capture preventing adequate response
    ∙ Incremental half-measures arriving far too late
    ∙ Warning labels, advertising restrictions, designated areas
    ∙ Continued operation of systems known to be catastrophically harmful


    By comparison, social media platforms:


    ∙ Obvious harm visible for decades
    ∙ Industry suppression/dismissal of evidence
    ∙ Regulatory capture (now including dependency capture)
    ∙ Incremental half-measures arriving far too late
    ∙ Age restrictions, content warnings, “digital wellbeing” theatre
    ∙ Continued operation of systems known to be catastrophically harmful


    The parallel is exact. We’re following the same timeline, implementing the same inadequate measures, protecting the same profits, accepting the same casualties.


    With one crucial difference that makes the social media version potentially more catastrophic:


    Tobacco primarily killed individuals. They were horrible, preventable, unacceptable deaths – but ultimately individual tragedies aggregated. Society continued functioning. Institutions remained intact. Collective capacity for response persisted.


    Social media platforms erode collective psychological capacity itself. Not just harming individuals but degrading the civilisational infrastructure – sustained attention, impulse control, genuine connection, shared reality, democratic discourse, institutional trust – necessary for collective response to collective crisis.


    We’re losing the neurological and social capacity to address problems at the same time we’re accumulating problems requiring that capacity to address.


    Tobacco took fifty years from obvious harm to meaningful regulation. We eventually got there because collective capacity for response survived the interim casualties.
    Social media is eroding that collective capacity now and rifting the world into myriad micro-societies. Each year of continued operation makes adequate response less likely by degrading the psychological and institutional architecture necessary to choose it.


    We might not have fifty years to arrive at an adequate response. We might not even have twenty. We might already be past the point where collective capacity for voluntary cessation exists.


    The age ban, implemented two decades into obvious harm, suggests we’re already well down that trajectory.

    The Answer We Can’t Speak


    There’s a question we’re collectively avoiding, because asking it honestly would require confronting answers we lack capacity to implement.


    Not “should we ban children from social media?”


    Instead: “Should these platforms exist at all?”


    The honest answer – based on twenty years of evidence, understanding of business models requiring harm, recognition of systematic psychological exploitation, assessment of individual and civilisational consequences – is clearly no.


    They shouldn’t exist. Not in their current form. Not operating on attention extraction. Not optimised for engagement over wellbeing. Not designed to defeat human psychological defences. Not structured to prevent voluntary cessation.


    The business model is incompatible with human flourishing. Full stop.


    But we can’t choose that answer. Not because we don’t understand the harm. Because we’re dependent on the harm-creation mechanism.


    The platforms have successfully created the neurological and institutional conditions that prevent their own removal. That’s not an accident – it’s the explicit goal of engagement optimisation. Make yourself indispensable by making users dependent. Success measured by inability to imagine existence without you.


    They’ve succeeded spectacularly.


    So we implement age bans. Announce protective measures. Carefully avoid the actual question because we know – at somatic level, before intellectual justification – that we lack capacity to choose the adequate answer.


    The regulatory response itself confesses the dependency. We can only implement measures that preserve the infrastructure we’re dependent on. Anything more aggressive triggers withdrawal panic that makes it psychologically impossible.

    The Generations That Won’t Recover


    Here’s perhaps the darkest implication: even if we implemented adequate response tomorrow – complete platform shutdown, and civilisational withdrawal from engineered dependency – significant portions of currently living populations might never recover full psychological capacity.


    The neural pathways carved by twenty years of algorithmic manipulation don’t just disappear after a week off. The psychological architecture that never developed in those raised entirely within platform environments becomes hard to subvert. The institutional knowledge of how to function without digital mediation that we’ve systematically lost in service of some vague promise of social engagement.


    Some of that damage may be permanent.


    Not because humans are fundamentally broken but because neuroplasticity has limits, developmental windows eventually close, and twenty years of systematic erosion doesn’t reverse through six months of abstinence.


    The children we’re now proposing to protect with age bans were born into world where platform dependency was already civilisational norm. They never experienced pre-smartphone existence. Their entire psychological development occurred within environment optimised for attention extraction.


    Even if we stopped creating new casualties tomorrow, we’re looking at multiple generations carrying the neurological consequences of civilisational-scale experiment in psychological exploitation.


    The adequate response – shuttering platforms – would prevent additional harm but wouldn’t reverse existing damage. We’d be stopping the poisoning whilst acknowledging that some effects are permanent.


    That’s the hardest truth to accept. Particularly when accepting it would require implementing response we’ve already established we lack capacity to choose.


    So we don’t accept it. We implement age bans. Pretend that protecting future children compensates for abandoning current casualties. Announce measures that won’t meaningfully address the problem whilst carefully preserving our own access to the mechanisms creating it.
    The civilisational equivalent of the parent announcing they’re quitting drinking whilst pouring their morning whisky, rationalising that at least they’re setting a good example for the kids by not letting them drink too.

    The Confession In The Silence


    What’s most revealing isn’t what the age ban does but what it deliberately avoids.


    No discussion of shuttering platforms entirely.


