This article addresses the seventh aspect of the Henley Development Framework and is the first in the Integration group. Integration is where the hard work of examining your Foundations and Readiness becomes consequential for actions and reactions in the world around you. The connection between the three aspects here is the idea of being a catalyst. A catalyst is an agent that changes the rate of a reaction. It does this by slowing down or speeding it up without being used up in the process. This takes reflection and self-awareness.

Professionally, this tests whether you leave a role or organisation better equipped to carry on without you than before you arrived. Personally, the reward of integration in your development is a new type of agency - a freedom - in your life that might have been elusive for your younger self.

“What is going on?”

Critical and strategic thinking is a disciplined process of sense-making that ensures honest judgment and makes actions consistent with what truly matters.

This aspect of the Framework is the discipline of answering the question above well in the context of an organisational role. It is also possible to apply that to other domains, including the personal, because many types of action that flow from disciplined and rigorous thinking translate as patterns throughout life.

I’m going to start with the contemporary, and perhaps common-sense, views of thinking and strategy and how they are problematic.

Conventional critical thinking: the language of the machine

Pause for a moment and do a quick audit of the language used in your organisation, perhaps by you, to describe the processes and channels for presenting thinking. We process information, run the numbers, lack bandwidth, download a briefing, and above all, when we’re working out what decision to make, we compute. This is mechanistic, and it would be tempting to say that artificial intelligence - with all its computing power - has solved the organisational problem of thinking as a process (work), leaving the person free to make decisions much more quickly, and in much more depth. But this is essentially a deeply embedded metaphor that turns thinking into something that happens inside a machine, albeit a complicated one, and the individual into a device or vehicle for toolkits consisting of cast-iron models and frameworks.

Conventional strategy: the legacy of war

Though it has a very long history of use in military planning and execution, the term ‘strategy ’, as widely used now in organisational life, entered the mainstream and idiom of management relatively recently. I’ll expand on this in Part 2, because it has baggage, but it’s quite obvious in terms such as capturing markets, price wars, talent wars, being under siege, being in the trenches, running a campaign, and the ubiquitous discussion around strategy versus tactics. The location of strategic thinking? Inside the individual, the commander watching everything from the top of a hill.

This, I think, is what most people accept as the nature of strategy and also of the kind of thinking needed to understand it and make it happen. Critical thinking, in the mechanistic and hierarchical world of the late 20th century, distilled itself into a linear analysis of the parts, and isolating an organisational problem from its environment in order to make sense of it, and objectively testing a series of hypotheses before imposing a solution, preferably using a tried-and-tested formula or model. One of the best-known offspring of this is VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity), an acronym proposed by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus and circulated by the U.S. Army War College in the late 1980s.

What we get are definitions such as this one (presented by Oxford Management Centre, a training company):

“Critical thinking is the disciplined process of evaluating information, identifying biases, considering alternatives, and arriving at reasoned conclusions.”

I don’t think that captures critical thinking (it could work as an AI prompt, but that doesn’t get us very far), so I am not going to start there, or with what much of the management literature and some leadership theory have been encouraging us to do (some of which will be reviewed in part 2).

Critical and Strategic Thinking

In Management Learning, critical thinking should be understood as a blend of reasoning skills, perspective-taking, and awareness of the limitations on your ability to think about your own thinking. This is a departure from the usual menu of features associated with critical thinking as a skill. As Edward Glaser found in 1941, if not accompanied by the right disposition in the person, critical thinking techniques remain sterile.

The aim of critical thinking here is not to compute or outguess the future, but to attempt to see the world as it actually is, interpret that as meaning, and then say, do or add something uniquely your own. Critical thinking converts “having information” into “having a position”.

For me, strategic thinking flows from and within this and is the application of critical thinking to decisions needed for determining next moves, what counts as value (and what does not). This asks you to view the organisation less as a system of cogs and levers, and more as a living network of relationships, constraints, incentives, and feedback loops. This is sometimes a heavy burden that can carry legal, ethical, and human implications beyond the boundaries of the business or organisation's identity. Strategic thinking is always a question of real boundary conditions.

When it comes to personal development, Critical and Strategic Thinking connect your inner world of perspective - including all six of the HDF aspects featured so far - to your outer world of interactions, including all the intended and unintended consequences of decisions.

It may be getting worse!

We now work in an environment of extreme informational abundance, and arguably, Critical and Strategic Thinking has become more difficult in recent years. Strategic thinking used to privilege measurement, statistics, dashboards, market data, and so on. Acquiring information was power, and a painstaking business. Holding on to it was a strategic advantage. In the era of strategic planning, strategic marketing, and strategic policy, all this was a certain form of intelligence (another hangover word from the post-War period of mechanisation, military modelling, and mass-market expansion). Most senior managers and leaders learnt how to answer the headline question, “What’s going on?” by this process, and often came to believe that by fixing the order, the underlying pattern would follow.

AI is the latest in a series of reality checks on that whole idea. The 1973 oil crisis exposed the limits of strategic thinking in the 1950s and 60s. The planning models of the day extended cheap and stable oil into the future in a straight line, and disruption came from where the models were not looking: the geopolitics of the Yom Kippur War and the OPEC embargo. Those strategic forecasts were precise to the point of being completely blind to the underlying events. The 2008 financial crisis made the same point at far greater cost. The failure there was not a want of measurement but a glut of it. Despite, or maybe because of, a vast apparatus of risk models, credit ratings and dashboards, plus one formula in particular that a later account named the formula that killed Wall Street, right up until the shit hit the fan, the strategists gave a convincing impression of control.

Any system built to count quantities cannot register a change in relationships until it is too late. It matters little whether the order was in good repair if the pattern did not follow. AI is the most recent reminder that having or holding more information, on its own, is never the same as knowing what is going on.

The missing element, if it is no longer access to data, is the quality of judgment you apply. Bluntly, and to repeat, if you don’t know how you think, you are not in command. Strategically, if you cannot see how a decision will travel through systems of relationships, incentives, workload, trust, and attention, you risk not going with the grain.

What it looks like when it’s healthy

Strategic thinking matters because organisations evolve through complex patterns of interaction over time, rather than through “best-laid” plans and announcements. When multiple patterns overlay each other, the result is often a new, unexpected, and emergent pattern. You therefore need the capacity to think in terms of relationships and second-order consequences, not just tasks. You can state what you think and why you think it. You can distinguish between evidence and interpretation, and between interpretation and preference. AI can compare sources, weigh competing explanations, and a host of other things, but only you can evaluate all that. Critical and Strategic Thinking is a ‘back to basics’ necessity, one that is rarely taught in our schools.

Reflect on your practice, or experience around you, and begin to assess your levels of critical thinking and, if you hold organisational responsbility, strategic thinking. How does interpretation get sorted from evidence? How do you surface assumptions, test your thinking (or that of others)?

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Reference

Glaser, E. M. (1941). An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Oxford Management Centre (n.d.) How to Develop Critical Thinking Skills for Strategic Success. Available at: https://oxford-management.com/articles/how-to-develop-critical-thinking-skills-for-strategic-success (Accessed: 2 September 2026).

Was this pre-planned? Impromptu? Their actions elicited an immediate backlash on social media and among pundits, with the consensus condemning the action as a lack of respect and fair play.

Immediately after the match, several disciplinary investigations were launched, mainly into events that happened on the pitch, in-play and immediately after the final whistle, and these are still ongoing. Those are fairly well covered by FIFA’s rules and various codes of conduct. A few weeks on, the dust from those is settling, and the match itself is beginning to fade from online chatter.

But what about that presentation ceremony and conduct of the losing team? Are we any the wiser about that? I see two sets of questions, at different levels of abstraction.

The first level (noisy, but straightforward)

These are not complicated and pertain to the boundary of this as a particular case within the context of football. Were the Argentina players and staff in breach of anything that could result in sanctions? If so, which? If not, do the rules need to change?

When it comes to the Argentina team's gesture, if the code doesn’t prohibit it, nothing would have been breached. Case dismissed.

As far as I could find out from browsing the FIFA website and the published codes of conduct, only the Disciplinary Code (2023) would be relevant. However, even then, it is far from clear whether they did anything sanctionable, even if they did something wrong. That there is leeway within FIFA was evident during the tournament. For example, a suspension - under Article 27 - of the match suspension (for a red-card offence in the match with Bosnia and Herzegovina) was granted to the US striker Folarin Balogun. It is a matter of record that several calls were made by US President Trump to FIFA president Infantino about this. And that Balogun was allowed to play in the US’s next match, against Belgium. And that Infantino claimed that the decision was made by an independent committee.

However, FIFA’s Disciplinary Code says nothing about a losing team's stance during a ceremony, and neither does the Stadium Code of Conduct for this World Cup, which has a great many rules for the attending crowd but few, if any, for players and team officials. After the match, FIFA decided not to make a case. It is debatable as to whether no case could have been made. Article 13(2) of the Disciplinary Code prohibits, by way of example only, violating the basic rules of decent conduct and behaving in a way that brings football or FIFA into disrepute. Article 14(1)(b) covers unsporting behaviour towards an opponent. Article 14(2) confirms that the relevant misconduct is sanctionable even when committed off the field of play (that is, if the ceremony were interpreted as being in the period following the end of the game but still within the tournament). The appetite for that was not there.

At that level, we made need to leave it where it is, and move on.

A meta-level view (quieter, and complex)

I think there is more to say, though, about what happened because it may illustrate how a contextual pattern, one which is a boundary for the whole sport as it played between nations, operates.

If the conduct in question was not something that could easily be called a rule-breaking on the spot, such as a penalty, offside, or handball, and if it broke no rule, why is it that so many of us still feel that something has been left hanging which should not be.

I wonder if it bugs us because we were missing closure at a deeper level.

Condemnation of the Argentina team’s conduct often involved the words “respect”, and “fair play”, and the sentiment was often that the problem was that it was not shown. The Argentinians didn’t complete the implicit contract in an international fixture, namely that once the battle is over, the battle is over. There was, in other words, the continuation of the hostilities and rivalries coded into the structure of the game into the space reserved for resolution and acceptance. Humility in victory, grace in defeat. This unwritten rule was violated. But it’s a rule that has to be enforced in its voluntary observance. It may be that the rule we think we need is not one that can be written down and enforced.

To that end, we may begin to ask what non-compliance with an expected norm on the part of the loser means, and what that tells us about other fields of human relations.

What is sport for?

Sport, especially national sporting events, carries social meaning for us. During periods of international competition, whether Olympiads, World Cups, or even Eurovision Song Contests, the tendency to express judgmental reactions, passion, identity, and so on is not only tolerated but often encouraged by the state. These often feel like safe proxies for letting off collective steam to affirm collective belonging.

FIFA’s stated, official line is that sport is there to lead to peace. For me, this is interesting and concerns the antecedent conditions of any global team sport, with the World Cup as an exemplar of a pattern widely present in human society: what to do with the tension necessary whenever membership of one group finds that the term “membership” goes with “non-membership”. This implicit division is the source of much that is fecund in human history. Trade, wealth, politics, power, and control are interactive, and the question of collaboration versus collision is as old as the hills of Mount Olympus.

Where the active spirit of human interaction coincides with political necessity and economic survival, a level of discipline and drill is needed to be ready to move when conditions call for it. Training, or education. In ancient times, prowess at throwing, running, shooting and so on was already well organised. Modern team sports were forged during the Industrial Revolution, when people massed for work, had a regimented working week with mandated time off at the weekend, and had disposable income, amid rapid expansion and colonisation, and in the development and encouragement of various team activities and sports in the school systems of the age.

As long as it is within the rules and in the presence and guidance of a referee, team sports are necessarily combative, even violent. Was George Orwell correct in his 1945 essay, The Sporting Spirit, that international sport manufactures hostility rather than draining it?

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”

-  George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit,” 1945

Orwell was writing in the aftermath of a historic and often chaotic tour of the UK by Dynamo Moscow. The Soviets played four matches amid huge public interest, and it was a pebble that sent ripples through the sport and - to an extent - society. Orwell was presenting a diagnosis of a society recovering from profound trauma. Each side gets to see a version of itself.

And what of FIFA’s slogan? Is it a genuine wish for football to limit something that governments cannot? Or provide a credible theatre where these emotions, loyalties, and competitive spirit play out? We’re all supposed to feel what we would feel as if the conflict of the game was real, while at the same time not reacting to it as we would if it was actually real. To admit to that (“it’s only a game”) in the middle of the match would be like breaking the fourth wall at the theatre. It would satisfy us. Equally, NOT admitting that at the end leaves the illusion in control. That’s why it triggers us when a player or a team maintain the charade after the curtain has come down.

In 1952, Gregory Bateson spent time at a zoo in San Francisco watching two monkeys fight, without fighting. The nip stood for the bite, but it did not convey what that real bite would have carried. For that to be possible, he argued, the animals had to be exchanging a second kind of message alongside the first, a meta-message whose only content was how everything else should be read. “This is play.” Without it, a nip is an attack.

A football match follows the same idea. A tackle is a nip. So is a shirt pull, a shove at a corner, a professional foul taken deliberately for the good of the team. None of these means what the same act would mean on a street outside the ground, and everybody after the opening stadium countdown (players and spectators, too) is agreeing that this is the case, continuously, for ninety minutes. The referee role is essential to this meta-messaging, the most immediate negative feedback mechanism which, if not in place, would weaken the difference between play and war. For sport to work, some things that would normally mean one thing stop meaning literally what that thing means, just enough for us to “scratch the itch”, release the built-up tension, and return to a more benign equilibrium.

At least since the early 1870s, with the first international matches in Association Football and Rugby Union, nations have cultivated a benign way of letting ‘inter-national’ emotion and friction dissipate and resolve into a sufficiently stable state of non-conflict to signal the broader intention of co-existence. In football, as in rugby, a pitch is a place where you may charge into another person at speed, and it is not an assault. Crucially, everybody has agreed to this in advance, and the agreement is the whole point. In recent years, even golf’s team competition, the Ryder Cup, has demonstrated the dangers of fanning rivalry without a sufficiently strong negative feedback mechanism also in place.

Something very close to this happened in cricket in 2025. India played Pakistan in the Asia Cup in Dubai on 14 September, and won by seven wickets. At the end of the match, the Indian players walked off without shaking hands. Pakistan’s coach said afterwards that he and his captain had waited and that nobody came. The Pakistan captain then refused to attend the post-match presentation. Within days, the Pakistan board complained formally about the match referee, whom it accused of telling the captains not to shake hands at the toss, and demanded his removal from the tournament. The board came close to withdrawing the team altogether, all triggered by a gesture that no rule required and no rule forbade.

The International Cricket Council responded by saying the match referee had no role in regulating any protocol agreed outside the area of play, and that the handshake not taking place was a matter for the tournament organisers and for those who had taken the decision.

There is something cybernetic about all of this. Cybernetics is the study of circular causal and feedback processes in systems. A cybernetic account understands an event not in terms of cause and effect, but by asking what restrained the alternatives. It shows how organisms, societies, and nature itself maintain stability through information, communication and control.

When the show is over, and the play (or playing) is done, all-or-nothing drama decided, we are required - without making it explicit - to shake hands, congratulate our opponent (and ourselves), and retire in grace. The Spanish team’s guard of honour as the Argentinians went to collect their medals was the necessary, ritual and informal gesture to step out of the combative roles. The Argentina side’s decision not to reciprocate signalled a continuation of hostilities.

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Lifelong Learning and me

I said in Part 1 that I had only recently become aware of the relevance of Lifelong Learning. As I now reflect and re-acquaint myself with an earlier phase in my life (from 17 to about 25), that’s not entirely correct. What was I doing at the start? From where I am today, I see that, without ever having a name for it then, I had this principle, “an openness to being teachable,” informing the early, autonomous decisions I was making about the world of work. This was learning to dance, freestyle, with life. I was bouncing around in a life of modest means, in a capital city with a rich soup of a youth culture. I did not know it at the time, but I was free of most of the constraints on sustainable health and well-being. They come later.

Between roughly 26 and 50, a different phase and a different wording of the principle of lifelong learning (now labelled as such) took centre stage: “knowledge for being better employed”. This one was definitely coming from the environment and was a message about life. This was learning a formal dance, with steps, rituals, and lots of eyes on how advanced I was making myself seem; the need to settle, pay bills, a mortgage, bring up children, look a safe bet in the eyes of an employing institution, and get on the lower rungs of post-experience education, doing an MBA, doing a PhD, and so on. The list is quite long and has many collected badges. This, while all the time projecting the image of sober professionalism, necessarily internalised, expected in an industry that (I assumed) knew what it was doing. As an earnest, formalised and default form of Lifelong Learning, ‘knowledge for being better employed’ has some material metrics, but it leaves many of the restraints and limitations to sustainable health and well-being exactly where they were.

I reached my 50s and am now in my 60s, and I sense that a third movement has emerged: a return to the first. I don’t mean that I think like a teenager or footloose rebel, but rather I have come back to being open to being teachable. I now think of that middle phase of Lifelong Learning as the process of growing into the socialised idea of adulthood. However, the return to a more relaxed version of Lifelong Learning later in life has another quality. Education is no longer about advancement, enrolment, or appearance. It is a matter of outlook, self-interest, and interest in self. I guess this is a bit like that old meme, “dance like no-one’s watching”.

However, I need to mention several things, because I am not claiming that either of the two interpretations of Lifelong Learning provides all the answers.

In my case, beyond another Personal Title promotion within my university, I am now immune to the relentless grind of performative signs of lifelong learning. That is partly because I spent a lot of time and effort in that world, even perpetuating it. For example, I completed an MBTI certification, an NLP Practitioner course, and many other training programmes that I have since decided not to inflict on the MBAs. They did not hold up to critical thinking. I am feeling freer of the consensus, and that is not the same thing as there being no consensus at work for others in their development. What it does say about me is that I reached the other side of that forest and the open ground is once more available. Perhaps my work on the Henley MBA is to go back into the forest and see if anyone else is stuck, or searching for the way out.

