One of the problems with the discourse around leadership and organisations is how things get, well, thingy-fied. The most obvious example of this is change. I (still) regularly hear people say they need to ‘drive change’; a big programme for a client a few years ago was labelled as ‘Landing the Change’; change is something to be ‘lead’, a bit like a horse to water but with PowerPoints not sugar cubes; change is ‘managed’, in a project plan… Whilst there may be grains of truth

In recent years organisations large and small have embarked on the quest for greater agility, often at the exhortation of senior leaders who are the antithesis of that and/or without clarity around what is meant by ‘agile’. It gets framed variously as: ‘Agile’ – as in “we want to work in a way similar to that used by Agile software developers"; ‘agile’ – as in “we want to be more flexible”, without any clarity around what this is, and worst case as a euphemism for hot-desking