    No consideration of business model regulation that would eliminate attention extraction economics.


    No proposals for systemic intervention that might actually address root causes.


    Just age verification. ID checks. Symbolic protection for one vulnerable population whilst leaving the exploitation infrastructure intact for everyone else.


    That silence – the complete absence of adequate response from policy discussion – confesses our dependency more honestly than any admission we’d make explicitly.
    We can’t discuss shuttering platforms because the suggestion triggers immediate panic. Not careful policy analysis of costs and benefits. Immediate, somatic, pre-rational resistance.


    That’s truly the words of dependency talking.


    The profound alcoholic doesn’t carefully analyse whether complete cessation might be an optimal long-term strategy. They immediately reject the suggestion as extreme, unnecessary, disproportionate. The dependency generates rationalisations that protect access to the substance.


    This is the same mechanism operating at civilisational level.


    Policy discussion carefully constrained to measures that won’t threaten platform operations. Not through conscious conspiracy but through unconscious dependency. The bounds of “reasonable policy debate” are set by collective inability to imagine existence without the things destroying us.


    The age ban represents the maximum intervention our dependency permits. Everything more aggressive is automatically categorised as unrealistic, extreme, impossible to implement – not based on careful analysis but based on somatic resistance to imagined loss.
    We’ve become the thing we’d need to not be in order to address the problem adequately.

    Whether It’s Already Too Late


    So here’s the question that matters: Is civilisational recovery from platform dependency still possible?
    Or have we passed some neurological and institutional point of no return where collective capacity for adequate response no longer exists?


    I genuinely don’t know.


    The optimistic case: Humans are remarkably resilient. Neuroplasticity continues throughout life. Social systems can reorganise rapidly when circumstances demand. We’ve recovered from collective dependencies before – smoking rates have declined significantly following adequate regulation. Civilisational recovery is difficult but possible.


    The pessimistic case: The tobacco parallel breaks down because tobacco didn’t erode collective capacity for response. Social media platforms have created dependency whilst simultaneously degrading the psychological and institutional infrastructure necessary to address dependency. Each year of continued operation makes adequate response less likely. We may have already passed the point where voluntary cessation is collectively possible.


    The honest case: We won’t know until we try. Of course, we won’t try until we’re forced to by consequences so catastrophic they override the dependency-generated resistance to adequate response.


    Which means we’re likely headed for version of civilisational withdrawal that’s involuntary rather than chosen. Not policy-driven shutdown but collapse-driven cessation when the platforms’ continued operation becomes materially impossible to sustain.


    That’s a considerably less pleasant scenario than a voluntary, managed transition to platform-free existence. However, it may be the only pathway available when the population has lost capacity for voluntary cessation.


    The age ban suggests we’re not even close to voluntary response. We’re still in the “4% beer on weekdays” phase of addressing civilisational alcoholism. The catastrophic consequences that might force involuntary withdrawal haven’t yet arrived – or haven’t yet been recognised as such by populations whose capacity for recognising catastrophe has been systematically eroded.

    The Regulatory Theatre Continues


    Meanwhile, the age ban will be implemented. Headlines will be written. Politicians will claim credit for protecting children. Industry will comply with minimal measures whilst continuing operations unchanged. Everyone will declare victory.


    Children aged 15 years and 364 days will be protected from psychological exploitation through rigorous ID verification.


    Adults aged 16 years and 1 day will continue unrestricted access to identical exploitation infrastructure, their lack of psychological defences carefully ignored because acknowledging adult vulnerability would require admitting the platforms themselves are the problem.


    And what of us? We’ll all continue scrolling, checking, engaging, medicating whatever needs the platforms serve, convincing ourselves that protecting children whilst preserving adult access represents meaningful progress rather than confession of our own dependency.


    The cocaine water keeps flowing.


    The isolation cages remain operational.


    The rats – young and old, in school uniforms and grey suits – continue drinking.


    And the fact that we can only implement symbolic protection whilst carefully preserving the exploitation infrastructure proves exactly what we’re unable to admit: we’re not protecting anyone.


    We’re protecting our access to the thing destroying us.


    The age ban is confession masquerading as solution.


    And somewhere, future historians are watching this regulatory theatre, wondering why we thought checking IDs whilst operating civilisational-scale psychological exploitation constituted meaningful reform rather than admission that we’d already lost collective capacity for adequate response.


    The answer is simple: Because we’re addicted.


    Not metaphorically.


    As neurological reality constraining what regulatory responses feel possible.


    The inadequacy of our protection reveals the depth of our dependency.


    As well as the fact that we can’t choose better measures proves we’re exactly as lost as the measures themselves confess.

  • The Curse of Competence: Why Excellence Makes You a Hostage to Your Own Skills

    Let’s talk about probably the most perverse reward system ever devised outside of experimental psychology labs: the modern workplace’s response to demonstrated competence.

    It goes something like this:

    You solve a problem effectively.

    People notice.

    They bring you more similar problems.

    You solve those too. Congratulations! You’ve now been rewarded with a permanent problem-solving role that will follow you like a particularly clingy ghost through the remainder of your professional existence. I hope you enjoy whatever it is you were doing!