In a sort of echo of the most famous maxim within the Peter Principle (Peter and Hull, 1969), that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence, there is a genuine question societies are grappling with today about the best policies of lifelong learning. Did Lifelong Learning become "not the symbol of our unfinished development, but a guarantee of our permanent inadequacy" (Illich & Verne, 1976, p.13)?

That’s why I chose the title “Unfinished Business” for the Henley Personal Development Podcast.

I’m still ‘on my toes’, and always should be. I don’t know what will happen next, and I must equally trust myself to be prepared for the world. It’s the sort of balance a high wire acrobat (Bateson’s example) needs to hold tension and freedom. I am more ready and open to either change or challenge. Can I be both wiser and none the wiser?

Creativity and me

I understand creativity as a word to describe what happens when we open things up.

I’m tempted to stop there because that’s what I think it is for.

On the other hand, there is more to say.

There’s a (tautological) version of this in which creativity is “for” whatever people agree is creative. A social construct, and therefore if there is no audience and no impact, then it’s no different to the tree falling in the forest making a sound or not when no one is there. Creativity is creativity if we can measure it. I think the translation of that into business and workplace language is "innovation" (a subset of creativity that adds value).

There’s another version where it is not “for” anything except itself. It is what it is, and it is creativity without (or before) anyone knowing about it. The tree falls, the air moves, the space opens up, light gets in. It’s reasonable, to me, to see that as a primordial universal. So I’m more inclined to these ideas, though the pull of the other is a strong conditioning on what gets labelled as creative. I do not rule out the existence or importance of the Muse, but I see that input as catalytic rather than integral to the process.

I’ll borrow the words of an artist well-known for being very thoughtful on this subject, David Bowie. Below are quotes taken from a 1997 interview he gave when he turned 50 (there’s that age again), and Henley MBA alumni will recognise this from one or other of the PD workshops:

Lifelong Learning AND Creativity, and me

So far, this has dealt with these ideas (as Part 2 began) as separate, or parallel ideas. I need to say what Lifelong Learning and Creativity is for, as one aspect, one idea. But actually, that has been hiding in plain sight all along; in the story of my three (lived) phases of Lifelong Learning creativity.

I had creativity given to me by an early and formative portion of life with “one thing leading to another” as its motif. To London, to organising part of a youth movement, to being on the road for some travels, to odd-jobbing and signing on, to boredom, then to a defining and sobering realisation of what hard work can feel like. There were few, if any, barriers, and little, if any, direction from me. Being amorphously creative (though not particularly productive) was quite synonymous with life at that point.

It was the middle, busy phase where I acquired categories, sober professionalism, what a safe bet looks like, what an academic is, and so on. Again, little or no choice in the context.

The third phase, emerging naturally, is when those categories became visible as categories and therefore optional. I can see myself much more clearly now, and I’m more free of the performative grind described in phase two. I have progressed a generation, or two (now a grandparent), occupied a space in my writing and facilitation, intensely interested in pattern and order, joyful in conversation with colleagues, students, and alumni, more tolerant of some things and less so of others, and now more than before I can see and feel the Framework's definition of creativity at work in me:

Lifelong learning and Creativity is my ability to stay open in a world that refuses to stay still.

That’s what the combination is for.

Which brings the next aspect into view. Critical and Strategic Thinking is where judgment gets applied, and judgment can only work with the categories it is given.

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References

Illich, I. & Verne, E. (1976) Imprisoned in the Global Classroom (London, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative).

Peter, L.J. and Hull, R. (1969) The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York: William Morrow.

Lifelong Learning, long before the phrase was born (1830s to 1930s)

Adult education entered the industrial world as an argument about what the word useful means. Through the early 1800s, working people in Britain organised their own learning: reading rooms, discussion societies, evening lectures, often in the back rooms of pubs, and later in halls they built themselves. What they wanted from it, in a phrase of the time, was “really useful knowledge”: history, economics, and an understanding of why their lives were as they were (Johnson, 1979; Thompson, 1963). At the same time, reformers and some employers, such as George Birkbeck, were funding a more respectable version, the mechanics’ institutes, where useful meant technical skills and approved science, and where any political questions were kept off the syllabus. Same word, two meanings: knowledge for understanding and expanding your life, or knowledge for being better employed in it. Everything that happens to lifelong learning over the next two centuries is a rerun of that argument, and when Paulo Freire arrives in this story in the 1960s, arguing that education is either the practice of freedom or a tool for fitting people into the world as it is, he is taking a side of a fence staked out a century and a half earlier.

The argument found its philosophers in the 1920s. American educator Eduard Lindeman's The Meaning of Adult Education (1926) claimed that adult learning begins where vocational training ends: its raw material is the situations of adult life itself, work, family, community, and its purpose is to make sense of that life as a whole, which is a task that no education course completes. Alongside Lindeman stood John Dewey. For Dewey (1916), education simply is growth, and the test of any experience is what it leads to next: a good experience enlarges your capacity for further experience, a bad one shuts it down (Dewey, 1938). Follow that pragmatist logic of education being you discovering what is practical and useful, then something interesting drops out of it. If education is growth, and growth is measured by what it opens up rather than by what it delivers, then there is no point at which education can be said to be finished. The lifelong part of adult learning is implied by the definition from the start. Lindeman, inspired by the emphasis on participant-driven education in the Folk High School movement in Denmark in the 1840s, is the source of many of the tenets of andragogy. This has influenced management education principles at Henley, such as involving the learner in their learning, using their experience as the primary resource. As Lindeman wrote:

“None but the humble become good teachers of adults. In an adult class the student’s experience counts for as much as the teacher’s knowledge...sometimes it is difficult to discover who is learning most, the teacher or the students.” (1926)

The generous decade, and the reversal (1960s to 1996)

The term Lifelong Learning formally arrived with institutional backing. UNESCO’s report Learning to Be (Faure et al., 1972) proposed the learning society as a humanist project. Every person, it held, is entitled to learn throughout life to become more fully themselves. Learning was for being, and the report warned against reducing education to economic preparation. The same period produced Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), where adult learning is a dialogical and collective practice of gaining freedom, and Malcolm Knowles (1970), whose use of the term andragogy carried a gentler version of the same conviction into professional practice: adults learn from experience, for their own purposes, as directors of their own development.

The about-turn came from economics, which had simply been waiting in the wings. Gary Becker’s Human Capital (1964) supplied a frame in which education is investment, skills are assets, and the return can be calculated. There is nothing sinister in the frame; the trouble is its attachment to a bottom line. Once learning is an investment, the case for any learning must be made in investment’s terms, and whatever cannot make that case dissolves in insolvency. By the time the OECD published Lifelong Learning for All (1996), the translation to commodification was complete. Lifelong Learning was now the response to globalisation, technological change, and labour-market flexibility. Further learning became something economies require of people, rather than something people are entitled to ask of life.

Frank Coffield (1999), who had just spent five years directing the UK's main research programme into the learning society, noticed the sting hidden in this. Markets and technologies were changing regardless of anything a worker did. But once lifelong learning became a duty, the blame for any failure had somewhere personal to land. Lose your job, and the story is no longer that the economy shifted; it is that you failed to keep your skills up to date. Coffield called this social control, where people who are busy self-correcting have less time to question the arrangement that keeps requiring the correction.

The compulsory sector, meanwhile, ran the same experiment on children. The progressive inheritance of Dewey, learning through experience, the teacher as gardener rather than filler of vessels, was steadily displaced across the same decades by standardisation and testing, on the reasonable-sounding grounds that what matters can be measured and what is measured can be managed.

The pattern is the one that the brief histories in this series keep finding: an inventive, generative idea, an administrative capture, and a drive to insert a metric where the fun of not knowing used to be.

Learning in the present tense (2000 to now)

The best-known recent critic of all this is Gert Biesta (2006), who gave the disease a name: learnification. This is a redescription of education in which only the individual learner and their measurable outcomes remain, with the larger questions of purpose, content, and relationship edited out. Ask what the learning is for, Biesta argues, and the discourse has no answer, because the question was removed along with the language needed to pose it. John Field (2006) reads the same landscape more evenly, granting that the new educational order has genuinely opened doors while noting who is left holding the obligation: lifelong learning as permanent probation, with the individual forever re-qualifying for an economy that keeps changing the locks. Our current decade has given us the micro-credential, the digital badge, and the learning platform, which are the technology-enhanced warehouse model of Part 1: learning as stackable (thin) units of verified acquisition.

UNESCO’s Reimagining Our Futures Together (2021), published almost fifty years after Faure, calls for a new social contract for education, framed now by ecological crisis as much as by economics. Whether it fares better than its ancestors remains open. The record so far suggests that the humanist argument for lifelong learning is itself a lesson each generation is forced to repeat.

The person who carried this whole argument to the widest audience was Ken Robinson, whose talk on whether schools kill creativity became the most watched in TED’s history. Behind the humour sat a serious report he had chaired for the UK government (NACCCE, 1999) and a serious claim (Robinson, 2001): that an education system built for the industrial age had installed a hierarchy of subjects, useful ones at the top, and had taught generations that being wrong is the worst thing you can be, when the willingness to be wrong is where anything original starts. Notice Robinson made the case against standardised learning by appealing to creativity, treating them as one argument, not two.

Creativity: the making of a measurable object (1869 to 1966)

Creativity’s history as a subject of study in education is shorter, and starts from the opposite corner. Where lifelong learning began open and was narrowed, creativity began narrow, the property of the exceptional few, and was deliberately widened. Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869) is the mystique in scientific dress: eminence as a trait of rare bloodlines, nothing to be done about it except perhaps selective breeding. Graham Wallas (1926) made the first real crack in this picture by describing a process rather than a person. His four stages, preparation, incubation, illumination, verification, implied that the making of new ideas had a structure, and structures can in principle be learned.

The founding moment of creativity research proper is usually dated to J.P. Guilford’s 1950 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, which pointed out that psychology had almost entirely ignored the subject and proposed that creative ability was distributed across the population, measurable, and distinct from intelligence. The instrument arrived with E. Paul Torrance (1966), whose Tests of Creative Thinking scored fluency, flexibility, and originality, chiefly by counting the uses a person can imagine for a brick. In parallel, the advertising executive Alex Osborn (1953) gave organisational life the brainstorm, ancestor of every away-day flip chart since. The widening had gone all the way - creativity was now officially in everyone. However, the question of how minds make genuinely new things had become emblematic in how many ideas can you list in three minutes, and an industry grew up around improving the count.

The other thread (1955 to 1990)

A different line of thought was running through the same decades, less interested in counting ideas than in asking what an idea has to break in order to be new. George Kelly (1955) proposed that every person operates like a scientist, running a system of personal constructs, the distinctions through which they anticipate the world, and that each person’s system serves until events refuse to fit it. What happens at that point of refusal, when a person must reconstrue rather than merely re-sort, is where Kelly locates creativity as a real psychological movement. Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation (1964) placed the creative act at the intersection of two previously unconnected frames of reference; his word for it was bisociation, and his examples ran from the punchline to the scientific discovery, both of which work by the sudden collision of matrices that had been kept apart.

Margaret Boden (1990) distinguished creativity that explores a conceptual space (finding new combinations within existing rules) from creativity that transforms the space (changing the rules so that previously impossible thoughts become thinkable). Torrance’s brick (and numerous other objects, such as a paper clip) lives entirely in the first kind. The second kind is what the Henley Development Framework is implying: the moment when generating options within your categories yields nothing, because the categories themselves have reached their limits, and something has to be redescribed. Readers of Part 1 will recognise the manager whose distinctions, learned in a closed system, meet an open one. Boden names that predicament as a demand for transformational creativity, and no amount of fluency inside the old space will substitute.

The present disturbance (2009 to now)

In 2023, GPT-4 was put through the Torrance Tests and scored in the top one per cent of human norms for fluency and originality (Guzik, Byrge and Gilde, 2023). Those results were quickly overtaken. A subsequent study found large language models outscored human participants across a battery of divergent thinking tasks, even when fluency was controlled for (Hubert, Awa and Zabelina, 2024). One available conclusion is that machines are now more creative than we are. Another could also be that they are not really getting any better at being creative - they are far too repetitive and formulaic. The better conclusion, I think, is that those old tests never measured what mattered. The listing of original uses for a brick can be hacked. It turns out to be exactly the kind of exploratory search a statistical model of language does superbly, precisely because the space being explored was built from the recorded human past. What the scores cannot show is Boden’s second kind: noticing that your construct system has failed against a world that has changed, and redrawing it while standing inside it. That is not a fluency task. It is a response performed by someone within a system, which is one reason the Framework treats creativity as an aspect of a person’s readiness and not as an output.

We reach the junction (has anyone linked the two?)

So, at the end of two histories: has anyone put lifelong learning and creativity together as one idea? Carl Rogers (1954) came close, arguing that the mainspring of creativity is openness to experience, the same disposition any real learning requires, so that the creative person and the learning person are one person described twice. In management, Argyris and Schön (1974; 1978) supplied the working distinction between single-loop learning, correcting errors within your governing assumptions, and double-loop learning, revising the assumptions themselves, with Mezirow (1991) carrying the equivalent insight into adult education as transformative learning. Anyone who has followed this article’s two threads will see the rhyme: single-loop is exploring the space, double-loop is transforming it.

Behind all of them stands Gregory Bateson, and his version is the deepest (and most difficult to grasp with conventional thinking). Bateson observed as early as 1942 that organisms do not only learn things, they also learn how to learn: they acquire, mostly without noticing, the habits of sorting that decide what kind of situation this is and what kind of response fits it (Bateson, 1972). Most of the time, that second-order learning is invisible, because it works. His further category, rarer and harder, is change in the sorting itself, the reorganisation that becomes necessary when the acquired habits meet a world they cannot parse. He did not label it as creativity, but it is exactly what this Framework calls creativity, and on his account it is not a different category from learning at all. It is learning, encountered at a depth where the learner’s own categories are what must change.

“Flexibility may be defined as uncommitted potentiality for change.” (Bateson, 1972, p.497, in ‘Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization’)

Lifelong Learning and Creativity are this flexibility, the readiness potential. Where that leaves me personally, and what I think this aspect of the Framework is really for, is the subject of Part 3.

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References

Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Argyris, C. and Schön, D.A. (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books.

Becker, G.S. (1964) Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education. New York: Columbia University Press.

Biesta, G.J.J. (2006) Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Boden, M.A. (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Coffield, F. (1999) ‘Breaking the consensus: lifelong learning as social control’, British Educational Research Journal, 25(4), pp. 479-499.

Dewey, J. (1916) Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan.

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education. New York: Kappa Delta Pi.

Faure, E. et al. (1972) Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow. Paris: UNESCO.

Field, J. (2006) Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. 2nd edn. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Galton, F. (1869) Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan.

Guilford, J.P. (1950) ‘Creativity’, American Psychologist, 5(9), pp. 444-454.

Guzik, E.E., Byrge, C. and Gilde, C. (2023) ‘The originality of machines: AI takes the Torrance Test’, Journal of Creativity, 33(3), 100065.

Hubert, K.F., Awa, K.N. and Zabelina, D.L. (2024) ‘The current state of artificial intelligence generative language models is more creative than humans on divergent thinking tasks’, Scientific Reports, 14, 3440.

Johnson, R. (1979) ‘”Really useful knowledge”: radical education and working-class culture, 1790-1848’, in Clarke, J., Critcher, C. and Johnson, R. (eds) Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. London: Hutchinson, pp. 75-102.

Kelly, G.A. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W. Norton.

Knowles, M.S. (1970) The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy versus Pedagogy. New York: Association Press.

Koestler, A. (1964) The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson.

Lindeman, E.C. (1926) The Meaning of Adult Education. New York: New Republic.

Mezirow, J. (1991) Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

NACCCE (1999) All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education. London: Department for Education and Employment.

OECD (1996) Lifelong Learning for All. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Osborn, A.F. (1953) Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Robinson, K. (2001) Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Oxford: Capstone.

Rogers, C.R. (1954) ‘Toward a theory of creativity’, ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 11(4), pp. 249-260.

Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz.Torrance, E.P. (1966) Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking: Norms-Technical Manual. Princeton, NJ: Personnel Press.

UNESCO (2021) Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education. Paris: UNESCO.

Wallas, G. (1926) The Art of Thought. London: Jonathan Cape.

This is the sixth aspect of the Development Framework and the last of the three in the Readiness group. It joins the idea of Lifelong Learning, or the continuous activities that help you update your thinking as both the world and you evolve, and Creativity, which (in the framework) is your ability to generate new distinctions, options, and approaches when the categories you already have no longer work, or have reached their limits in a new situation.

It’s not controversial to assert that learning keeps your thinking current. Nor is it much of a stretch to say that you need some kind of creativity when current thinking is no longer enough. When we can combine them, though, they amount to an attitude: openness, curiosity, experimentation, and a willingness to say, “I don’t know, yet… I wonder how to find out”.

In the previous article I wrote that the ultimate access route, when you are under-resourced, is the ability to find and learn your way to a resource that does not yet exist.

This present article is an expression of that ability.

I should admit something at the start. Oddly, given the business I am in, I have come to lifelong learning as a foreground topic for Personal Development late. I have taught management learning for over two decades, and learning has been my professional subject for longer than that, yet for most of that time I treated lifelong learning as background context, a rather sweeping policy phrase rather than a specifically personal question (I’ll say more about that in Part 3)

Perhaps that delay is itself the point. Lifelong learning is one of those things that hides in plain sight beyond compulsory education. We’re strongly encouraged to keep learning, keep going, keep up to date, and I think this is partly what makes it so uncontroversial. When it just means all activity you voluntarily do after you’ve finished formal education, it is quite odd to say that was not a good thing. Where I work, nearly every aspect of my advancement or certification is influenced by what I can list in a learning log. So it has been, for me, an undercoat of paint onto which a person keeps decorating and redecorating over time. As I discovered, following a flood in 2024, sometimes stripping away layers of inappropriate coverings, including the wrong kind of plaster for a house that needs to breathe, is brutal, but the result is much more durable.

In a similar way, after many layers of input and training in the 1990s and early 2000s, I began reviewing my take and examining the premises of my assumptions about learning and creativity, and this drew me closer to something I know I missed, and I think education as a product may have missed as well.

Learning: the language of the record?

To reinforce this, ask most professionals what lifelong learning means in practice, and you will get an account of their record-keeping. Hours logged, points earned, certificates filed, a course completed every so often to keep a membership current. None of this is worthless, but notice what it assumes: that learning is an activity you do in designated episodes, that it produces evidence, and that the evidence is the point. Learning becomes a resume of acquisition and conquest that can be shown off, and the learner becomes the curator of that inventory.

Readers of the previous article will recognise this picture, because it is the warehouse again. The Henley Development Framework makes the same objection here as it did with the idea of Being Resourced. For experienced managers, lifelong learning - if discovered alongside or after the certificate/training route has been exhausted - is less about accumulating knowledge and more about staying teachable. Teachability is another way of saying it (the other side of the coin from learnability, I suppose), and it generates a different kind of trail evidence: the quality of the questions you ask, the wisdom to see mistakes as information rather than verdict, the space you make in your life for exploration. Without that space, the Field Guide says, what we learn to do well is repetition and reinforcement. A full portfolio of learning records and a closed mind are compatible.

Creativity: the language of the gifted?

If lifelong learning tends to be shrunk and narrowed into administration, the concept of Creativity has gone the other way and been inflated into a mystique. In everyday talk, it could mean a gift a person is born with, an artistic temperament (some people have it, most do not), or a company affirmation (which every organisation thinks is basically one workshop away from embedding). This general sense of birthing ideas therefore has a lot of possible applications.

The Framework’s definition is deliberately more specific and, I think, more useful. Creativity is what you need at the specific moment when your existing categories reach their limits. Every manager carries a working set of distinctions: this counts as a risk, that counts as an opportunity, this is how our customers behave, that is what good performance looks like. The set was learned in earlier situations, and it works until the situation changes underneath it. When that happens, sorting harder with the old distinctions produces nothing new. Something has to be redescribed. A problem turns out to be a symptom, a mistake turns out to be information, a boundary between departments turns out to be an accident of history. The ability to look again and find new patterns is creative work, and defined this way, it needs no special talent or gift. It needs only the skill to notice a situation that has outgrown its categories, which sooner or later is every situation, and a person open and willing to notice.

What it does require is tolerance for the interval in between. The Development Framework describes the healthy state for creativity as being able to hold contradictory hypotheses at the same time, and, when things are unclear, designing a way to sit with that rather than rushing for closure. That sort of tolerance should sound familiar from the article on Emotional Resilience. There, the pressure was emotional, and the task was to stay in contact with difficulty. Here, it is on understanding, and staying in contact with ‘not yet knowing’.

Why this matters more as you become senior

In more senior roles, past experience can become a trap if your working assumption is that it is what got you to your current position. For one thing, you are almost certainly in a different context, and the patterns and skills that brought you success earlier in your career were applied in a relatively closed system: problems repeated, feedback came quickly, and the familiar, proven, incremental path worked well. Seniority moves you toward the boundaries, where your system meets other systems and stops behaving predictably. Problems stop repeating, feedback arrives late and blurred, and the patterns extracted from the closed years will mislead.

This is subtly misleading because it hides inside something that feels like memory. We say the past causes the present, but how it did so is always a reconstruction, “the story”, as told from where you now stand. Your current position selects, out of everything that happened, the events that count as the path: the decisions that proved shrewd, the skills that turned out to matter, the risks that paid off. In that sense, the present generates the past, or at least the version of it you consult when you reach for "my experience". And each new role rewrites the story. The lessons of experience are less a record of what worked than an account of what your present position is.

Mistaking your account as a reliable guide to what comes next is the trap.

What you need to keep your sense-making alive: noticing new patterns, questioning your own assumptions, reframing complex problems rather than solving the versions of them you already recognise. That is why Lifelong Learning and Creativity is an aspect of the Framework.

A useful test is to ask whether, when a situation changes unexpectedly, you become more curious or more controlling. The controlling response defends what you already know and do. The curious response embraces what the change is telling you about the limits of what you already know. Most of us can know, honestly, which way we tend to go under pressure. Do you point your questions only at what you already know? Or genuinely at what you do not?

What gets in the way

The biggest hindrance to lifelong learning and creativity is really subtle: the assumption that senior people should already know. It pervades the atmosphere and turns the kind of curiosity Lifelong Learning should evoke into risk, and Creativity into a disruptive threat to status (and the status quo). If you are the senior manager, no one is likely to challenge you. If you are lower down and looking upward in the organisation, telegraphing your “I don’t know yet” can feel like a withdrawal of your credibility.

Middle-management overload does the rest. Being overloaded, or overloading yourself, fragments attention and leaves you permanently on the back foot, time-poor and risk-averse. And a person on the back foot reaches for certainty. The preference for answers over better questions is no character flaw. We all do it when we’re squeezed and under pressure. Which is one more reason this aspect sits in Readiness beside Being Resourced: an under-resourced manager will reach for certainty.

In Part 2, I want to trace where these two main ideas came from, taking them in turn. Lifelong Learning began as one of the most generous ideas the twentieth century had about education, before being narrowed, decade by decade, into an instrument of employability, and that story runs alongside the rise of progressive education and its stifling under standardisation and testing. Creativity’s history as a subject of serious study is shorter and stranger, and I will follow only the thread that leads to the definition this Framework uses.

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Unpacking this reasoning, you get to something a bit like this: “leaders succeed because they possess the quality of succeeding”.

This resembles a famous scene in Molière’s 1673 comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, where, during a mock examination for a medical student, the examiners ask the candidate to explain why opium induces sleep. He confidently replies that it possesses “a dormitive principle”, offering a perfect circular argument that explains nothing. The doctors applaud. The scientist Gregory Bateson liked this example, and used it to mark the difference between naming something and accounting for it.

We are obsessed, in our pursuit of marketable leadership skills, with versions of the dormitive principle that is “leadership” invoked in order to explain success.

Look at how the current market writes about it. In 2026, for example, successful leadership is being defined by adaptability, agility and human connection. It is a prediction in the future tense, followed by a list of abstract nouns, with no statement of what success would consist of, for whom, or over what time period for assessment. The nouns are replaced every year or two, but the underlying structure remains (old wine in new bottles?). Nobody appears to see the annual, pendular renaming of “what leadership is” as evidence of an error in thinking.

This tells us something about our determination to fix the cause of success in one place. First, an outcome is observed and judged desirable. Next, the person standing nearest it, perhaps already carrying the designation of “leader”, is named as its source. Finally, we arrive at a quality called “leadership” lodged inside that person. This is cultural rather than logical, and so familiar that it passes without examination. It then breeds a whole set of further nouns, such as charisma, resilience, executive presence, foresight, strategic vision, and so on, that become the components of successful leadership.

The self-help shelf runs almost entirely on this fuel, as does, less forgivably, a good deal of popular leadership literature. A researcher inductively studies a set of admired executives, abstracts what they have in common, names it, often as a formula, and the name becomes something others can be assessed against, trained in, and hired for. What began as a rich description of people in circumstances ends as an extruded, inner substance, portable across any context, which some individuals are held to possess in greater concentrations than others.

The (usually commercialised) means of measuring the substance follows shortly afterwards, along with the ranking of individuals by how much of it they are held to contain.

That final hardening, from abstraction to thing, is called reification. We move from data, which is what we see in the world, to an inductive hypothesis about a category we call leadership, which we then reify in the individual. We return to the world with that category serving as both the explanation of success and the prediction of it. A lifetime of study can be devoted to this formulation of leadership and success without anything further being learned about either (I hope my colleagues won’t kill me for saying this!).

The whole question should be a more open enquiry. What must the social world be like such that successful leadership is possible at all? What would have to exist, and to be operating, for our observations to come out as they do?

Any serious answer will involve a relational view of the world, and a radical overhaul of the idea that leadership is a bunch of properties of a person. It must resist turning a description of a pattern between people, which is a matter of verbs, into objects that individuals can have more or less of.

This is also a problem of punctuation. Bateson’s word for it, borrowed from grammar, describes the choice of where to cut a circular sequence and call one point its beginning. Punctuating the relational circuit at the individual generates specific apparatuses: selection processes, remuneration committees, succession plans, and the ritual dismissal of a chief executive as a way of restoring the causal story when outcomes deteriorate.

Distributing leadership, and making everyone “a leader”, does not remove the flaw. It propagates it. The predicate is spread across the whole organisation while its grammar is left intact, and everyone becomes answerable to the same undefined criterion, including people who were previously outside its reach.

We should, as organisations, educators, and individual actors, learn what conditions make collective sense-making possible. The individual will always survive as the unit of experience, of moral standing, and of accountability, and much of the effort to dissolve that has ended badly. None of it requires the individual to be the unit of explanation, however. Experience and explanation have been run together for so long that separating them sounds like an attack on the person, which it is not. Declining to treat one person as the cause of a collective outcome takes nothing away from them. What I am arguing for is closer attention to the conditions under which organisations manage to do the things we afterwards call successful, together with a working relationship between a person and an organisational role in which they know that their self-esteem and their working identity are not the same thing.

I had a glimpse of this in the World Cup Final, where the differences between the Spanish approach to team, coaching, performance and so on were all about the conditions, while the crumbling of the Argentinian model, built around one individual, was a bit pitiful to watch.

The same problem, closer to home

Personal Development, as I like to define it, is the removal of restraints to the likelihood of sustainable health and well-being. It is not an objective end-state. The category of ‘the personally developed’ is one of those things it is only possible to see with peripheral vision, and looking at it directly is the surest way to lose sight of it. So I have to be careful not to treat self-awareness, reflective capability and systemic judgment as a new set of dormitive principles, which is exactly what they become the moment they appear on a competency framework.

The obvious retort is that I teach these things for a living, so what am I doing in the room? Arranging conditions, mostly, which is a different activity from drilling a capacity or training a skill. Restraints can be identified and sometimes removed. What happens after that is not delivered by me and cannot be timetabled.

I should be honest that this is a limitation rather than a technique, and that it is only partly avoidable. I work inside an institution that awards degrees, and awards require criteria, and criteria are nouns. I cannot conduct the work without language, and language reifies by default; the moment I name a pattern in the room, it starts to harden into a thing that someone can be assessed on, including by themselves. Participants arrive wanting to be told what to acquire, and disappointing that expectation is not always the developmental act it might sound like. What I can do is notice the pull, keep saying out loud what the framework is and is not, and treat the temptation to convert every observation into an attribute as a permanent feature of the work rather than an error to be eliminated from it.

For management education, and for me in the role of management educator, the implication is awkward. It is far easier to teach nouns than patterns of relationship. A noun can be modelled, listed, fixed, and examined. A relation has to be noticed, and noticing takes time, attention, and a tolerance for answers that cannot be easily generalised.

If, however, personal development means anything, it means helping people see the patterns they are part of, as they are, rather than issuing them with a vocabulary for qualities nobody has ever located.

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Special days on our vacations were the ones when we were taken to Clacton pier, which - at that point - had a 100-year history as an entertainment and holiday destination for day trippers and locals. By the 1970s, it had been set up as a fun fair and amusement park, with (as I recall) all the noises, smells, sensations, and terrible fashions of the era.

What I understood about many things at the fair, even then, was that it was rigged, and that this was somehow part of the deal. The two-penny falls machine was built so that the shelf of coins never quite tipped. The grabber crane held its prize with a tenderness that, on inspection, turned out to be a calibrated weakness in grip. The coconuts, legend insisted, were glued. We half-knew all of this, and we queued anyway, because the half-knowing was included in the price of the ticket. The fair was honest about its dishonesty. Nobody on Clacton Pier ever mistook the hook-a-duck for a referendum.

I have been thinking about those summers this week, because the pier’s constituency is in the news.

On Tuesday, Nigel Farage took the unusual step of resigning as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton, precisely to stand in the by-election that his own resignation would trigger.

What is going on?

Since May this year, the UK Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards has been investigating whether Farage should have registered a £5 million gift he received from Christopher Harborne, a cryptocurrency billionaire and Reform UK’s largest donor, in the weeks before he was elected in July 2024. The narrative for the money has not stood still. It began as funding for his personal security. Harborne later told the Daily Telegraph he had given it out of admiration for Farage’s decades of work on Brexit. Farage himself has described it as a reward, a sort of lottery win, telling LBC’s Nick Ferrari that he could spend it on Ferraris if he wished. Sky News reported that he completed the cash purchase of a £1.4 million house shortly after the money arrived. Strike one.

Then, last weekend, the Sunday Times alleged that George Cottrell, a long-standing Farage associate who pleaded guilty to wire fraud in the United States in 2017, had paid for Farage’s security and social media staff in the period before he entered Parliament. Strike two.

Farage denies any wrongdoing and insists not only that there is nothing to see here, but that he has followed the rules throughout.

The inquiry exists to find out.

Except that the inquiry has now been interrupted by this latest announcement, which was rather the idea. A finding against him could have meant suspension from the Commons, a recall petition, and a by-election on terms he did not choose. Resigning first gives him a by-election on terms he did choose, in a seat he won with 46 per cent of the vote. The investigation is paused for the campaign and resumes if he wins, but a newly re-elected MP begins a fresh window of declarations, so the contest is also, conveniently, a laundering of the register. He has called it a people-versus-establishment by-election and declared that the voters of Clacton should be the judges of his actions. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens have all declined to stand in the election on the shared principle that the contest is a stunt, which leaves him campaigning against, among others, the rising star of British politics that is Count Binface (and probably an assortment of fringe party candidates, and parties with candidates dressed in fringes). Reform has offered to pay the estimated £200,000 cost of the poll, which is an interesting admission, and an extravagant price for a very odd form of entertainment.

If the people of Clacton can be bothered to come out and vote in August, they will very likely oblige him. They are being asked, though, to judge a question nobody asked. That Clacton (and hinterland) likes Nigel Farage was settled in 2024 and is not in dispute. Whether he complied with the disclosure rules that bind every member of the House is a different question, and it cannot be answered by constituent acclamation. A crowd can affirm that populism is popular. That’s not quite the same as auditing standards in public life.

The case for the defence, meanwhile, has been sent out on the morning rounds, and it repays close listening. Laila Cunningham, Reform’s candidate for the London mayoralty, explained on LBC that Farage had no need to declare anything because he was “not politically active” when the money arrived in 2024. Being chairman of a political party was, she said, an honorary role; he was a social media influencer and a GB News presenter at the time. Pressed on the point that he was still in charge of the party, she compared him to Reform’s back-office staff, and then conceded that she did not know the exact meaning of politically active, which seemed to her quite subjective. The manoeuvre is an old one. Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” was a denial built to be true under a private definition and false under the ordinary one, and “he was not politically active” belongs to the same family of weasel words.

In Parliament, the relevant rule asks new MPs to register benefits received in the year before their election if the money could reasonably be seen as connected to political activity. During that year, Farage was chairman of a party constituted as a company, in which he held the controlling shareholding, and he was campaigning on national television most evenings. If that is a private citizen, then I have a glued-down coconut to sell you, and I can promise it will still be there tomorrow.

He has form, which is why the indignation rings so oddly. In 2009, Farage was recorded as estimating his non-salary expenses and allowances from the European Parliament at around £2 million. In 2014, he was fined £200 for failing to report the free use of office premises supplied by a donor. The European Parliament later docked some £35,500 of his salary in a dispute over the use of his allowances, and in January of this year, the standards commissioner found he had registered roughly £400,000 of interests late, a breach recorded as inadvertent and left unpunished. These don’t add up to a courtroom, open-and-shut case of corruption, so that is not the claim. I think it does amount to a pattern, though. A quarter of a century of opacity, technical non-disclosure, indignant denial, and invective. It’s a sordid pattern that belongs to the one man in British politics who built an entire career on the accusation that the political class had its snout in the trough. If that feels reminiscent of a political playbook from another country, hold that thought. Farage stood outside the coconut shy for twenty years shouting that the game was rigged, and it turns out there was glue in his coat pocket all along.

The playbook

Delegitimise the referee so that an independent standards commissioner becomes “the establishment,” fighting by foul means, victimising an otherwise honest bloke. Rename investigation as persecution and convert the rhetoric into a loyalty test for the party. Name and shame the media until the term mainstream is seen as a slur. Freeze out individual journalists to control the rest; Reform has simply stopped speaking to LBC’s Nick Ferrari since he asked what the £5 million bought. Treat questions as impertinence, or as “frankly, it’s none of your business”, in his exact phrase. Farage walked into the Heathrow cameras this week on his way home from Independence Day celebrations in Washington, and the timing was almost too neat: the end-of-the-pier act had been studying the Great American State Fair, and its sideshows.

The thing I keep returning to is the one closest to my own work. Not the playbook. It is what happened to Farage when the questions started to fly in. The press conference at which he announced his resignation was, according to him, the angriest moment of his life. He has stopped interviews, or even taking questions and sends surrogates instead, who have floundered under the studio lights.

Self-awareness and self-accountability are two of the most sought-after qualities in leadership, and this past week should serve as a case study in what it looks like when they are absent. We all should be able to be examined without disintegrating if we have been honest with ourselves. If we have not, then a performance will crack under the scrutiny. An identity that can only take sniping shots, that exists only in negation, and that retreats to counterattack (or leaves the stage in a huff) is not robust, and - in my view - is not fit to represent the duty and responsibility of government. In all this, Farage desperately wants us all to keep focusing on him. This should really be the red flag.