    Welcome to the Curse of Competence – that strange phenomenon whereby doing something well once guarantees you’ll be doing it repeatedly until either your skills deteriorate from soul-crushing boredom or you fake your own death and restart your career under an assumed identity in a different industry.

    The Competence Trap: Hotel California for Skills

    The competence trap functions with the elegant simplicity of a particularly well-designed venus fly trap. The initial experience is quite pleasant – recognition! appreciation! the warm glow of being needed! – right until the moment you realise you’re now permanently stuck doing that one thing you happened to be good at during that meeting in 2019.

    “But surely,” I hear you protest, “organisations would want to develop their talented people? Move them around to leverage their abilities? Create growth paths that capitalise on demonstrated excellence?”

    Oh, my sweet summer child. That would require both forward thinking and the willingness to temporarily sacrifice immediate efficiency for long-term gain – two qualities approximately as common in corporate environments as unicorns who are also certified public accountants. (Why think of the future when you have next quarter breathing down your neck!)

    The reality operates on a principle I’ll call Organisational Path Dependence: once you become known as “the Excel person” or “the one who can calm down Client X” or “the presentation wizard,” that identity becomes fixed in the corporate hivemind with a permanence that ancient Egyptian stonemasons would envy. (The pyramids may be magnificent but I’m sure Sarah has been doing that trick with the finance software for as long as it took the slaves – I mean aliens – to build them)

    This phenomenon creates magnificent absurdities like:

    – The senior developer still fixing basic code because they were good at it as a junior five years ago

    – The marketing director still writing all the copy because once, in 2015, they composed a particularly effective email

    – The finance executive who can’t escape quarterly planning because they created a spectacular spreadsheet during the Obama administration

    Each trapped in their own personal Groundhog Day of competence, doomed to repeat their past excellence in perpetuity while watching less capable colleagues fail their way upward with spectacular regularity. (It’s amazing how there’s a waterline where you fall upwards once you get into the management realm, whilst the mere plebs of the world huddle around metaphorical fires worrying about the 675 metrics they have to hit just to keep doing the actual fucking work.)

    The Reward for Carrying Water: A Bigger Bucket

    The corporate response to demonstrated capability follows a pattern so predictable it should be taught in business schools under the probably-more-honest-than-most-bootcamps “How to Systematically Burn Out Your Best People 101.”

    Step 1: Identify person who executes Task X effectively

    Step 2: Give person more of Task X

    Step 3: When they handle that well, add even more Task X

    Step 4: Express confusion when person becomes increasingly desperate to never see Task X again and/or goes off sick citing mental burnout

    This system operates with the precision of a Swiss watch designed by particularly sadistic engineers. Its elegance lies in how it masquerades as recognition while functioning as punishment. “You’re so good at this!” translates directly to “You’ll never escape doing this!” – a sort of Sisyphean life where rocks and infinite hills got replaced with the mind numbing shuffling of digital detritus in a tastefully styled office with seemingly unironic motivational quotes. It’s up to you which is worse (I’ve always liked rocks).

    In that sense, the demonstrated empathy on show is rather like responding to someone who swims well by throwing them into progressively deeper bodies of water while adding increasingly heavy weights to their ankles.

    “But you’re so good at not drowning Hannah! We’re just creating opportunities for you to further develop this clearly demonstrated capability!”

    What makes this particularly diabolical is how it’s presented as a compliment. “We keep giving you these projects because you’re so good at them!” they say, nodding earnestly, as though permanently consigning you to the same repetitive task is a recognition of your value rather than an exploitation of your reliability. Meanwhile, those who don’t have any obvious skills spend at least 75% of their time practicing their acceptance speech for the invariable falling upward promotion trajectory that invariably awaits. (That’s because the generally accepted way to deal with awful leaders is by throwing them somewhere else in the hope that maybe that person might have a semblance of a backbone, and the ability to have an uncomfortable conversation rather than palming them off because their current manager has neither.)

    The effective people by comparison? Well the reward for carrying water is, inevitably, a bigger bucket, and a PIP if they fail to carry the bucket that may or may not now contain all of Earth’s water system.

    The Competence/Growth Inversion Principle

    Behold the magnificent irony at the heart of professional development: the relationship between demonstrated competence and actual career growth typically exhibits a strong negative correlation.

    I call this the Competence/Growth Inversion Principle, and it works like this:

    – The more crucial your current contribution, the less the organisation can “afford” to move you. (In the corporate world, why would we want to move people out of roles that get stuff done as it might mean we’d have to think about one or more of succession planning, increased competition at the next level of hierarcy, or pulling ones thumb out of one’s backside.

    – The more reliably you solve certain problems, the more tightly you become identified with those problems (so you’ve worked out how to use functions beyond =SUM? You’re the Excel “guru” now – no, there’s no payrise).

    – The more irreplaceable you become in a specific function, the less likely you are to escape it (it’s like a black hole has appeared in space yet rather than being able to observe light falling into the abyss, it’s your career prospects disappearing over the event horizon).