The real lesson

The real questions here are not really about Farage, or who will win his silly by-election and return to the dodgems. The real question is for you, and for me, and how carefully I think about all this.

My mother is buried in the churchyard at Kirby-le-Soken, a few yards from her sister, and five miles or so from the Clacton pier. It’s a beautiful, peaceful spot. I am not religious, nor am I morbidly sentimental, so this place is a present-tense meditative spot I visit each September. It’s where I can revisit what made her such a good person and properly examine whether I am even close to that myself. I find my instincts. I reset my compass.

Would she think I'd been fair?

A few miles further along the coast, the sand cliffs at Walton-on-the-Naze are falling into the sea, several metres a decade, and no doubt some of the coast I played on as a boy is now underwater. From the end of the pier, the coast looks permanent. The coast knows otherwise.

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At first, they are good to their users. Then they squeeze the users to please their business customers. Then they squeeze everybody to please the shareholders. Then, in Doctorow’s cheerful telling, they die. The word won awards in 2024, which tells you something about how many people felt seen by it.

Judging by my experience with LinkedIn over the last 6-12 months, I’d say the platform is somewhere in the middle. Just open the feed. We’ve gone beyond the much ridiculed and parodied “I’m humbled to announce something”. We’re now leaving the outer limits of “My toddler has taught me a surprising lesson about B2B sales, or leadership, or accountancy”, and are now in the realm of “a man you have never met, wearing a headset for no discernible reason, wants you to know what Navy SEALs can teach us about feedback”.

I can only speculate, but much of it has the cadence of being written with AI, perhaps only by AI, now also with an illustration rendered by AI, and liked, shared, and commented on by (at best) humans using their AI.

A vivarium of synthetic enthusiasm with actual humans reduced to spectators of their own network. This has not yet fully taken over the LinkedIn feed on my browser, though it takes constant monitoring and adjustment to filter out the most egregious slop. On the apps (tablet or smartphone), it’s much worse. They have rearranged the viewing options to add a “video” tab that is no different from Instagram's (and probably others’), with short-form content heavily weighted toward advertising, tired business memes, and clickbait.

To its credit (slightly), LinkedIn has noticed. In May this year, it announced it would suppress AI slop, engagement bait and recycled thought leadership, including posts with telltale machine phrasing. At the same time, it made this announcement while keeping the “rewrite with AI” button in its own post composer. This is a pub declaring war on drunkenness while extending happy hour.

LinkedIn’s mission was originally a good one: connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. It instantly replaced a number of other “let’s connect” websites that had briefly bloomed in the desert. They also kept many of the benefits and access free to use (in return, obviously, for your data!), and their Premium levels were, and are, pretty worthless in what they deliver to the average user. But this probably protected them from disruptors, as LI had a monopoly on “where can we find each other?” in business. In the beginning, the platform promoted that connectivity, and through its groups, articles, and the first version of the feed, it really worked for that. Over time, they started nibbling away at what most users liked about that. The prominence of articles and posts were reduced, and features such as groups were shunted off into the sidings.

The game-changer was in March 2026, when LinkedIn announced a two-stage systematic change to its feed algorithm. First, an LLM-powered retrieval process that narrows millions of posts to about 2,000 candidates (for you to see), then a Generative Recommender that ranks them (for you) based on content interest, not 1st level connection.

We now have a feed that is largely machine-written (or enhanced), machine-illustrated, machine-promoted, and then a machine intelligence decides, with no sense of irony, what the human at the end of the line actually reads.

Even if LinkedIn’s founding mission hasn’t been abandoned, it is perhaps being swept away in the tsunami of attention-deficit scrolling and the economic model that funds it. But before I get too comfortable blaming them, I must acknowledge that I am part of the ecology which is “the feed”. We all are. Every reflex ‘like’, every “Great insight!” comment, and every repost is a vote for more of the same.

What to do?

So, five suggestions, offered to myself as much as anyone:

1. Apply the “anyone else” test. If anyone else could have written my draft post, I won’t publish it. That’s a huge chunk of writing saved!

2. Comment like a colleague, not a sycophant. Add something. One genuine disagreement is worth fifty compliments. We all have itchy trigger keyboard fingers, so this one takes a bit of self-discipline.

3. Starve the clickbait. The algorithm cannot distinguish between contempt and interest. Commenting to object is still engagement.

4. Unfollow like I mean it. Nobody is notified, no feelings are hurt, and my feed might slowly return to being a room I would choose to be in.

5. Use AI as a junior researcher or critic, not an author. Helping to tighten a sentence is one thing. But there’s really no substitute for being the originator of the work I author. This is what being an authority means. I use Gen AI to research some things, but it’s most useful for dissecting a thought that I’ve already been playing around with.

There are grey areas in all of this. They’re not all easy to avoid. For example, even if I think I’m saying something deep and profound, if it’s a thought-piece, it may be abstract. If it’s abstract, it may need to look more general. Also, I sometimes (ok, often) find it difficult to resist commenting on something inane on LinkedIn, and while this is a useful “warm-up” exercise for a longer period of writing or ideation of my own, it’s a self-violation of #3. Another take-down of a shoddy PD concept only boosts that post’s reach, regardless of the brilliance of my sabre wit. Rock, meet hard place.

Will any of this reverse enshittification? No. For the moment, that’s why I’ve retreated here to Substack.

Doctorow says that the cure is competition, regulation, the right to leave and take your network with you. User feedback won’t fix a business model, but that was never really the point. I don’t know whether anything will save LinkedIn, so we may need to redefine the terms of our professional selves to swerve around it. The only conundrum is, should I share this article on LinkedIn?

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Being Resourced would deserve a place in a Development Framework in any era. This era, though, has all the hallmarks of comparatively high volatility and uncertainty (a sort of societal El Niño), so we should take it seriously.

The widespread stockpiling view of resources, the one I traced through the firm and the self in Parts 1 and 2, only really works when you can see where you are going, the way you might provision a ship for a voyage with a known destination. This is, or has been, the career metaphor from the 1960s. Until now.

Are we going to keep that, or will we be surprised by what is coming? Across most of what now shapes a working life, there is a sense that the concrete destination has quietly dissolved. Working practice has loosened its shape, and the ladders and long tenures that once let people accumulate towards a foreseeable end have given way to something far less well mapped.

Is it possible that more and more of what we used to spend years building up as Being Resourced is of less and less value? When we’re talking about the resource-based view of human success as a metaphor borrowed from economics and strategy, I think this is valid.

Take Generative AI. Models are now used to help train the models that follow them. Anthropic's Constitutional AI, as set out in Bai and colleagues' 2022 paper, began to replace much of the human judgment in training with model-generated feedback against a set of written principles (Bai et al., 2022). The practice has since advanced. Google DeepMind's AlphaEvolve, published in 2025, uses one model to improve the algorithms that train the next, including parts of its own training pipeline, so a system now helps to shape its successor (Novikov et al., 2025). We can also see a little of what these models contain. Anthropic's 2025 interpretability work found that when one of its models was instructed to write a rhyming couplet it settled on the word that will end the next line before it wrote the line, that it reasoned in identifiable internal steps, and that it represented some concepts in a form that holds steady across different languages (Lindsey et al., 2025). None of this means the machines think. What it means is arguably more unsettling: iterations of large language models that have successfully accumulated our accumulated systems of language abstractions. This is accerlated in an Arms Race between nations and tech companies to develop and release AI models first. We must expect further levels of unexpected abstraction simulating, not mimicing, how we are linguistic apes.

As it accelerates, the assumption underneath our stockpiling of life’s resources starts to give way. On the other hand, when we’re talking about human judgment, critical thinking, self-awareness, and any capacity that encourages learning and interaction, I see Being Resourced as the most important tool to develop. The largest problems in front of us, the genuinely wicked ones, with the climate emergency and ecological degradation at their head, have no solved state to provision against, no final list of measures that settles them, only a long adaptation whose demands keep changing as we meet them. I am being careful here not to call on too many contemporary examples, which will become outdated too quickly. I’m suggesting that all this matters for the underlying principles of resourcefulness as an orientation, and an open-ended, open-minded one at that.

“No one could have predicted…”

This is the sentence reached for in hindsight, usually by those with the most incentive to predict (the planner, the expert, the leader with the clear vision, the person being held accountable, and so on). It is rarely the unprepared who use it.

It speaks to a version of readiness that has failed. The appeal also highlights something very useful - the inevitable gap between our conditioned assessment of reality and… reality. So, part of what “no one could have predicted” is of our own making. The tighter we commit everything to a single, specific outcome, the more we tend to strip out the slack that might have absorbed unintended consequences. Our attachment to resourcing only the plan manufactures the fragility we then blame on the world.

In late January 2025, DeepSeek, a relatively small Chinese company, released a new AI model said to have been built at a fraction of the cost expected elsewhere. In one day, the market value of Nvidia, the firm whose chips the prevailing vision had made indispensable, fell by around $589 billion, the largest single-day loss in the history of the US stock market (Bloomberg, 2025). The people best placed to see it coming did not.

And…

Six months earlier, in July 2024, a single faulty software update from the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed millions of Windows computers worldwide in an afternoon, grounding flights and disrupting hospitals, because the systems it touched were run so lean that nothing was left to absorb the shock..

In each case, the destination everyone had provisioned the boat for dissolved while they were still sailing towards it. There are, of course, human versions of this. One, below, remains perhaps the darkest story in modern sailing, the other is more personal to me and illustrates Being Resourceful on another part of the ocean, with a completely different result.

In 1968 Donald Crowhurst, a weekend sailor with a failing marine-electronics business, entered the Sunday Times Golden Globe, the first solo non-stop race around the world. To fund it he mortgaged his business and his home to his sponsor on terms that left him no way out, since to withdraw was to be ruined. His trimaran was an unproven design, finished in such a rush to make the start that its safety systems were never connected, and once at sea it was soon clear it could not survive the Southern Ocean. With a plan that held no slack and no exit, he began to fake his position, broadcasting a fictional circumnavigation while he drifted in the Atlantic. As the other competitors fell away in the positions and he found himself, impossibly, set to win and - therefore - to have his logs examined, the gap between the voyage he was reporting and the one he was actually making widened past anything he could hold. In July 1969 he went overboard. His boat was found drifting and empty, the logbooks full of the unravelling. What failed Crowhurst in the end was not his boat or its contents. It was that he had left himself no way to re-source, and nowhere to stand when the plan and the world came apart.

Then there is the story of the Ituna, a 36-foot, Morecombe Bay built in 1912 and refitted in 1949 by four young Irish architecture students with no other means to get to the United States for a scholarship under Frank Lloyd Wright. One of the crew was my father, Des Dalton, and he go to experience a shared resourcdefulness first hand.

In May 1950, the Ituna sailed from Roslare towards New York. The crew had almost nothing. The boat had cost a £150, basic rigging, one radio and a set of charts. They sold its failing engine on the black market in Vigo to raise funds, their stock of sails was thin, and their navigation was largely learned on the way, and their radio failed (they could receive, but not transmit).

What they had instead was resourcefulness and, as if you believe in these things, the luck of the Irish. They took tows from trawlers, lived on the goodwill of strangers and yacht clubs in every port, recovered a sail lost overboard in a storm, hauled a crewman back from the sea after the boom swept him off, and slipped between two hurricanes by being, for once, becalmed at the right moment. None of it was the plan. All of it was finding the next source when the last one had failed, and after a summer of it they sailed past the Statue of Liberty in late September. They reached the far shore not because they had worked out what was ‘enough’, but because they could keep replenishing their ingenuity when they did not.

With the larger social and environmental problems, “no one could have predicted” is not an alibi, because these issues have no destination, no teleology, to begin with. Any genuinely wicked problem, the climate emergency above all, has no solved state to provision against and no final list of measures that settles them. Every move we make feeds a recursive loop that shifts the ground we are moving across. Surprise is built in. That “no one could have predicted” is actually an invitation to stop trying to predict.

A quick recap

Being Resourced does have one aspect where it equates to the question, “Do I have enough of this?” When things are steady and fairly predictable, which is much of the middle part of your working life, you are likely to need to have a healthy stockpile of well-known or well-defined resources just to keep getting the job done, and perhaps opening the next door. This is the mainstream view of Being Resourced, and it translates well enough into career coaching, management development and training, and performance reviews. For self-improvement, career advancement, or even social change, this will have its limits. It comes up short when you give yourself no slack, as when an organisation confuses efficiency with survival. At a personal level, you know what this feels like: the chronic sense of being under-prepared or overwhelmed, the short-term remedy of doing more with less, and the burnout or low self-esteem.

When the world pivots and reality bites, those symptoms are a sign that you need to expand what readiness looks like. You need a different resource question: “Can I replenish what I need when the situation calls for it?”

Readiness

In Part 1, I set Being Resourced beside its nearest Foundations neighbour, Sustainable Health and Well-being, as the difference between the condition of the well and whether you can reach it. That is still the case where you need grounding in your relationship with self. Now, “Being Resourced” also lines up alongside "Emotional Resilience” as expressions of a state of systemic readiness.

Priming is about your relationship with a future you cannot see, and whether you are tuned to respond when it arrives in a shape you did not predict. That is the capacity to find a new source when an old one runs dry, to re-source yourself. Being Resourced extends to the next adjacent aspect in the group, Lifelong Learning and Creativity. Being open and ready in your learning makes resourcefulness a fresh option when tried-and-trusted old ones may have run out.

Learning to be resourceful

In Part 2, I said that a living system keeps its shape not by hoarding but through exchange with everything around it. You are that sort of system. Your energy, attention, and steadiness are states in relation to your world, and they are restored from there. Resourcefulness, read this way, is a measure of the health of that exchange.

I left my personal story in Part 1 half-told. I had stepped off the established path at seventeen and spent my twenties, followed (in my mind) by the shadow of the absence of what that would have handed me. I discounted my creativity and resilience to the point where I did not see them as resources. What changed in my thirties and forties?

I did not skip the conventional view. I worked hard to prove my worth and ambition to the world. Early on, I took every course offered, accumulating certificates, resume lines, and lower rungs on the job titles ladder. The MBA was the first encounter with something that had the potential to be more than the letters. I was 36 when I graduated in the marquee at Greenlands, and 42 when I was hired by the College (as it then was). I had one foot still in the stockpiling phase, and now one foot in the watermill version of seeing myself in the flow. Early steps at Henley were in programme management and the MBA directorship - my proudest career achievement to that point - and then that appointment period ended. It threw me, in the middle of the merging period with the University of Reading, and there it was - the big question of “Who am I?”

I did my PhD as a part-time student between 2008 and 2013, and it revealed much of the vulnerability I was still carrying. “Am I good enough?” In 2010, I was offered the convenor role for the Personal Development module. In the midst of all that, I slowly realised that I was, in the end, the only person who could answer that (trust me, this was the turning point). In the last 5 years, I have felt happy with my work at a level independent of what colleagues make of it, or whether the university rewards for it. I am being resourced by the whole challenge, by the whole system, principally by the interaction with the students and alumni. I trust whatever is the thing beneath the conveyor belt of the qualification. I find I am in my element.

All this sits at the centre of how I read this PD aspect. I think I had needed to go through the experiencing being resourced as a series of objects, but with one or two exceptions, none of the courses I have done, or the trainings I’ve attended, or the professional bodies I have sought validation from have remained active ingredients. Their value to me now is from the critical reflection of their working assumptions.

Being resourced is a perspective and an activity, a continuous tuning and re-tuning, and a steady run of small corrections. I am never finished being resourced; there is no pressure to reach “enough” because I had it all along. Students are what make a university, and a university should enable self-emancipation.

I have no idea what is going to happen next, and it’s fantastic. That is what I think Being Resourced is for.

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References

Bai, Y. et al. (2022) ‘Constitutional AI: harmlessness from AI feedback’, arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08073. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073 (Accessed: 27 June 2026).

Bloomberg (2025) ‘Nvidia’s $589 billion DeepSeek plunge is largest in market history’, Bloomberg, 27 January.

Lindsey, J. et al. (2025) ‘On the biology of a large language model’, Transformer Circuits Thread. Available at: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html (Accessed: 27 June 2026).

Novikov, A. et al. (2025) ‘AlphaEvolve: a coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery’, arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.13131. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131 (Accessed: 27 June 2026).

In Part 1, I argued that the meaning we now treat as obvious, a resource as a quantity you hold in store, is recent, and that an older meaning, a resource as a spring that refills when it is drawn from, is the one that matters for sustainable development. Going back to the source, from the Old French verb ressourdre (to rise again), resource originally carried the sense of a spring that replenishes itself when it is drawn from. Somewhere on the journey into management English, we kept the noun and lost the verb hiding inside it, and with the verb went the whole idea of renewal.

In this part, I want to explore all his. Most of what I cover is relatively recent, the last fifty years or so, and falls into two halves: (1) how the resource-as-stock took over the way organisations think, and (2) how it then turned inward and took over the way we think about ourselves. What follows is a quick sketch rather than a full history, but it covers the parts that shape how managers and students are taught to think.

The resource enclosed in the firm

When the economist Edith Penrose set out to explain how firms grow, she described the firm as a bundle of resources whose value lay in the managerial work of putting them to use, a process she treated as continuous, uneven, and never finished (Penrose, 1959). Her interest was in what a firm might become by drawing on and recombining its existing resources, and this was the first appearance of what is now known as the resource-based view of the firm. Over the following decades, this idea became a dominant strand of strategic theory, and one that removed much of her original sense of fluidity. By the time the resource-based view had acquired its name (Wernerfelt, 1984) and its canonical statement (Barney, 1991), a resource had reified into properties you could list and protect to secure competitive advantage: valuable, rare, hard to imitate, hard to substitute. Those feel more like assets in a vault rather than a source of invention in a field. The governing question had shifted from what a firm could renew to what a firm could hold that its competitors could not obtain.

With the shift to a knowledge economy in developed economies, the same re-coding occurred among people. For most of the twentieth century, the function that dealt with employees was called personnel, a word that at least named them as persons to be administered. From the early 1980s, it became, across most of the English-speaking corporate world, human resources. This change was not merely cosmetic. It placed people in the same category as plant, capital, and raw materials, things an organisation acquires, deploys, and accounts for, and it drew intellectual support from the older economics of human capital (Becker, 1964), in which the knowledge and skill a person carries is an investment yielding a measurable return. There is some pragmatic truth in the idea, which is part of why it spread so completely.

Its effect on the managerial imagination, though, was (albeit briefly) to make a human being legible as a stock of value held on the organisation’s books, and a stock is something you are then under pressure to utilise. From 1967, a movement called Human Resource Accounting, developed at the University of Michigan and trialled at the R.G. Barry Corporation, set out to record the cost of recruiting and training staff as an asset on the balance sheet and to amortise it over an employee's working life, exactly as a firm depreciates a machine (Flamholtz, 1974). It did not last, and the reason it did not last is relevant here. Accounting standards refused, and still refuse, to recognise an internally generated workforce as an asset, on the grounds that a firm cannot control people the way it controls property, since they can leave. So a person remains a cost expensed as it is incurred, even as the popular language of human resources still says they are an asset to be invested in. They are the one resource the firm is told to treasure and forbidden to capitalise.

The argument that a company exists above all to maximise returns to its shareholders, stated bluntly by Friedman (1970) and given its technical machinery by Jensen and Meckling (1976) in what became the most cited paper in the business literature, reframed the manager as an agent, which was itself a cost to be monitored and reduced. Once a firm is understood as a device for converting resources into shareholder value, any resource not currently producing that value reads as a problem or waste. The drive towards full utilisation, the steady squeezing of reserves, the institutional suspicion of anything held back and not yet earning, all of it follows from treating the resource as stock and the stock as something that ought to be working at all times.

Waste, or room for response

It would be too tidy to say that management science simply forgot the idea of resource as a fresh-water spring. I am suggesting in these three articles that a person’s uncommitted capacity is not waste but room for response, and this turns out to be a live argument within the literature itself: organisational slack (an economic theory that measures whether a firm is employing more resources than required to meet its target output). Cyert and March (1963) observed that organisations almost never operate at the maximum efficiency assumed by models, and that the gap between what they have and what they strictly need is not simply fat waiting to be trimmed. Bourgeois (1981) made the case directly, showing that slack is the cushion which lets a firm experiment, absorb a shock, and adapt when its environment shifts, so that the leanest firm is frequently also the most brittle. Agency theory, after Jensen, reads this capacity as managerial self-indulgence, while other theorists read it as the precondition of survival under conditions no one planned for. When a company such as 3M deliberately protects a share of its people’s time for work with no defined return, it is choosing to protect the spring over maximising the warehouse, wagering that the value of unallocated capacity lies precisely in its not having been allocated in advance.

There is an irony buried in even this more sympathetic literature because it returns us to where Part 1 ended. The research on protecting slack in resources tends to assume that managers can see it, that uncommitted resources are visible and can be redeployed when the need arises. That assumption can take the form of an inventory point of view, wearing different clothes. It works only in a world stable enough to be predicted in advance. If (when!) the world surprises us, what matters is the (spare) capacity (of people, for example) to access, renew, or generate.

The resource enclosed in the self

Returning to the recent history of being resourced, any organisational theorist who cared about personal development was the turning of this whole apparatus inward. If a firm is a bundle of resources, and a person is a resource the firm holds, then it is a short step to treating the person as, in themselves, a bundle of resources to be audited, developed, and optimised. The competence movement took that step. McClelland (1973), arguing that intelligence tests predicted remarkably little about who would actually perform well in a role, proposed that we identify instead the specific competencies that distinguish strong performers, which he was content to define as characteristics that add economic value to a person’s work. Richard Boyatzis (1982) gave the idea its managerial form in a model of the competent manager assembled from a profile of nineteen generic competencies (something I saw firsthand in the 1990s when my Business School in Budapest entered into a close partnership with Case Western’s MBA program, designed around Boyatzis’s approach). With that, the person had become an inventory for employability. It is telling that McClelland went on to found a consultancy to sell the profiling, and the instruments that now structure a working life, the competency framework, the appraisal scored against defined behaviours, the development plan that locates your gaps and sets out to close them, are all descendants of that. Each of them poses the inventory question. Each invites you to regard yourself as a store of assets that is either sufficient or deficient, and to treat deficiency as a prompt to acquire more.

An entire industry now lives in the space that logic opened, and I dare say there isn’t a UK university that doesn’t promote something similar to achieve an employability mission. The market in self-development, coaching, and the gentler reaches of therapeutic self-improvement largely accepts the premise that you are a portfolio of resources, some of them running low, and offers to help you top them up: more confidence, more focus, more resilience, more emotional intelligence, each available as a module.

I am not dismissing this. Some of it is well-researched and sincerely presented (included by colleagues I trust and admire), and I have seen how it has genuinely been useful to people I know. I am exploring what is taken for granted in its assumptions and testing that against my definition of Personal Development as sustainable Health and Well-being (see Part 3). By addressing being resource as a personal inventory problem, the self-development marketplace inherits the warehouse wholesale, and it tends to leave unexamined the question Part 1 ended on, whether the empty store is yours to refill at all or whether it was depleted by a context you do not control or design.

Psychology took the same idea and applied it to the inside of a person. In 1998, the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues published a paper whose title asked whether the active self is a limited resource. Their answer was yes. They argued that willpower works much like fuel: you have a fixed amount of it, and every act of self-control lowers the level. On this account, resisting a temptation, making a hard decision, and pushing through an effort you would rather avoid all spend from the same single reserve, which is then refilled by rest and, in the version of the popular books most enjoyed, by a dose of glucose. The idea was easy to grasp and felt true to experience, and it spread well beyond the journals, into airport paperbacks about decision fatigue and the daily ration of good choices a person supposedly has before the tank runs dry. It was the warehouse installed inside the person, fuel gauge and all.

The spring reasserts itself

The fuel-tank model ran into trouble, and from inside psychology rather than from its critics. Carter and colleagues (2015) revisited the studies and found that once unpublished and null results were included, the effect more or less disappeared, which is what you would expect if the published record had been skewed towards positive findings. A larger test followed: twenty-three laboratories agreed in advance on a single procedure and registered their predictions, so that no one could adjust the interpretation afterwards, and between them they found no depletion effect at all, even though almost all of them had expected to confirm it (Hagger et al., 2016). Baumeister has argued that the replication used a task unlike his own, and this means the debate is still open. Even so, the weight of evidence has moved, and the account of our inner life that most resembles a warehouse approach is the one that has been hardest to reproduce.

I find all this is a good prompt for critical thinking. The question becomes what kind of thing the self is if it is not a finite store of “stuff”. This is where I start to look elsewhere, towards the traditions that treat a person as a living system, something that keeps itself going through a constant exchange with everything around it. Seen that way, energy, attention, and self-control are descriptions of states of a system in relation to its world. Where the poet Alexander Pope spoke of hope, I would say instead that “life springs eternal” because it takes us back to part 1’s question of balance as something continuously made and remade rather than a level to be topped up.

I do not want to claim too much from this, because I have never argued that the stock view is simply wrong. Counting what you have is the right approach when the norms in your world are steady enough to be counted, when the corporate and social ground holds reasonably still. The pattern I am pointing to sits underneath that. We default to the language of stock, first for the firm and then for ourselves, and yet the lived evidence (everyone’s struggle to keep up) keeps pulling the other way. What carries a system through something it did not see coming is less the size of its store than the health of its ability to renew and redeploy what it has. The firm that survives a shock is often - in part, at least - the one carrying slack it did not strictly need. The person who successfully meets a challenge they could not have prepared for usually does so out of a resourcefulness that no competency audit would ever have recorded. Availability, not abundance.

This is why the etymology in Part 1 was more than idle curiosity. The story here is not one of an old meaning being put right by a better one. It is the story of a useful original idea, the resource you can count on and maintain, spreading so far through the institutions that shape how we think, until it has almost hidden from view an older meaning. Under some conditions, the other view (the resource that rises again) is correct.

In Part 3, I want to come back to the Framework itself and what I think Being Resourced is for. It will also be the point where Being Resourced hands over to its neighbour in the Readiness group, Lifelong Learning and Creativity.

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References

Barney, J.B. (1991) ‘Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage’, Journal of Management, 17(1), pp. 99–120.

Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M. and Tice, D.M. (1998) ‘Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource?’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), pp. 1252–1265.

Becker, G.S. (1964) Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bourgeois, L.J. (1981) ‘On the measurement of organizational slack’, Academy of Management Review, 6(1), pp. 29–39.

Boyatzis, R.E. (1982) The Competent Manager: A Model for Effective Performance. New York: Wiley.

Carter, E.C., Kofler, L.M., Forster, D.E. and McCullough, M.E. (2015) ‘A series of meta-analytic tests of the depletion effect: self-control does not seem to rely on a limited resource’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(4), pp. 796–815.

Cyert, R.M. and March, J.G. (1963) A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Flamholtz, E.G. (1974) Human Resource Accounting. Encino, CA: Dickenson Publishing Company.

Friedman, M. (1970) ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits’, The New York Times Magazine, 13 September.

Hagger, M.S., Chatzisarantis, N.L.D., Alberts, H. et al. (2016) ‘A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), pp. 546–573.

Jensen, M.C. and Meckling, W.H. (1976) ‘Theory of the firm: managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure’, Journal of Financial Economics, 3(4), pp. 305–360.

McClelland, D.C. (1973) ‘Testing for competence rather than for “intelligence”’, American Psychologist, 28(1), pp. 1–14.

Penrose, E.T. (1959) The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Wernerfelt, B. (1984) ‘A resource-based view of the firm’, Strategic Management Journal, 5(2), pp. 171–180.

Being Resourced is the access and capacity to get what you need and replenish what you have used.

Being resourced, in terms of learning and development, is not really about acquiring more (money, qualifications, network, and so on). Those are means, not ends and can become a circular process of self-limitation when it comes to sustainable, lasting personal development.

Instead, I think of being resourced as your process of replenishing your access to those resources that allow you to respond to the world as it comes to meet you (often unannounced). Such resources fall into three types. There are the practical ones, such as tools, budget, and information. There are also the relational, such as supportive networks and trust among colleagues. And finally, the inner, such as awareness, attention, emotional resilience (the subject of another article), self-esteem, and self-compassion.

I have had periods in my life when this process for being resourced was a problem. At seventeen, full of bravado about what the world needed, I left the expected educational track before completing A-levels that would have been the gateway to university, itself the gateway to other steps and states. But I had many things I was passionate about, curious to experience, and eager to express. I also had a supportive, if bewildered, family, and sufficient sense of self-adventure to go for it.

On the other hand, the consequences of my decision only became apparent later. On paper, in my twenties, I lacked many of the ticked boxes that opened doors, and this was a real struggle, one in which I doubted myself for a long time. What I could not see then was that my sense of self-doubt was a measure of my not replenishing myself. I was on my feet, yes, but without enough available to me to generate momentum, I was drifting.

Today, on reflection, I know something I cultivated in my teens that was still here, still sustaining me: a kind of private creativity and a stubbornness that kept me going. When I arrived in higher education (aged 31), I immediately felt at home. It fed the spring that fed my resourcefulness. People worry about the cupboard being bare, but first, you need a good cupboard.

Resource: the language of the warehouse

Much of the Development Framework’s definition of Being Resourced runs counter to the way many workplaces talk about resources. For example, a department responsible for people is called Human Resources, a name reflecting the way businesses were encouraged to think in a time of industrial expansion and standardisation of productivity (1925-1975); employees (people) as stock, acquired, deployed, counted and removed. A firm’s resources are part of production, where utilisation rates should approach 100 per cent, and idle capacity is waste. Strategy speaks of resources as assets, things an organisation owns and leverages for advantage. In finance, the annual planning round speaks of resource allocation, as though the whole question were one of distributing fixed amounts of something quantifiable. Each case serves a purpose, so inside this view of resourcing, it is not foolish. And through repetition across HR, Finance and Strategy, it starts to feel like common sense: a resource is a quantity, not a quality. Where our vocabulary came from is the subject of Part 2.

“A resource”, as a quantifiable thing, is only one sense of the word, and not the oldest. “To resource” once meant to rise again, the way a spring returns after it has been drawn from, and that meaning is the one this aspect Framework really depends on.

Reasons why this aspect is important for Personal Development

1. Awareness

Awareness is noticing what is worth tending to before anything demands it. What ends up mattering is rarely what your planning would have predicted. Trust built before you need it, a relationship kept warm for no particular reason, a little slack deliberately left in the diary: none of these survives a strict productivity or return-on-investment test. Their value only becomes clear later, when an unforeseen demand arrives, and you find you have space for options you would not otherwise have had. That is the difficulty. While nothing requires them, there is no rational case for keeping them, and so the logic of rigid resource planning is happy to strip them out.

2. Accessibility

A resource you cannot reach when you need it is not really a resource. In many organisations, resources are tightly marshalled, and because they must be accounted for, they must be justified. Without a concrete case, access is withheld, but the problem remains.

The competent manager is then defined as the one who does more with less, which then sits at odds with any official line about asking for help. The issue arrives too late for you to prepare for it, and too expensively for anyone to fix it properly. Doubly draining. Part of being resourced is the unglamorous work of keeping routes genuinely open to draw from: knowing whom to ask, and building the kind of informal relationship in which the asking does not cost you standing.

3. Flexibility

Combined, awareness and accessibility give you flexibility: the capacity to change course when the situation calls for it. Flexibility lives in the capacity you have left uncommitted, which the language of the warehouse reads as waste and is built to eliminate. It is not waste. It is room for response.

This is where Being Resourced reaches out to its neighbour in the Readiness group, Lifelong Learning and Creativity, because the ultimate access route is the ability to learn your way to a resource that does not yet exist. I will come back to that in Part 3.

Balance

Balance is a topic we spend time on in the first stage of the MBA, and I think it is a good image of what being resourced actually is. Balance is not a state you reach or target you set, and then hold fixed when achieved. Or, if it is, then you have a perpetual shadow to chase. When truly balanced, you are engaged in a constant dance between stability and change.

A balanced physical posture, for example, is a continuous run of tiny muscular corrections around a centre line. Any deviation or sway that is detected is answered, and the answer is itself detected and further answered, almost all beneath awareness. Stillness is the appearance; recursive loops of amplification and dampening are the activity. Equilibrium is a dynamic process rather than a fixed position, and Being Resourced is part of this.

This is why you are never finished Being Resourced, any more than you are finished breathing in when you breathe out. At work, the relevant question is whether your pattern of drawing down and replenishing resources to get the work done can sustain itself, or whether you are quietly running a deficit in your process and calling it commitment.

This kind of deficit or depletion is usually treated as a private matter. If your well is running dry, is it because you are drawing too much water, or because the water level has been depleted? Most remedies on offer are addressed to you out of any context. At work, you may be building a deeper resource drought within your team, department, or organisation, as well as yourself.

If this sounds like Sustainable Health and Well-being, the Foundations aspect that is concerned with what keeps you durable as a living system, then they are indeed close neighbours (by design). Being Resourced raises the question of Sustainable Health and Well-being as a contextual background in the arrival of unforeseen events.

In Part 2, I want to trace where the warehouse picture came from: how the vocabularies of human resourcing, finance and strategy turned a word that once meant a spring rising again into a word that means stock on a shelf, and what a century of work on resources, from the physiology of equilibrium through the psychology of conservation and depletion to the economics of organisational slack, can tell us about why it is availability, and not abundance, that is worth attending to.

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I convene the Personal Development (PD) module on the Henley MBA. Over the course of their degree, students submit three mandatory, reflective assignments which chart their own experiences and insights. We mark them as proceed or revise (which the university, in its utilitarian approach, calls pass or fail).

For years this worked without my having to think very hard about why. We received some excellent assignments and some poor ones, and although we sometimes doubted whether a student had understood the task, we almost never had to question whether what we were reading was written by that student. During 2026, the reach of Generative AI (and its adoption into almost all platforms and writing devices) has changed that. On evidence so far, heavy reliance on AI for text fails to do what the PD assignment brief asks for, because when AI cleans up the text, it washes the person out of the response. This used not to happen.

I’m missing an assumption, I presume

Practising what I preach, and to work out a response of my own, I needed to apply critical thinking to surface any assumptions I did not know I held.

Pre- AI, I had assumed, without ever examining it, that fluent, well-shaped reflective prose was evidence of reflection. Not proof, but evidence. When a piece read as though someone had thought carefully, I took that as a sign that careful thinking had occurred behind it.

I now think that assumption was a bit off. AI has exposed it by its instant ability to fire back very polished, plausible, and impeccably ordered statements about Personal Development. However, such statements are not necessarily statements of PD. Gen AI, always set up to please, hadn’t created a problem; it just accelerated it to the point where there was the appearance of insight on the surface.

Thinking back to those stand-out PD assignments pre-AI, I believe that good writing was the result of (a) a learned ability to write well, and (more importantly) a lot of drafting, sifting, revising, and filtering of personal experience. Panning for gold by hand, in a way. However, I also realise that even without polish in the reflective writing, it was still possible to write an outstanding PD assignment. The difference between a proceed and a revise was not a question of polish, but spit. Not everyone writes well; it’s hard work. That’s not what makes a piece reflective (though I think we can all improve our writing, mainly by reading widely). What does it is the even harder process of weaving personal experience, emotion, doubt, “ah-ha” moments, and honest curiosity into the response to the question. Do that, and I’m in.