    Meanwhile, observe the person who is mediocre at multiple things rather than excellent at one thing. They often advance with puzzling speed, largely because:

    1. They’re never quite good enough at any one thing to become indispensable in that role

    2. Their consistent mediocrity creates no specific attachment to any particular function so they are always ready to go (mostly to shit, but in a way that allows them to tell management what they want to hear abstract of what reality is)

    3. Their broad but shallow exposure creates the illusion of versatility

    4. Nobody fights to keep them in their current role because nobody particularly values what they’re currently doing

    This creates the magnificent spectacle of organisational advancement functioning almost as natural selection for a particular type of non-excellence – not outright incompetence (though that certainly happens), but rather the careful cultivation of being just good enough at many things to avoid the curse of being excellent at one thing. (In that sense, it’s a skill – but probably not the sort of skill we should be lauding if we’re being honest).

    The competence trap thus creates a perverse incentive structure where rational career actors might deliberately avoid demonstrating too much excellence in any single domain lest they become permanently associated with it. Is that what a company should look like?

    The Specialist’s Lament

    For those caught in the competence trap, work often devolves into a peculiar form of specialised repetition that feels less like career development and more like being a particularly well-educated hamster on a wheel.

    I recently spoke with a mid-career professional – let’s call her Grace – who made the career-limiting mistake of creating an exceptional PowerPoint presentation in 2018. This singular event, which lasted approximately 45 minutes, has somehow become her professional identity for the next seven years.

    “I have two degrees and fifteen years of experience,” she told me with the thousand-yard stare of someone who has created one too many slide transitions, “but I’m now introduced in meetings as ‘our PowerPoint person’ like I’m some sort of sentient template. I’ve debated changing my surname to PPTX-Smythe.”.

    Another victim of the competence trap – we’ll call him Marcus – described being “the data guy” despite having originally been hired as a strategic planner with significant decision-making responsibility.

    “I made one particularly good PowerBI dashboard during my first month,” he explained, “and now I haven’t been invited to a strategy meeting in three years. Meanwhile, I’ve watched three consecutive bosses implement catastrophically bad strategic decisions that I could have helped prevent, but apparently, my only role now is to create colourful visualisations of the resulting disasters.”

    The specialist’s lament echoes across industries and functions: “I am so much more than this one skill, and yet this one skill has somehow become my entire professional identity.”

    The Three Deadly Career Virtues

    Particularly prone to the competence trap are those who exhibit what I’ll call the Three Deadly Career Virtues: reliability, efficiency, and conflict avoidance.

    These seemingly positive attributes combine to create the perfect victim profile:

    1. Reliability ensures you’ll get the job done without requiring management attention, making you the path of least resistance for similar future tasks

    2. Efficiency means you can handle increasing volumes of the same work, creating the illusion that this arrangement is sustainable (I mean why wouldn’t it be given companies operate under the idea of continuous, infinite growth as if that’s really a thing)

    3. Conflict avoidance makes you less likely to push back when your role becomes increasingly narrowed to your area of demonstrated competence

    Together, these virtues create what appears from the outside to be the ideal employee but is actually a person being slowly entombed in their own capabilities like a museum exhibit: “Here we have a perfectly preserved specimen of an Excel wizard in their natural habitat. Note how they continue to pivot tables despite their growing despair.”

    In short, the exploitable get exploited. It’s a tale as old as time, but without the whimsy of listening to a song about Beauty and the Beast (bite me, I’m a Disney fan).

    These qualities typically combine with a work ethic instilled since childhood that makes refusing tasks feel morally wrong, creating the perfect conditions for indefinite exploitation of specific skills at the expense of broader development. (The reward for childhood trauma that likely made you a people pleaser to mitigate anger? Some adult trauma, delivered digitally via the Microsoft office suite.)

    The Double-Bind of Demonstrated Expertise

    Those caught in the competence trap face a particularly cruel double-bind when they attempt to escape:

    Scenario 1: Do you continue demonstrating excellence in your pigeonholed role, further cementing your association with it while watching growth opportunities go to others?

    Scenario 2: Deliberately perform worse in hopes of being released from your specialisation, thereby risking your professional reputation and potentially confirming the organisation’s unspoken belief that you’re only good for this one thing anyway. (PIPs are available for those below the “safe” watermark of those who operate the metrics rather than those who have to comply with them).

    Neither option offers a particularly appealing path forward. It’s rather like being asked whether you’d prefer to be slowly suffocated by a pillow or a duvet – the instrument differs but the outcome remains distressingly similar.

    This double-bind often leads to the most reliable people in organisations quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles at 11pm while sighing heavily into their third glass of wine. (Or, in my case, manipulating my psychology by engaging hyperfocus simply by waiting till the last second before I have so much adrenaline and cortisol in my system, there’s approximately zero chance I’m going to be sleeping).