Gen AI is industrial-scale gold extraction. Thousands of tons of water eviscerating the mountainside, effortlessly sifting vast amounts of bedrock to get a shiny product. If a machine can now produce the bullion without the journey of prospecting and knowing the hard way where to look, the awkward question is not “how do I spot the machine” but “how do we still find the personal growth when the tool we’re using is so powerful at looking like it has done the work for us?”

I am not sure I have a good answer.

Mark my words

When my markers (I have a lovely team of about seven markers and four workshop tutors) are most confident that a piece is genuine, the quality of the writing is a bonus. What really makes the difference are the particulars; details that could only belong to one person. Specific meetings, named colleagues or family, a private grief set beside a public success, or a deep personal realisation. We treat those particulars as sort of “proof of life”, and if they are processed using course or workshop materials (which, of course, an AI won’t conjure unless prompted), then the result feels idiosyncratic.

Revisions are requested mainly when we just can’t locate the student, best expressed in the mess, uncertainty, triumphs and disasters of adult life and learning. AI, at best, only opaquely suggests these, heavily disguised as general or generic examples and frameworks.

On the other hand, there is an opportunity here for me to understand what it must feel like for a student who, confident in their technical know-how and workplace status, sits at the foot of a new mountain - personal reflection and vulnerability - when under pressure to deliver for the MBA assessment regime. Getting AI to come up with text, as opposed to using its excellent facility for challenging assumptions of something you’ve written beforehand, is an indication of something that we should see as information about where an adult learner has some work to do. To balance that, I also have a question about the prompts I’m setting for students to write to. Writing about private facts, emotions, and opinions doesn’t come naturally to most of us, so the whole course has to create space where a writer feels informed enough to say, safe enough to share, and critical enough to connect that writing to their personal and professional development. We therefore must have tolerance when a first PD assignment doesn’t “go deep”. In the past, this was fairly easy to give feedback on, because the text in front of us was genuine, just missing the intended target. With Gen AI, there is suddenly a facade of a reflective essay, but with no foundations built from scratch.

Founding principles and assumptions of PD

As I reflect here, I return to the principles behind the course, which have organically grown from the 80 years of management education at Greenlands. The most important of these is that a learner’s health, well-being, and prosperity must be fostered, nurtured, and facilitated through genuine dialogue. This dialogue must be open to honest self-examination, and that requires courage. Since roughly 2005, this has been addressed in the MBA programme through a tutor-marked assessment focused on personal growth, reflection, and action. We have always assumed that this reflection needs to be written alone and submitted as a finished object, in line with the other assessments in the course.

Why? Partly because this is convenient to mark, and with at least 2,500 course members across 25-30 cohorts in several countries, I should be honest that administrative convenience has influenced how we facilitate the principle named above.

The question we now face challenges the assumption that a tool used in writing is a contamination of that kind of creative, personalised thinking.

This feels increasingly more difficult to treat as a black-and-white issue, though. We are in a technology/assessment arms race we can never win. Few of us, myself included, can readily separate what we think (and what we know) from how we meet and use the technology that Gen AI has introduced into the learning process as a whole. We’re playing catch-up, wearing a blindfold, in a race where there is no surety that the racetrack tomorrow will have the rules and shape it had yesterday. A mandatory declaration of AI use scratches the surface and was already dated when introduced nearly a year ago.

Right now, as a marker and moderator, I am investing much more time and effort in reviewing and giving feedback on PD assignments, thanks mainly to the task of seeing through the writing (slick or slack) and touching the student.

None of us knows

The reason I cannot move to solutions is that I do not think we yet know what the technology is doing to itself. The strange property of these tools is that they are very good at the account and have no access at all to the process of learning. Its most attractive facet, if you are being transactional, is that AI will absolve the writer of the effort of writing. This is the same as absolution from thinking. And that, in turn, is absolution from learning. The Genie is out of the bottle, and there will be no putting it back, so instead we must find out how to think critically in this new era.

I cannot accuse a student of deliberately using AI to bypass reflection; I can only observe that, on this occasion, that’s what has happened. On the other hand, the strongest learners may already be using AI to reflect more effectively, not less, and with a great deal of care and effort: writing the difficult first draft alone, then turning the tool on their own words to critique, then rebuilding from there, iteratively, genuinely, to sharpen the text. Both approaches are using the same technology. What differs is the learner's relationship to effort. Whether we can teach that difference, and whether we can recognise it under the pressure of an assessment regime, I genuinely do not know yet.

Learning, leading, living should all be effortful. The trick will be to raise our game, as practitioners, as academics, and as human beings, so that AI is a tool FOR making an effort, not a bypass or shortcut in place of. As long as learning is effortful, the effort will do something that will be on top of the quality of the writing, or the perfection of the prose (whatever that means!). Personal Development doesn’t work when it’s merely outsourced because it will leave you unmarked. You need to bump into the world to feel it, touch it, be changed by it, and perhaps change it.

I do not have an answer to that. I am not sure the field does. What I notice in the best writing on this at the moment is that it has stopped pretending to, and has started asking the prior question instead: not “how do we defend the assignment” but “what was the assignment ever a measurement of, and does that thing still need measuring in writing at all.”

Where this leaves me

Less certain, and oddly less anxious for it. I cannot be policing every student, just standing by my understanding of what counts, what makes their time at Henley worthwhile and transformational. I never find it easy to explain what that is.

So, for now, I leave this open rather than close it. If reflective assessment survives this, I suspect it will not be because we found a better way to catch the machine, but because we got clearer about what we were trying to see in the first place.

What I can say is that today’s Gen AI models cannot write a good Personal Development assignment. Tomorrow? “None of us knows”, which makes the reassessment of what Management Education is trying to do even more urgent. I must stay true to my job - respectfully getting in the way of a person’s thought process in a useful (if not always easy) way.

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Keep me panning for gold...

All three aspects in the Readiness part of the Framework are directly related to answering this, and for the individual, Emotional Resilience is the first approach toward “I am priming myself”, and this is happening to you in the present moment (as all life does). In parts 1 and 2, I argued at some length about what Emotional Resilience is and is not. The case is made, and what I want to do here is say what I think the aspect is for. I find this a more enjoyable question because it is so open-ended.

Emotional Resilience, when done well, helps you stay healthy in all the relationships you have with the world, including with yourself. With yourself, in the sense of the first three aspects in the Grounding section of the HDF. With the world, in the sense of the interpersonal (people) and with the complexity of the very many social and living systems you are part of.

Until you gain an appreciation and acceptance of resilience as a living, dynamic state, Emotional Resilience will feel lonely. You are not the single wooden beam taking a single load. You are not the sum of all those parts. And you are not a fixed point that you have to get back to when the world (or your thoughts) pull you out of shape one way or another.

In fact, almost everything I concluded in tracing the history in Part 2 confirms the opposite. The children who did well were the ones with someone steady beside them. The sense of coherence in a person that finds the world a manageable (perhaps even joyous) flow can emerge as much in relationships as it can be summoned from within. Resilience, the developmental researchers were finding, was relational before it was felt as personal. From 20 years of visits to South Africa, my rudimentary understanding of ubuntu (more or less, a person is a person through other people) seems to embody this.

So, if I am asked what the aspect is for, the truest short answer I can give is that it is what you need to stay connected in a healthy way, under exactly the conditions that make connection hardest.

Your Emotional Resilience is not (only) a private achievement

Part 1 left a dent in my thoughts. I described emotional resilience as the capacity to hold a boundary between several forces. The brittle edge of more strain than you have the resources to maintain, the self-image of a cocoon that mistakes its own hardening for strength, and the compliance that takes on every stress demand and calls that absorbing resilience. Coherence was the name I gave to whatever it is that lets your shape change without you coming apart. The engineering metaphor cannot capture this process in us because, useful as it may be for some contexts, for a human being that is where the loneliness creeps in.

A beam holds alone, or not at all. A person does not. Finding the resourced middle ground is not something a nervous system does on its own in a room. Emotional Resilience, when it is held, holds between people. The instruction to the private individual to be more resilient is not just unfair but incoherent (by the way, this is why I don’t think a competency programme can work). It asks a person to manufacture alone the one thing the evidence says is made together.

Why this matters now more than it used to

The times we live in do not need my help to sound urgent, and perhaps every era has its own urgency. Nevertheless, there are also rises and falls in any complex system, and current global conditions are marked by growing scarcity, biodiversity decline, and genuine socio-political uncertainty. We still compete heavily for finite resources and rely on codes or institutions that were built for an era visibly straining against this one. In some respects, the ground is moving faster than anyone can map it. In an unsettled period, these systemic stresses are handed down the line until they reach an individual, who may find that their inability to absorb the strain is a personal shortfall. Then we start to look for the coping toolkit, which revisits the shortcomings mentioned in Part 1:

• You can harden, refuse the strain, build the cocoon, and feel for a while like the one steady thing in a moving world (“I’m alright, Jack”). This only works up to the point where that resilience costs you the higher-level, systemic responsiveness that would have let you change with the conditions rather than smash against them.

• Or you can dissolve, lose yourself, and absorb without push-back every demand the moment it arrives. That becomes a shapeless resilience, with the cost that eventually there is no longer a recognisable you doing the resiling.

Both are lonely. Both are what people do when they have understood, correctly, that no one is coming to share the load. Neither is coherent (in the sense I have explained for Emotional Resilience).

Emotional Resilience is, put plainly, staying in contact with difficulty without either sealing yourself off from it or being dissolved by it.

This is possible when you experience:

1. What a sustainable and healthy emotional life looks like

2. The self-awareness to notice the pattern as it happens

3. Self-accountability to own what is yours in it.

However, it doesn’t stop there. In your Emotional Resilience, there is the next ring out. The people immediately around you is where you find the interpersonal resources you also need. These include those steady relationships that developmental researchers kept finding, trusted friends and colleagues who listen, and who tell you the truth, and significant people close to home who notice when the hardening has started.

Next, there is the largest relationship of all, the one to the living systems our human world nests within but believes itself to be apart from. Your Emotional Resilience, it turns out, depends on nature. When the natural system we belong to is itself changing, it asks us to change with it rather than become rigid and unbending in opposition to it. Adapting with, not adapting to.

The pattern you must pay attention to is basically the same at every level. The attention I am describing is not the anxious, circling self-scrutiny or rumination that the resilience literature or self-help movement can foster. The moment you make emotional resilience a thing to monitor, you risk turning it into just one more performance metric to manage. The reflection has to be done with compassion, which is to say without self-punishment, the way you would attend to someone you cared about who was struggling. A person can be ruthlessly honest with themselves and still be on their own side.

In the next set of articles in this series, I turn to Being Resourced, which is a fairly practical PD aspect, though it, too, raises some interesting and even philosophical questions of its own. Below is a link to an earlier post that introduced the Henley Development Framework for anyone arriving here out of sequence.

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To help map this properly, I’m going to focus more on resilience than on emotion, which is covered elsewhere.

Resilience as archaeology

Resilience derives from the Latin resilire, to leap back. Looking back from the 21st century, and given our current individualistic interest in dealing with a stressful world, we tend to look for examples of how this concept was addressed before the word was coined. For example, the Stoic tradition, which I discussed in greater detail in the Self-accountability article, contains one of the most enduring modern readings of resilience. For Epictetus, and later for Marcus Aurelius, the disturbance a person feels is not in the event but in the judgment they bring to it, so the work of resilience is inward, a matter of correcting the view so that the load is felt less. This is a serious and humane position, and it is also recognisably an ancestor of the Mindset category I set out in Part 1; choose your attitude in situations one cannot change. The Stoic adapts to the world by adjusting to it, and, for the most part, does not expect that adjustment to change the world. In the Taoist tradition, being supple and yielding are associated with life and being rigid with death; the green branch that bends in the storm is set against the dry one that snaps. One way or another, and under many different names, the question of what human resilience is and how it can be achieved plays out in just about every early tradition, east and west. The closest summation of the 2,000-year history of how we make sense of resilience is the story of a tension between hardening and softening. As broad, philosophical categories, these appear and re-appear, leading to different ways of seeing the world.

Resilience in the modern lexicon

Resilience, the word, entered English in the early seventeenth century with the sense of to rebound or recoil (McAslan, 2010), a meaning that persists in plain meaning. In part 1, I challenged this “bounce back” reading, though I have to admit that it does have etymology on its side.

Every field which has made resilience an object of study has left that ordinary meaning behind, arriving at very different interpretations and meanings. Below, I trace the general idea of resilience in terms of (1) material, (2) ecosystem, and (3) personal knowledge.

1. The engineering inheritance (1818 to the 1850s)

Resilience became technical, and therefore precise, in the nineteenth century, in the hands of engineers. Thomas Tredgold introduced it into scholarship in 1818 to describe a property of timber, specifically the capacity of certain woods to take a sudden and severe load without breaking (Tredgold, 1818). Four decades later, Robert Mallet, investigating which materials the Royal Navy should trust in the hulls and guns of its ships, refined it into a measurable quantity, the modulus of resilience, the energy a material can absorb and then give back as it springs to its original form (Mallet, 1856). This is resilience as many engineers still use it, and the definition has barely changed in a hundred and fifty years: the energy stored in elastic deformation and released on unloading.

An engineer’s resilience is, exactly and by design, a return; the material takes the strain, and the proof of its resilience is that it gives the energy back and recovers its shape to continue its original function. This is only true up to a point, the elastic limit. Beyond that, the deformation becomes permanent, and the material does not return to its original state. The engineers were being precise about a narrowly defined, inherently measurable concept: a single material with a single equilibrium to which it returns.

That narrowing is what management science, and by connection, social science inherited. It is why, when we tell a person to be resilient, the assumption hidden underneath the instruction is to take the load, hold your shape, and spring back. I argued in Part 1 that the picture is incomplete because a person is not a structural, inanimate element (a wooden beam), but many of today’s taken-for-granted assumptions about Emotional Resilience trace their ancestry to this.

2. The environmental or ecological turn (1973 onward)

A decisive alternative view came from ecology. In 1973, the ecologist C. S. Holling drew a distinction (not previously pointed out) between resilience and stability (Holling, 1973). Stability was defined as a measure of resilience equal to how quickly a system returns to equilibrium after a disturbance, with mechanical resilience transposed into biology. Resilience was how much disturbance a system can absorb before it naturally reorganises into a different version altogether; a different configuration of relationships but still recognisably alive and functioning. More than two decades later, looking back over what the word had come to carry, he named the split directly, calling the first engineering resilience, the return to a single equilibrium and the speed of that return, and the second ecological resilience, the magnitude of disturbance a system can take before it shifts into another stable state (Holling, 1996).

A lake that tips naturally from clear to turbid has not bounced back and has not died. It has become a different lake, stable in a new way. Holling’s point was that managing a system only for rapid return to the status quo ante, the first kind of resilience, tends to strip it of the second (viable sustainability). The effort to hold it at a single, defined equilibrium leaves it brittle and prone to collapse when a sufficiently large shock arrives.

This was the third option I described in Part 1, the one the steel beam does not have, now stated as science rather than as assertion. If you think that resilience is merely being responsive to your environment (adapting to it), Holling’s ecosystem says you do not adapt to a fixed backdrop; the system and its environment define each other’s conditions, so the adapting is mutual, a moving-with rather than a yielding-to. This is very easy to miss when you focus only on the individual.

Later development of this work into the study of adaptive cycles and what its authors called panarchy (Gunderson and Holling, 2002) is the study of how living systems stay themselves by changing, which is the definition I gave of emotional resilience at the start.

3. Flexibility and the two kinds of learning

There is a strand of systems thinking from the same period that puts the matter in a way I find even more useful, because it bears directly on why resilience is so hard to train or predict. One of its figures described flexibility as uncommitted potential for change, the slack a system keeps in reserve so that it can respond to what it has not yet met, and observed that systems lose this flexibility precisely when their variables are driven to the limit and held there, with nothing left over (Bateson, 1972). That loss is akin to the cocoon from Part 1, described in the language of systems: a person absorbing more and more, every variable pushed to its maximum, no slack remaining, which looks like strength and is in fact the condition just before rigidity.

Bateson’s work distinguishes two kinds of learning.

i) There is learning that adjusts your responses within a frame that you do not question and which doesn’t change. The output is getting better and quicker at what the situation already offers. In this case, Emotional Resilience would mean a change in your response, but not in the context.

ii) There is learning that is a change of your response and a change in the frame itself. The output is a sort of dance between what’s going on around you and what’s going on within you.

If ‘bounce-back’ resilience is the first kind, wearing the clothes of the second, it may appear to give you choices for recovering inside a situation, but at the risk of losing your resilience (potential) when the context shifts. The widening of response I described as the heart of Emotional Resilience in the Henley Development Framework is the second kind. If this is a competency, then it is a meta-skill.

4. Resilience in people (1970s to 2000s)

While ecologists were redefining resilience in systems, developmental psychologists were discovering something about it in people, and they began, as the ecologists had, by expecting one thing and finding another. Norman Garmezy and the researchers who followed him set out to study children who did well despite every prediction that they should not, under conditions of poverty, instability, and parental illness, expecting to find rare and exceptional individuals, unusually tough, somehow armoured against their circumstances (Garmezy, 1971). The longitudinal Kauai study, which followed a cohort of such children from birth, found instead that what protected them was not an inner hardness but the reliable presence of at least one steady relationship (Werner and Smith, 1982). Michael Rutter's work on protective factors pointed the same way (Rutter, 1985), and Ann Masten gave the finding its enduring name when she called resilience ordinary magic (Masten, 2001), a common human capacity assembled in the ordinary systems of care and relationship that surround a person rather than manufactured alone inside them.