    The only apparent escape routes involve:

    1. Leaving the organisation entirely (the “corporate witness protection program” approach)

    2. Finding a sponsor powerful enough to override the organisational imperative to keep you exactly where you’re “most valuable”

    3. Developing such a spectacular new skill that it overshadows your existing competence trap (approximately as likely as teaching your cat to prepare your taxes, but if you can say AI in every other sentence, you may have a shot)

    The “Go-To Person” Paradox

    Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the competence trap is how it’s disguised as a compliment. Being the “go-to person” for anything sounds like recognition rather than the professional equivalent of being sentenced to repeat the same year of school indefinitely.

    “Sarah’s our go-to for client presentations” sounds like praise until you realise Sarah hasn’t done anything except client presentations since the iPhone 7 was cutting-edge technology.

    “We always rely on Dave for the monthly reporting” seems like an acknowledgment of Dave’s value until you notice Dave gazing longingly out the window every 30th of the month like a prisoner marking days on a cell wall, grappling with an Excel spreadsheet so large and creaky that it might masquerade as a haunted house on the weekend.

    Being the “go-to person” is less an honour and more a subtle form of organisational typecasting – one where you’re permanently cast as “Person Who Does That One Thing” in the ongoing corporate production of “Tasks Nobody Else Wants To Learn and How We Found Suckers To Do Them.”

    The Organisational Amnesia Phenomenon

    Compounding the competence trap is what I call Organisational Amnesia – the curious inability of workplaces to remember anything about you except the specific skill for which you’ve become known.

    You may have:

    – Published thought leadership in your industry

    – Successfully led cross-functional projects

    – Developed innovative approaches to longstanding problems

    – Demonstrated exceptional leadership qualities

    – Acquired three new languages and the ability to communicate telepathically with squirrels

    Please be aware that, much like that stock market advice you got, past performance does not indicate any potential future likelihood of similar success.

    Instead in planning meetings, you’ll still be referred to as “Morgan from accounting who does the thing with the spreadsheets.”

    This selective institutional memory creates situations where highly capable individuals with diverse skills and interests become one-dimensional caricatures in the organisational narrative – reduced to a single function like characters in a particularly lazy sitcom that runs for seventeen years with no sign of stopping, serving as escapism for the masses who can say “hey my life is bad, but I’m not as bad as Seymour from Uncomfortable Conclusions”.

    The Competence Escape Velocity Theory

    For those determined to break free of the competence trap, I propose the Competence Escape Velocity Theory, which states that escaping your pigeonhole requires simultaneously:

    1. Building a coalition of influential advocates who see your broader potential

    2. Secretly training replacements who can take over your current responsibilities (extra points if AI does is – management love that stuff, i.e. less spending on people who might complain)

    3. Creating visible wins in areas unrelated to your competence trap

    4. Developing a reputation for something – anything – other than your current specialisation (perhaps not soiling oneself at the Christmas party – keep some standards)

    5. Being willing to risk the identity security of being “the person who does X well”

    This multi-pronged approach represents your best chance of achieving escape velocity from the gravitational pull of your own competence – a manoeuvre approximately as complex as launching a rocket while simultaneously convincing mission control that you’re actually still on the launchpad.

    The difficulty explains why so many choose the simpler option: updating their CV and finding an organisation where they haven’t yet revealed their particular talents, creating a brief window of opportunity before the whole cycle begins again.

    The Mediocrity Advantage

    This analysis reveals a counterintuitive truth: there are significant professional advantages to strategic mediocrity – or at least to the careful management of where and when you demonstrate exceptional capability.

    The truly savvy career operator maintains a carefully calibrated performance level:

    – Good enough to be considered valuable

    – Not so good as to become indispensable in any one function

    – Visibly competent at politically advantageous skills

    – Carefully average at career-limiting responsibilities

    This calculated approach to skill demonstration represents a sophisticated response to organisational incentive structures that routinely punish excellence with more of the same work rather than growth opportunities. The sad reality is that this is ultimately bullshit of the highest order – and something that needs to be addressed at a broader level.

    After all, it’s not that organisations consciously design systems to reward mediocrity and punish excellence – it’s simply the emergent property of prioritising short-term efficiency over long-term development, immediate needs over strategic talent deployment, and the path of least resistance over optimal resource allocation. Who’d have thought focusing solely on the next thing – be that a quarter, task, or fixing a catastrophe might have such a significant impact?

    Beyond the Competence Ghetto

    So is there an alternative to this dysfunctional system? Perhaps. But it requires organisations to fundamentally reconsider their approach to talent development and individuals to strategically manage their skill demonstrations.

    For organisations, escaping this trap means:

    1. Creating systematic rotation programs that prioritise development of people over short-term efficiency

    2. Rewarding knowledge transfer rather than exclusive ownership of capabilities – which creates structural problems for both the business and the poor souls who get trapped

    3. Explicitly valuing versatility alongside specialisation

    4. Building redundancy for critical skills rather than relying on individual “heroes”

    5. Measuring managers on their team members’ growth rather than merely their output

    For individuals navigating existing systems, survival strategies include:

    1. Deliberately cultivating multiple, visible areas of competence to avoid single-skill typecasting

    2. Strategically training others in your “special skills” to reduce your uniqueness

    3. Explicitly negotiating skill deployment and development pathways before demonstrating new capabilities

    4. Creating alternative identity markers in the organisation beyond your functional skills

    5. Recognising when the only escape route might be the exit door – sadly, sometimes it becomes the only option if your organisation isn’t willing or able to change.