This suggests that Emotional Resilience is not the lonely task asked of the individual. Resilience was relational before it was ever personal. It is worth noting how closely this sits alongside a concept I drew on earlier in the series in the Sustainable Health and Well-being article, and with Aaron Antonovsky’s sense of coherence (Antonovsky, 1987). This was the degree to which a person finds the world comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful, which he too found was constructed out of relationships and conditions rather than summoned from within. The word coherence, which I made the centre of the definition in Part 1, is not a coincidence. The capacity to stay coherent under strain is assembled, in large part, by the systems a person belongs to, which is exactly why locating the whole of it inside the lone individual is not only a burden but mistaken.

An interesting aside from the clinical tradition distinguishes resilience from resistance (which we might casually treat as the same). In resistance, there is no disturbance, and therefore no need to adjust or repair. Resilience, by contrast, is disturbance reaching a threshold, followed by response, or feeling. Emotional resistance does not equal emotional resilience.

5. Plasticity, prediction, and the body (2000s to now)

This ecological insight has found a home in the scientific study of the body and the brain. Where Holling argued that living systems persist by reorganising, neuroscience has shown that the brain is just such a system, that learning correlates to the physical reorganisation of neural connections through experience, and that a brain capable only of springing back to a prior state, unable to take a new shape, would be a brain that could not learn at all. This is the biological meaning of plasticity. In engineering, plasticity is the failure point, the threshold past which a material has failed (which may be an important function); in biology, plasticity is essential for life and learning. Were we to lose neuro-plasticity, we would have zero resilience.

A development of the last two decades sharpens this for the emotional case in particular. On the predictive account of the brain, now widely held in cognitive science (Friston, 2010; Clark, 2016; Seth, 2021), the brain is not a passive receiver that reacts to what arrives, but a system that continuously predicts its world and checks those predictions against what comes in. An emotion, on this view, is bound up with the registering of a gap between what was predicted and what actually happened (Barrett, 2017). Emotional Resilience, therefore, is not the capacity to absorb the shock of the unexpected without flinching; it is the capacity to revise the model that the shock has just shown to be problematic.

If I persist in the idea that my resilience is just me soldiering on, the mismatch I perceive or feel with the world is noise to be endured. There is eventually a bodily and mental cost to that rigidity, measurable as what one researcher named allostatic load (McEwen, 1998), the wear that accumulates in a system kept under sustained demand without being allowed to reorganise. This is the breaking point I described in Part 1 applied to your physiology.

6. The critical turn (2010s)

Not everyone who has studied resilience has admired how organisations use the word. A body of recent work argues that resilience, as deployed in policy and management, functions as a way of governing, that to make resilience the responsibility of the individual is to relocate onto a private person the strain that properly belongs to the conditions they are working in, and to make the failure to cope look like a personal deficiency rather than a signal about the system (Evans and Reid, 2014; Davies, 2015). Can we see Emotional Resilience as a genuine problem at the scale of an institution or a society? If so, can it be answered by an intervention aimed at the individual, who is then held responsible for absorbing it?

This is a call for you to study the system you are in, whether your organisation treats resilience as a shared responsibility or as a private duty, whether it makes space for sense-making when conditions change or simply tightens its grip. The nested systems I described in Part 1 (the team held by its department and outward to society and to nature) are the levels at which resilience is distributed and constituted. The demand that the individual supply it alone is, in the end, a category error about where in the system the variable lives.

What this all shows

Resilience has carried two meanings throughout, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is return: leap back, recover the shape you held, restore the one equilibrium. It is the meaning written into the word, made precise by the engineers, and kept alive in the everyday counsel to bounce back, toughen up, and carry on.

The second is transformation: accept the strain, change shape, seek resources (the theme in common in this part of the HDF) and persist as yourself in a new configuration rather than the old one. The striking thing is how different scientific fields converged on this meaning, and how reliably the popular and corporate registers have collapsed it back into the first.

Elasticity is return within a limit, the spring back to the prior shape, and it is the whole of the engineer’s resilience and the whole of the popular one. Plasticity, in the biological sense, is the capacity to form a new shape and remain a living, functioning thing. This is resilience - the potential to learn and survive.

What survives? Coherence: the holding-together that lets the shape change without the thing coming apart.

In Part 3, I will share some final thoughts on what I think Emotional Resilience is for.

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References for Part 2

Antonovsky, A. (1987) Unraveling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Barrett, L.F. (2017) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clark, A. (2016) Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso.

Evans, B. and Reid, J. (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity.

Friston, K. (2010) ‘The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), pp. 127–138.

Garmezy, N. (1971) 'Vulnerability research and the issue of primary prevention', American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 41(1), pp. 101–116.

Gunderson, L.H. and Holling, C.S. (eds.) (2002) Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Washington DC: Island Press.

Holling, C.S. (1973) ‘Resilience and stability of ecological systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, pp. 1–23.

Holling, C.S. (1996) 'Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience', in P. Schulze (ed.) Engineering Within Ecological Constraints. Washington DC: National Academy Press.

Lao Tzu (1963) Tao Te Ching. Trans. D. C. Lau. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mallet, R. (1856) On the Physical Conditions Involved in the Construction of Artillery. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts.

Masten, A.S. (2001) ‘Ordinary magic: resilience processes in development’, American Psychologist, 56(3), pp. 227–238.

McAslan, A. (2010) The Concept of Resilience: Understanding its Origins, Meaning and Utility. Adelaide: Torrens Resilience Institute.

McEwen, B.S. (1998) ‘Stress, adaptation, and disease: allostasis and allostatic load’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840, pp. 33–44.

Rutter, M. (1985) ‘Resilience in the face of adversity: protective factors and resistance to psychiatric disorder’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 147, pp. 598–611.

Seth, A. (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber.

Tredgold, T. (1818) ‘On the transverse strength of timber’, Philosophical Magazine, 51.

Werner, E.E. and Smith, R.S. (1982) Vulnerable but Invincible: A Study of Resilient Children. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Zhuangzi (2003) The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. Trans. B. Watson. New York: Columbia University Press.

your capacity to maintain your shape as you change your shape.

I am aware that this sounds odd, even contradictory, and I am happy to keep it that way for a while, because the contradiction is where the living and learning edge is. Any approach to resilience that sugarcoats that edge misses the whole point. Emotional Resilience is the capacity to stay coherent while in contact with difficulty. This is easier to comprehend, but does need some explaining, because it is not what most people and most organisations mean when they talk about resilience.

In everyday use, and increasingly in corporate language, resilience often results in people, when under pressure, doing more and more to absorb more and more without changing. Emotional Resilience, in this way, feels like a force field or cocoon that you put up around you for protection.

The problem with that is that it is not sustainable if your capacity for strain outweighs your resources to stop before a breaking point. If your objective of keeping yourself the same is the prize, this will increasingly leave you isolated from reality when the context changes, which it will. Trying to remain resolutely “you” in a world on the move ends up in a kind of hardening of the heart.

In my view, Emotional Resilience is a widening, rather than narrowing, of the range of responses available to you when feelings are at play in the flow of life, and of course this includes work, organisations, and career.

Emotional Resilience at work

What happens when this phrase surfaces in an appraisal, management training, coaching conversation or a well-being initiative, where you work? How does that conversation typically go? Does it just appear as self-talk? What’s the language used?

Here are six categories. See if any feel familiar:

1. Recovery (resilience as getting back to normal): “bounce back,” “get back on the horse,” “pick yourself up and dust yourself off,” “spring back,” “recover quickly.” The hidden assumption is that the state you were in before the difficulty was the right one, and that the task is to return to it as quickly as possible, as though nothing had happened and nothing needed to change.

2. Hardening (resilience as becoming less permeable): “toughen up,” “grow a thicker skin,” “build mental toughness,” “stay strong,” “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” “grit your teeth.” The assertion is that if you make the outer layer thick enough, less of the world will get through, and that this is what strength is.

3. Endurance (resilience as carrying the load without letting it show): “keep calm and carry on,” “take it on the chin,” “roll with the punches,” “soldier on,” “push through,” “suck it up,” “don’t let them see you sweat,” “leave your problems at the door.” The measure of success has quietly become how little strain is visible to anyone else, and after a while to yourself.

4. Mindset (resilience relocated inside your head): “stay positive,” “it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you respond,” “every setback is a set-up for a comeback,” “choose your attitude”, “find the opportunity in the difficulty.” The premise is that the situation is fixed and not up for discussion, so the only thing left to adjust is your view of it. Like it or lump it.

5. Self-maintenance (resilience as a personal resource to be topped up so you can absorb more): “resilience is a muscle you can train,” “build your reserves,” “recharge your batteries,” “fill the tank,” “self-care,” “develop your coping toolkit,” “manage your stress.” Your feelings and your body are treated as tools or equipment, and the point of maintaining the equipment is to increase the load it can carry before it fails.

6. Finally, Organisational packaging, which you may recognise even more sharply: "how resilient are you?", "resilience training," the well-being webinar, "future-proof yourself," "thrive, don't just survive," "resilience is a core competency." Several prominent organisations even list Resilience as a core corporate value, and many more translate this into programmes of predetermined competency-building.

A surprising amount of what is offered as resilience turns out, on closer inspection, to be an instruction to carry more weight while showing fewer signs of the strain it causes and the toll it takes.

Are we working on the wrong variable?

I have the feeling that Emotional Resilience ends up being very hard work for the individual. How is a person going to live up to all that framing? And is it true that your Emotional Resilience and the need to consider it are two different things? The more we need to talk about Emotional Resilience, the further we have moved away from having it.

A healthy system, in its natural state, just doesn’t have the issue of its resilience. The elements listed in the six points above are noticeable only when a system is already in trouble. They are there to compensate for a balance that has already been lost. It’s like throwing good money after bad.

The healthy balance between stress and strain is (by and large) in equilibrium, and held that way by the unspoken resilience of whatever greater system they are defined by. A team by its department, a department by its division or organisation, an organisation by its market, a market by its industry, an industry by society, and a society by its relationship to nature… and nature by itself.

Emotional Resilience is placed to the foreground when feedback in the system has accelerated an imbalance or disequilibrium (i.e it’s all going too fast, or some part is running out of sufficient resources to remain sustainable). Emotional Resilience is a system’s self-corrective measure.

Stress and Strain

These are terms usually found in engineering that can be applied to the social sciences. Stress is in mass circulation, in fact. For the engineer, stress is a measure of the load applied to a material, while strain refers to the deformation which that load produces in it. A ‘resilient material’, in this sense, is not one that shows no strain under load. The material that shows no strain at all is not strong; it is brittle and usually a short moment away from fracture when placed in the wrong context. But there’s something a steel beam cannot do. When the load comes off, it has only two futures available to it: return to the shape it held before, or, if the load was more than it could take, fracture. It cannot become a different beam and still be a beam. A living system can. A human can. We have a third option that steel does not, which is to reorganise into a shape we have never held before and still be recognisably ourselves.

For a human being, and for any living organism in its environment, it follows that being resilient equals being under sufficient strain to register a stress. That is, be responsive to the environment to adapt with it. Being responsive to your environment is considered a good thing for a leader, and even better for an organisation or society, but this falls short if the definition is to adapt to it, and not with it (something to unpack in Parts 2 and 3). Resilience is the capacity to take the strain, yes, and in humans (as we are living systems) to change shape under the load. Sometimes we recover the earlier shape, and sometimes we settle into a workable new one without losing identity or structural integrity. Feeling strain is not failure; it is evidence that there are sufficient resources to register, judge, and respond to the load rather than collapse under it.

Which brings me back to the contradiction I hinted at earlier - keeping your shape while you change your shape.

If resilience is not the refusal to be deformed but the capacity to be deformed in a healthy and sustainable way, then “being more emotionally resilient” is not how to feel less. It is the harder question of how to widen the range of ways you “feel” in response while staying coherent as you. Being coherent is not the same thing as the shape you currently assume. Shape can and should change, so coherence is what remains resilient. That is what this aspect of the Framework is really pointing at, and it is also why emotional resilience cannot be cleanly separated from self-awareness, since the self that has to hold its shape under strain is the same self the earlier work was trying to bring into view.

In the next part, I will map the territory of the various ways we have spoken and thought about resilience in general, and emotional resilience in particular.

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“There’s an awful lot of women, particularly, coming up. They grab my hands and say, ‘Save us. Save us.’ A sense in which the country is in such a rapid, downward spiral, whether it’s shoplifting, anti-social behaviour, or the genuine fear for the safety of their daughters or granddaughters, and that’s why we’re doing so well.”

This made me stop and think. Something about the rhetorical pattern felt familiar. This article isn’t about critiquing or debating the merit or otherwise of the social themes he lists, and it’s not about whether you share his worldview or oppose it. It is a Critical Thinking question, and an enquiry into the marriage of motives to tactics to attain or maintain a strategy.

How did we get to a place where this pattern of discourse has become commonplace? And is it pointing to something larger, a method to be found not just in populist politics, but also in public relations, social media, large-scale commercial enterprise, and generic management?

What I want to do here is describe how it works.

What Farage opens with is what I would call a casual ‘fabrication’. I prefer that to falsehood because fabricate has as its root the old French, faber, which carries the ghost of the original meaning - a skilled craftsperson who makes with their hands.

Here, fabrication is the deliberate assembly and telling of a story that did not happen in order to establish credibility for a proposed course of action. Farage is manufacturing, with practised opportunism, a frame that did not previously exist, and he’s passing this off as a discovery that explains why he advocates what he does. The manufacturing process is concealed behind the showroom.

The six-component sequence outlined below is my own assembly, and synthesises work in several traditions, including Mudde and Müller on populist structure, Arendt and Pomerantsev on credulity, Levitsky and Ziblatt on democratic erosion, and Oreskes and Conway on doubt manufacturing in commerce. The sequence is proposed in order to test it against contemporary events.

1. The founding fabrication. This is a claim that is not quite testable, but is sufficiently emotionally legible to function as a frame. It does not have to be a lie in the simple sense. It often works better when it contains some real element, a scrap of plausibility, which makes it hard to refute in the moment, and unlikely to matter later on in a sequence of communication. In the Farage passage, the founding fabrication is the unverifiable claim that “women, particularly,” are coming up to him, grabbing him, and saying “Save us!” It cannot be checked. But… it is designed to trigger an emotional attachment. Almost nobody objects, in principle, to the fabrication of consumer desire, because it is now so deeply embedded in everyday life that it has stopped looking like fabrication. The political version looks shocking, partly because we have not yet fully become immune. Donald Trump’s first term in office was notable for the frequent condemnation and pushback against his fabrications. In his second term, we rarely raise that as a feature.

2. A manufactured division. The frame, once installed, separates the world into an ‘inside’ (the argument) and an ‘outside’. There are real people, and there is a corrupt elite. There is a perpetrator and a victim. There is a loyal patriot, and there is a disloyal traitor. The division is produced within the emotional call to action of the frame and then projected back as if it had been there all along. In the Farage passage, the division is between those who feel that ‘downward spiral’ and those who do not, which becomes, by easy implication, the division between those who will save us and those who are causing the problem.

3. The erosion of credulity. Once the division is in place, the trust that normally holds groups together is invited to break down under the power of a binary. People stop extending good faith across the line the frame has drawn. The social institutions that previously mediated between groups (the press, the academy, the civil service, the regulators, and so on) are recoded as belonging to ‘the other side’, which means counter-interventions can be dismissed as partisan rather than corrective. Farage’s use of this depends on erosion, because without it, the founding fabrication would not survive contact with verification.

4. The acquisition of power or influence. Once credulity has been sufficiently corroded, the operator can position themselves as the only interpreter of the situation they manufactured. Power flows toward whoever can supply the frame because the frame (for now) has become the definition of the experience.

5. The retention of power or influence. The sequence, once it has started, must keep going, but it risks becoming something of a Ponzi scheme, relying on fresh credulity to enter the system. New fabrications are introduced. New divisions are drawn. New enemies are nominated. The operator cannot stop, because stopping would allow ordinary credulity to return, and ordinary credulity is what would dismantle the position. This is why public figures working this way often appear to be in a state of permanent emergency. The emergency is the medium in which they live.

6. The extraction, or mining, of value. The position acquired and retained is then converted into something the operator wants. Political office, broadcasting contracts, speaking fees, board positions, book deals, donations, personal enrichment, dynastic succession. Market share. Shareholder return. These conversions are usually visible afterwards but obscured at the time because the operating frame discourages the audience from seeing the operator as a beneficiary of the arrangement they have created.

This is the playbook. It is the same method whether you read it in the Farage passage I began with or in the campaign that promised £350 million a week for the NHS. The figure was wrong on its face and known as such by those promoting it, but its function was never arithmetical. It established a frame (often with three-word slogans) within which the European Union became a thief, the British people became its victim, and the Leave campaign became the redeemer.

In the mid 2010s, Donald Trump’s birther campaign against Barack Obama operated with this in the United States, and was an early example of the many times he has used this as a tactic since.

"I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding." Donald Trump on NBC’s Today show, 2011.

He has since scaled up production.

Orbán’s Soros framing did so in Hungary, fabricating an adversary against which permanent emergency rule could be justified. In each case, all six components are present.

My interest is in management education (especially Personal Development as Sustainable Health and Well-being). What is more important than the political examples is that this did not begin in politics. It is older and more entrenched, and began in commerce. The Brown and Williamson tobacco memo of 1969, with its phrase that doubt is our product*, set out the operational template that the fossil-fuel industry, the opioid industry, and large sections of the food and drink industry have used ever since. The rhetoric does not require that you deny the science. It requires only that you manufacture sufficient confusion to delay consequences. John Yudkin’s research at Queen Elizabeth College in the 1960s, identifying sugar rather than fat as the principal dietary risk factor in cardiovascular disease, was suppressed for decades by a sugar industry that funded competing research and helped install Ancel Keys’ fat hypothesis as orthodoxy. The vindication came posthumously.

The same logic appears in advertising. Listerine was sold for decades as the remedy for halitosis, a condition the manufacturer effectively invented. De Beers’ diamond engagement ring campaign from 1947 onwards fabricated the conviction that diamonds had always been the necessary form of romantic commitment. Whole categories of contemporary economic life rest on founding fabrications of this kind.