    The Uncomfortable Conclusion

    The competence trap reveals an uncomfortable truth: organisations frequently talk about developing talent while implementing systems that systematically prevent it. The gap between rhetoric and reality creates the professional equivalent of quicksand – the harder you work to prove your value, the more firmly you become stuck in a narrowing role.

    It may not be a conscious decision that is manifested by an evil corporate mind, but its impact on the wellbeing of their staff, and the associated headaches created by the need for mental gymnastics creates problems that are both human and financial.

    Perhaps the final irony is that recognising this dynamic represents its own form of competence – one that, if demonstrated too visibly, might land you permanently in the “organisational development” role where you can spend the remainder of your career explaining this phenomenon to others without actually being able to escape it yourself. (I fear I may have fallen into this hole by writing articles but, hey, at least I may have a future in some form of corporate stand up).

    The true meta-skill, then, might be learning exactly when to display competence, when to conceal it, and when to decide that an environment incapable of appropriately developing talent deserves neither your excellence nor your loyalty – being good at things you don’t want to do probably isn’t the route forward if you want to do bigger and better things.

    In that sense, the most valuable skill in navigating modern organisations might not be any particular technical capability but rather the wisdom to recognise when your competence is being weaponised against your own development – and the courage to seek environments where excellence is a pathway rather than a prison.

    The original copy of this article was published on my personal LinkedIn on April 25th, 2025. You can find the original link here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curse-competence-why-excellence-makes-you-hostage-your-turvey-frsa-kympe/?trackingId=XmAsaUBPQQGJHP0dYoGpKw%3D%3D

  • The Power Paradox: Why Those Most Eager to Lead Should Probably Be Locked in the Office Supplies Cupboard

    Let’s discuss a serious issue that has plagued human societies since approximately fifteen minutes after we climbed down from the trees and someone declared themselves “Chief Banana Distributor” – namely, that the people most desperate to be in charge are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from power as humanly possible, preferably in a soundproof room lined with pictures of kittens and motivational posters about ‘synergy’ so they can at least feel at home.

    Such a reflection, whilst possibly exaggerated for effect, isn’t merely a cynical observation on my part – one only need look around at the liberal sprinkling of proverbial self styled “hard men” in our contemporary political environment.

    It’s a structural problem that manifests with the reliability of a British train cancellation announcement – predictable, depressing, and somehow still surprising when it actually happens. (Depressing might not be the case for all people as my right hand man at work actually likes cancellations – on the proviso that he gets a decent refund. Bless you Marrows).

    Consider the psychological profile of your average power-seeker. The person who looks at a leadership position and thinks, “Yes, what the world desperately needs is ME telling everyone else what to do.”.

    This individual – and I’m sure you’ve met a few like I have – typically possesses the exact cocktail of traits you’d want to avoid in someone making consequential decisions: unshakeable self-belief detached from actual competence, a conviction that complex problems have simple solutions they alone can see, and an ego so robust it could survive a direct nuclear strike.

    Meanwhile, the person who might actually make a decent leader – thoughtful, self-aware, cognisant of their limitations, capable of balancing competing perspectives – is often found desperately trying to avoid being nominated for the role whilst muttering something about “just wanting to get on with some actual work.”

    What we’ve got here is a classical selection problem that would make Darwin reach for a stiff drink. Don’t worry me old mucker, Charlie – we’ve got some ideas!

    The Douglas Adams Rule of Leadership

    The late, great Douglas Adams perfectly captured the paradox of leadership in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” when he wrote:

    “The major problem – one of the major problems, for there are several – one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

    This isn’t just witty science fiction (I mean it is that also), but rather it’s practically a mathematical theorem that plays out with depressing regularity across organisations from corporate boardrooms to parish councils to national governments. No locale is safe – Vogon inhibited or no.

    Sadly, the desire for power often correlates inversely with the wisdom to wield it responsibly. Those most attracted to leadership positions tend to be those most enamoured with the trappings and status rather than the actual responsibility of stewarding an organisation or community through difficulty and uncertainty.

    The Confidence/Competence Inversion

    I’ve spent enough time in corporate environments to witness what I’ll call the Confidence/Competence Inversion Principle: the relationship between someone’s certainty about their capabilities and their actual abilities often bears an unfortunate negative correlation.

    You know ThatGuy™. I talked about them briefly a few weeks ago in one of my recent articles.

    They’re the one who speaks first, loudest, and with unwavering certainty about topics they discovered approximately 37 minutes before the meeting. (I can play catch up on learning with AI, you know!)

    The one who has never encountered a moment of self-doubt that couldn’t be immediately crushed under the weight of their own magnificence (behold the glory that is constrained within this mid-range Next two-for-one suit!).

    The one whose confidence in their prescriptions is matched only by their complete ignorance of the subsequent clean-up operations required after their brilliant ideas implode. (I always find it remarkable the amount of people who think they are great drivers but constantly have near misses with accidents – funny that).

    These individuals don’t merely suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect; they’ve turned it into a leadership philosophy, that would have a whole saleable framework of what was involved in being as good as them – if it wasn’t for the ego delusion and the fucking inability for them to do any actual work of value.

    These people have mistaken certainty for competence, volume for insight, and stubbornness for principle.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in your organisation sits someone with actual expertise – thoughtful, nuanced, aware of complexity – who prefaces every contribution with “This might be wrong, but…” or “I’m not entirely sure about this…”

    Guess which one gets promoted?

    Precisely.

    The Reluctant Leader Hypothesis

    There’s a persistent myth in modern management that leadership requires unbridled enthusiasm for the role. That the person who wants it most deserves it most. This is roughly equivalent to suggesting that the person most eager to perform brain surgery on you – despite having no medical training but owning a really sharp kitchen knife and having watched several YouTube tutorials – should be allowed to crack on. (Several videos – not one. How much more evidence do you need!?)

    Perhaps we should consider what I’ll call the Reluctant Leader Hypothesis: those best suited to positions of responsibility are often those most aware of its burdens and limitations.

    History offers some support for this idea.

    Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator who relinquished power voluntarily to return to his farm.

    George Washington refusing a third term and establishing the peaceful transition of power.

    Even the mythological King Arthur, a man pulled from obscurity by a sword that apparently had better leadership selection mechanisms than most modern organisations. (There’s a real thought – maybe we should seek out mythical swords to determine who should be king, except I’ve just checked the stock levels at the Mystic Warehouse, and they’re all out).

    What unites these examples isn’t merely their reluctance, but their sense of service rather than entitlement. Leadership as duty rather than as a prize. Authority as responsibility rather than playground dynamics of who has the sharpest title. You know – God forbid – actual leadership.

    The Corporate Selection Problem

    In theory, modern organisations should have sophisticated methods for identifying and developing genuine leadership talent. In practice, most promotion systems operate with all the nuance and discernment of a hungry toddler at a birthday party buffet, grabbing the brightest, loudest things while ignoring the vegetables of quiet competence sitting forlornly on the side.

    The standard corporate selection process rewards several traits that have at best a tenuous relationship – and arguably an inverse one – with actual leadership capability:

    – Unwavering self-promotion – Because nothing says “I’m focused on organisational success” like an obsessive documentation (and associated proclamations) of personal achievements

    – Strategic visibility – Ensuring one is seen doing things rather than simply doing them well (because why do the work when you can just take the credit?)

    – Confident proclamations – Making assertions with certainty regardless of their relationship to reality

    – Relationship cultivation with existing power structures – Proving one’s fitness to lead by demonstrating a profound capacity for strategic flattery and a fondness for the taste of human excrement of staff who, obviously coincidentally, sit further up the hierarchy

    None of these correlate strongly with the ability to navigate complexity, build consensus, acknowledge uncertainty, or make difficult decisions under pressure – you know, the actual job of leadership.

    The Quiet Competence Conundrum

    Meanwhile, genuine capability often manifests in ways that are systematically overlooked or undervalued:

    – Thoughtful consideration – Interpreted as indecisiveness rather than prudence

    – Nuanced perspectives – Dismissed as “complexity” in a world enamoured with false certainty

    – Acknowledgment of limitations – Seen as weakness rather than self-awareness

    – Focus on work rather than self-promotion – Resulting in the organisational invisibility of the actually competent

    The result is a persistent filtering mechanism that elevates the confidently inadequate whilst overlooking the quietly capable. It’s not merely an unfortunate coincidence but a structural feature of systems that mistake confidence for competence, certainty for clarity, and self-promotion for achievement.

    Beyond the Binary: The Confident-Competent Unicorn

    Despite my ongoing affinity for hyperbole, surrealism, and aligned topics, let’s acknowledge the legitimate counterargument: confidence and competence aren’t mutually exclusive.

    Occasionally – about as frequently as a total solar eclipse visible from your precise geo-coordinates where you read this article – these qualities align in a single individual.

    These rare creatures – the confident-competent – do exist.

    They combine genuine capability with the self-assurance to deploy it effectively.

    They’re the unicorns of the organisational world, and finding one feels about as likely as discovering your cat has been quietly paying half your mortgage.

    The problem isn’t that these individuals don’t exist; it’s that our selection mechanisms are catastrophically bad at distinguishing them from their more common doppelgängers: the confident-incompetent. From a distance, and particularly to existing leadership equally afflicted with the confidence/competence inversion, they appear identical – how are people going to deduce the difference between bullshit and brilliance if at least part of their own rise to the top involved a suitable amount of bluff and bluster?

    The Selection Renovation Project

    If we accept that our current approaches to identifying leadership talent are fundamentally broken, how might we improve them? How do we find those capable but not necessarily clamoring for power?

    Here are some horribly unfashionable suggestions that would probably get me removed from any corporate HR function within approximately 17 minutes:

    1. Value proven problem-solving over persuasive self-presentation

    Track record of quietly solving complex problems without creating new ones might be a better indicator of leadership potential than the ability to create a compelling PowerPoint about one’s own magnificence. Projects that never go red are probably better places to find leaders compared to the ”heroes” who always seems be in the thick of the latest corporate bomb site.

    2. Seek evidence of epistemic humility

    The capacity to say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” indicates an intellectual flexibility essential for navigating uncertainty. Someone who can’t recall the last time they were mistaken isn’t displaying confidence; they’re displaying delusion.

    3. Observe behaviour under genuine pressure

    Not the manufactured pressure of interviews or presentations, but the authentic stress of unexpected challenges. Character reveals itself not in rehearsed moments but in unscripted responses to difficulty. As the old saying goes – “adversity introduces a man unto himself”.

    4. Listen to those being led

    The people working directly with potential leaders often have the clearest perspective on their actual capabilities. 360-degree feedback isn’t perfect, but it’s frequently more accurate than upward-only assessment, because often the nature of senior leadership is that they don’t have the understanding of the detail, because the detail has probably changed in the last 20 years since they were doing the actual work on the ground.

    5. Create selection mechanisms that don’t reward self-promotion

    Design processes that identify capability without requiring candidates to engage in competitive displays of ego and certainty. (The amount of people I see overlooked simply because they aren’t extroverted enough still baffles me to this day).

    6. Value the questioners, not just the answerers

    Those who ask thoughtful questions often have a deeper understanding of complexity than those offering immediate, confident solutions.

    The Fundamental Recalibration

    Perhaps most fundamentally, we need to recalibrate our collective understanding of what leadership actually is. It’s not about being the loudest, the most certain, or the most eager.

    It’s most certainly not about having immediate answers to every question or projecting an image of infallibility.

    Leadership in a complex world requires the capacity to:

    – Navigate uncertainty without resorting to false certainty

    – Integrate diverse perspectives without losing decisiveness

    – Acknowledge limitations without abdicating responsibility

    – Maintain direction without ignoring changing conditions

    – Build consensus without avoiding necessary conflict

    None of these capabilities correlate strongly with the traits we typically filter for in our leadership selection processes. None emerge reliably from processes designed to identify the most confident rather than the most capable.

    The Reluctant-But-Capable Draft

    Maybe we need leadership term limits with mandatory periods of actual work in between. “Congratulations on your three-year stint as Director of Strategic Initiatives! Please enjoy your new two-year residency in Customer Support where you’ll experience the joyful consequences of all those ‘streamlining processes’ you implemented. Your corner office has been converted into a supply cupboard, but we’ve left you a lovely desk lamp.”. (That sort of thing tends to sharpen the mind in a way that no abstracted thinking can really illustrate when there’s a chance that making one’s subordinates lives hell might come back to burn one’s own backside in future)

    I’d like to propose the Turvey-Serve-y leadership selection process. (I’ll admit the naming needs work).

    Imagine an organisational world where leadership positions came with an obligation rather than a corner office, premium brand electric vehicle, and stock options.

    Where selection focused on demonstrated capability rather than performed confidence.

    Where the question wasn’t “Do you want to lead?” but rather “Given your demonstrated capabilities, would you be willing to serve?”

    Servant leadership isn’t a particularly new idea, and this approach would likely encounter immediate resistance from those most invested in the current system – particularly those whose rise has been fuelled more by confidence than competence. It would require restructuring incentives, reconceptualising leadership development, and fundamentally challenging our collective assumptions about what leadership looks like – far from an easy or overnight job.

    It would mean real change to ensure the new breed of servant leaders are empowered with the tools to generate real success, rather than loaded up with seventeen tons of load like the Little Donkey until said donkey has collapsed and needs to be put to sleep.

    It would be difficult, messy, and uncertain – much like actual leadership itself.

    The Uncomfortable Conclusion

    The power paradox has no simple resolution. The very nature of power attracts those who desire it for its own sake rather than for what it enables them to accomplish for others. Our selection mechanisms systematically mistake confidence for competence, certainty for clarity, and self-promotion for achievement.

    Yet perhaps acknowledging this paradox is the first step towards mitigating its worst effects. Perhaps by recognising the inverse relationship between power-seeking and suitability for leadership, we can begin to design systems that select for the qualities we actually need rather than those that shout loudest for attention. These plans will take time, but that’s surely an area where we should invest our thinking if we want a better world over time.

    In the meantime, perhaps the most practical heuristic remains a profound skepticism toward those most eager to lead. The person telling you they were born for leadership is precisely the one you should escort gently but firmly to the nearest supplies cupboard, where they can organise the paper clips into a splendid hierarchy of their own design while composing a 15-page manifesto on ‘The Future of Office Supply Optimisation: A Leadership Journey’.

    By contrast, the truly qualified leader is probably hiding under their desk right now, hoping that this particular chalice of responsibility passes them by, ideally to land on the desk of someone with enough confidence to be utterly untroubled by their complete lack of qualifications.

    The original copy of this article was published via my personal LinkedIn on April 17th, 2025. You can find the original link here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-paradox-why-those-most-eager-lead-should-locked-turvey-frsa-ydrde/?trackingId=7afVev12RM2JcryLdCRZuA%3D%3D