The conglomeration of multinationals and the globalisation of business applies this at a higher level of abstraction. The framing of innovation against regulation, of maverick pioneers against bureaucrats, of platforms against publishers, is the corporate cousin of the populist division between the real people and the corrupt elite.

Social media platforms have industrialised their delivery. They have built an infrastructure that, at scale, selects for the affective signatures the whole approach produces: outrage, division, the gratification of grievance, and the certainty of the in-group. The components were assembled in the twentieth century. The twenty-first century has put them on a conveyor belt.

This is where I want to stop presenting and ask. I hope that the majority of readers will have done significant learning, have been taught to think critically about evidence, and are now operating in environments where the question is no longer whether the information they receive is accurate but whether the frame within which it appears has been fabricated, and by whom, for the ultimate extraction of… (what?) The standard inventory of critical thinking, by which I mean the cognitive bias literature, the quick taxonomies of fallacies, the case-method habit of weighing evidence, was built for an environment in which information could broadly be trusted to be about what it appeared to be. That environment is now much fuzzier. The discomforting thought, if you want one, is that what I’m seeing represents the marriage of authoritarian intent with commercial technique, operating in a democratic environment.

So the question I want to leave you with is this. If what I have described is now the default operating environment of at least some public, commercial and organisational life, and if its six components are recognisable once you know what to look for, is our critical thinking still equal to what the present moment asks of us? Founding fabrication, manufactured division, eroded credulity, power acquired, power retained, value extracted. Can you see the shape, in the language of the politicians you read, in the advertising you are exposed to, in the strategy documents that cross your desk, in the mergers and acquisitions, and in the platforms that mediate most of what you now know about the world?

And if you can see it, what are you going to do about it, in your own thinking first, before you ask anyone else to do anything?

I am not going to answer that. The point of asking is that the answer belongs to the reader, and that the reader is, in this case, already in possession of the materials needed to give one.

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*”Doubt is our product” is a phrase from an internal 1969 memo by an executive at the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, then one of the largest cigarette manufacturers in the United States. The full sentence reads: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public.”

Doubt the science, doubt the experts, doubt the intellectuals, doubt the facts.

Further reading

The sequence developed in this article draws from, and in some cases synthesises, work across several scholarly traditions. None of the following sets out the six-component sequence as I have described it, and they are the natural places to read further.

1. The founding fabrication

Bernays, E. (1928) Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright.

Ellul, J. (1965) Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf. (Original French publication 1962 as Propagandes.)

Michaels, D. (2008) Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. (2010) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury.

2. The manufactured division

Mudde, C. (2004) ‘The Populist Zeitgeist’, Government and Opposition, 39 (4), pp. 541-563.

Mudde, C. and Rovira Kaltwasser, C. (2017) Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Müller, J-W. (2016) What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Stanley, J. (2018) How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House.

3. The erosion of credulity

Arendt, H. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Frankfurt, H. (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Pomerantsev, P. (2014) Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. London: Faber.

Pomerantsev, P. (2019) This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality. London: Faber.

4. The acquisition of power

Bonikowski, B. (2017) ‘Ethno-nationalist Populism and the Mobilization of Collective Resentment’, British Journal of Sociology, 68 (S1), pp. S181-S213.

Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. (2018) How Democracies Die. New York: Crown.

Linz, J. and Stepan, A. (eds) (1978) The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

5. The retention of power

Agamben, G. (2005) State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schmitt, C. (1922) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1985.

Snyder, T. (2017) On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books.

6. The extraction of value

Applebaum, A. (2020) Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday.

Chayes, S. (2015) Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. New York: Norton.

Chayes, S. (2020) On Corruption in America: And What is at Stake. New York: Knopf.

Stigler, G. (1971) ‘The Theory of Economic Regulation’, Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, 2 (1), pp. 3-21.

One of these is Freefall Writing (a pen, paper, a timer, a first word… and “just start writing”).

Another is a quick hunt on LinkedIn for something interesting, or incomplete, or just inane (my favourite), to craft a comment.

And then there is just playing with language and ideas to see what happens.

This week, I found myself wondering “What if I...?”, which is not really a question looking for a problem to solve, or a destination to reach, so much as a way of opening a window to see whether the weather is doing anything interesting. The other day, the window opened onto a phrase I have heard many times without ever looking at what it could do.

“I lost my train of thought.”

What if I rearranged the ideas?

“I trained my loss of thought”?

Same words, just with the grammar subversively cut up and reassembled.

Pop! A new idea, necessarily abstract. This makes a comparison possible - the original phrase complains about an absence, where the rearrangement proposes a reflection on concentration (or meditation) as a practice. What began as a small failure of attention becomes something closer to a discipline that monks and meditators might recognise, the deliberate cultivation of not-thinking as a way of letting something else arrive. I did not plan that juxtaposition; I noticed it, which is a different sort of activity altogether and probably the more interesting one.

Another phrase had been sitting nearby for a while, familiar enough that we have largely stopped hearing it:

“That question hit a nerve”.

What happens if I turn it around into

“That nerve hit a question”?

I’ve preserved the slang use of nerve as a trigger, but now the agency has moved, and with it the implied change of direction of cause. In the original, an external probe finds something raw in the listener, whereas now the rawness is already acknowledged, surfacing a question that I should respond to.

This is probably closer to what actually happens when something someone says lands hard as a reflection - the sensitivity finds itself reaching toward an expression.

Neither example is particularly profound on its own, and I am not really making a claim for either as a deep discovery. What interests me is the small act of rearranging, because familiar phrases can be clichés. They are useful precisely to the extent that we have stopped noticing them, which means they acquire a cargo of stowaway assumptions riding along for free. Treating such a phrase as raw material rather than as a fixed unit is a way of letting some of those assumptions show themselves, and although most rearrangements produce nonsense or the kind of pseudo-profundity that should be quietly dropped, occasionally one opens a small door onto something you didn’t expect and need to know.

A rearranged phrase is a very small act of vandalism, and yet it puts you in a slightly different position from which slightly different things are visible. This is, I think, part of what people mean or ought to mean when they talk about freshening things up. It doesn’t have to mean entirely new content, frameworks, or fashionable vocabulary. Merely a small interruption to patterns we have stopped noticing, made with what is already to hand and at no cost.

If you try it, most of what you produce will not survive the next morning, and that is rather the point of the practice, because the technique is the sieve and not the gold, and the occasional nugget that does pan out will tend to tell you something you had not quite been able to say, or had not realised you were trying to.

I would be curious to know what others find when they try this (not only the ones that work, since the ones that almost work are interesting in their own way).

What if we...?

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The question of health and well-being has been worked on for over a century and a half across three spheres of inquiry: the sociological (collective), the psychological (individual), and the ecological (systemic). Each tells us something that complements the process of finding our way through life's complexity. This is evident in the way key figures in each sphere, including Antonovsky, Engel, and Singer, do not remain focused solely within their disciplines. Health and well-being do not operate in narrow channels.

At the same time, hasn’t the contemporary popular interpretation (the books on the shelves described in Part 2) narrowed the conversation and boundary to the individual reader in a way that does not match what “sustainable” requires for it to work?

A part of nature apart from nature?

There is a deeper point about scale that much of the popular literature on sustainable health and well-being fails to register. The conditions of life on this planet are changing in ways that an individual, personalised technique cannot address without seeing everything as connected.

Ecosystems are collapsing, the climate is shifting faster than the adaptive capacity of most living systems, and the institutions humans built to manage their relationship with the natural world are visibly inadequate. In how we experience them, we have somehow placed the natural system that sustains human life outside of what we think it is to be a healthy human. We have not actually left that system. We cannot. The hubristic error is to treat the experiential separation as real, and to behave as though those systems can be managed from outside them. A lot of the literature on health and well-being treats the ecological crisis as background, if at all.

Sustainable Health and Well-being is the health and well-being of a person who is, whether they recognise it or not, an insider in the systems they believe themselves to be an outsider to. I don’t know whether it’s possible to deal with this in the classroom, even if it feels like an insight. At first, this will feel too big. For now, I think it’s enough to raise it as a thought and offer some more accessible answers that practitioners can start with.

What is Sustainable Health and Well-being for?

I have three answers:

1. Durability.

   Sustainable Health and Well-being is for keeping the personal development project from corroding over time. In my experience of teaching, senior managers do not arrive at their Personal Development actively seeking to be aware or accountable; they have been exercising both for years and have found the results disappointing. The promise of personal development, as a generic, umbrella term (which many MBA programmes claim), is an upward career trajectory. But lived experience is more complicated. Outward success comes and goes, and is defined by others. It often does not feel like success from the inside. This aspect identifies what has been missing from the picture: the durability condition, without which awareness and accountability cannot be sustained.

2. Scale.

   Sustainable Health and Well-being makes visible the levels at which a life is actually constituted. Our contemporary conversation about health and well-being is aimed at you (in its popular form) almost entirely at the personalised scale, and in a package that assumes you are below par. This is the scale at which the question first arrives when you are thrown off by life, and at first, the framing looks correct. On the other hand, the micro-scale invites you to frame your lack of health and well-being (exhaustion) through a lens or technique at the same scale. If this misreads what and where the depletion is being produced, the effect will not be sustainable. The conditions of your working life are only partly set by habits, beliefs, and techniques. They also include the structure of your organisation and industry, the demands of the hierarchy and interpersonal relationships, the relational ecology of society in a period of rapid change and institutional uncertainty. Attending to any of these requires a multi-scale view.

3. Refusal to live through comparisons.

   This aspect of the Framework is a refusal to compete for your health and well-being with an idealised version of “good”, or “perfect”. The personal-optimisation industry has produced an extensive vocabulary, much of it scientifically respectable in its sources, for talking about individual self-management, and I tend to reject this register, while accepting that some techniques can produce a positive local effect. Temporarily. If they cannot address the conditions that produce the sense of depletion, you will adjust your view to conditions that have not changed. I think that is the key point. Durability in your Health and Well-being comes from a positive change in your relationship with context, not from your capacity to bear it.

The World Health Organization’s definition, mentioned in Part 2, is the one most readers will know. On launch, its strengths included social well-being alongside physical and mental health at a time when this was unusual, and it rejected reducing health to the absence of disease. Its main shortcoming, in my view, is treating health as a state rather than a process. When an organisation uses this as their approach, it can soon translate to metrics, standards, and checklists. In addition, the unit of analysis is the individual, which makes the social dimension internal to the person rather than relational.

A more useful modern definition comes from Galderisi and colleagues in World Psychiatry (2015):

“Mental health is a dynamic state of internal equilibrium which enables individuals to use their abilities in harmony with universal values of society.”

The authors clarify what they mean by universal values, naming “respect and care for oneself and other living beings; recognition of connectedness between people; respect for the environment; respect for one’s own and others’ freedom” (Galderisi et al., 2015). This improves on the WHO formulation in three ways.

• It speaks of dynamic equilibrium (always a process) rather than a complete state.

• It accommodates the capacity to handle adversity in the future rather than treating its absence as an existing precondition.

• It maps to the Universal Values pedagogy I have been teaching on the MBA for some years (Dalton, 2023).

A third definition, a little earlier and more widely cited in policy circles than Galderisi et al., comes from Huber and colleagues in the BMJ (2011), defining health as:

“the ability to adapt and to self-manage in the face of social, physical, and emotional challenges.”

Huber explicitly invokes a systems analogy, comparing human health to a complex system's capacity to maintain its environment within a stable range. This is closer in some respects to the Henley formulation used throughout the Framework. However, it leaves the question of the scale implicit. Health remains, in Huber as in Galderisi, primarily an individual capacity.

I think what Sustainable Health and Well-being as a PD aspect adds to these is the explicit treatment of scale. Sustainable Health and Well-being is constituted across personal, social, and global scales, with the scales interrelated rather than separable. What an individual experiences as their own health is also a property of the relationships, organisations, and ecological conditions in which they are embedded and sustained.

In Management Education, this should translate into a particular kind of conversation that managers may not be expecting. In Personal Development, when the conversation reaches Sustainable Health and Well-being, the register has to change because the question is no longer what you can do about your own state to fix it, but what your state tells you about (fixing?) the conditions you are in.

This is where the distinction between stress and strain might come in useful. Stress is an external demand, or force, exerted on you as a living system. It is a description, neither intrinsically good nor bad, and a part of a systemic truth. Strain is the internal measurement of your capacity to respond to stress. It becomes a toll when environmental demands exceed the system’s capacity to sustain itself (Dalton, 2024). Stress is outside your control. Strain is another word for your control, and I will refer to this in detail when we get to the next group of aspects in the Framework; Readiness.

By way of closing

Now in my 60s, the Framework I have been working through and developing did not come together in the abstract. It has intellectual antecedents, biographical roots, and emotional journeys, including episodes from my own life that belong in another article.

Two questions to reflect on:

How much of the lack of health and well-being you experience as a private phenomenon is produced by relationships and conditions that are not entirely under your control?

What would it mean to attend instead to the system you are part of and the relationships that compose it?

Answers, if there are any, are the work of looking and continuing to look, which is what the framework is there to support, and which is what no book on a shelf can do for you (even mine!).

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References

Dalton, C. (2023) Universal Values Questionnaire. Henley Business School, University of Reading.

Dalton, C. (2024) Stress, or Strain? Henley Business School, University of Reading.

Galderisi, S., Heinz, A., Kastrup, M., Beezhold, J. and Sartorius, N. (2015) ‘Toward a new definition of mental health’, World Psychiatry, 14(2), pp. 231–233.

Huber, M., Knottnerus, J. A., Green, L., van der Horst, H., Jadad, A. R., Kromhout, D., Leonard, B., Lorig, K., Loureiro, M. I., van der Meer, J. W. M., Schnabel, P., Smith, R., van Weel, C. and Smid, H. (2011) ‘How should we define health?’, BMJ, 343, d4163.

World Health Organization (1946) Constitution of the World Health Organization. Geneva: World Health Organization.

I have always struggled to define health and well-being. Not what it refers to in theory (the state of being healthy, happy, or prosperous, perhaps also the state of being safe), but what it is to experience in life. Does the individual access health and well-being intellectually, or viscerally? Can it be categorised in a useful way? My instinct for a long time was to keep these questions open.

However, on a recent visit to my favourite bookshop, Blackwells on Broad Street in Oxford, I was struck by how the personal development and self-help section occupies several bookcases. There were books on morning routines, gut health, the vagus nerve, neuroplasticity, attachment styles, and the various flavours of mindfulness that sell in droves. It was not this size a decade ago. Does the shelf reflect what publishers have detected in market demand, or what we authors know about the topic that is new? Or both? Or something else? For sure, the shelf addresses health and well-being at the scale of the individual reader, so we are in a place where the person is the system in which the problem is located and the place from which the solution must come. My hunch is that the reader who follows the recommendations of even the best of these books, applies the techniques diligently, and observes some improvement in their condition, will find that the conditions which produced their original problem are largely unchanged.

For this part, I wanted to take a wider, longer view of the question of health and well-being. What I found are traditions of framing at the social, organisational, and ecological scales, though much less so at the individual scale.

The question Part 2 has to answer is: why is the conversation about health and well-being now conducted almost entirely at the scale least likely to address what is actually wrong? The answer involves going back to the period in which the modern question of health and well-being was first framed, in the conditions of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, and tracing the three traditions of inquiry that grew up to address what those conditions made visible. Each tradition addresses one of the scales specified by the Henley Development Framework, and each has accumulated a substantial body of work, with meaningful antecedents for today’s global situation seeded in the birth and social shifts of the Industrial Revolution.

The sociological tradition

The first tradition began in the metropolitan cities. Industrial Manchester, Engels’s subject in The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels, 1845), was producing a pattern of disease and mortality that pre-modern medicine lacked the vocabulary to describe. The poor were dying at rates the rich were not, in places organised by capital for purposes that did not include the well-being of those whose labour produced the wealth. Engels was making a political argument, but the empirical observation was unanswerable, and others without his politics were observing the same thing.

What was missing was a way to show the connection. John Snow supplied this in 1854 by mapping cholera cases around Broad Street in Soho against the locations of the water pumps (Snow, 1855). The map made an argument that statistics alone could not. Disease tracked to environmental conditions in ways that individual constitution and habit could not explain. Edwin Chadwick had laid the administrative groundwork three years earlier with his report on the sanitary condition of the labouring population (Chadwick, 1842), and the public health movement that followed produced, through the Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875, the first sustained admission by a modern state that the conditions in which its population lived were partly its responsibility. Health, in this view, was a property of populations and of the arrangements those populations lived under, and only secondarily a property of individual bodies.

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim took the same move into more difficult territory in Suicide (Durkheim, 1897). If the rate at which people end their own lives could be predicted from the social organisation of the society they lived in, the agency of the individual could not be the whole story of their fate. The implication was uncomfortable in 1897 and remains uncomfortable now, which is part of why the tradition of public health and well-being has had to be rediscovered repeatedly rather than established once and held.

Perhaps the twentieth-century work that has mattered most to management has been that of Professor Michael Marmot. The Whitehall studies, beginning in 1967, tracked British civil servants over decades and found that the lower one’s grade in the hierarchy, the worse one’s health (Marmot et al., 1978). The differences could not be explained by access to healthcare, since all civil servants had the same level of access, and they did not disappear when smoking and diet were controlled for. The job position was the variable. If the structure of the hierarchy you work inside is itself shaping your health, the question of well-being cannot be addressed by interventions aimed at you alone. This is uncomfortable in a different way from Durkheim, because it implicates the institutions inside which you, as a reader of a health and well-being book, are sitting.

What the sociological tradition could not do was tell us much about why two people in identical conditions experience them so differently. That work seems to be done elsewhere, in a tradition arising from different conditions but addressing the same underlying problem.

The psychological tradition

The second tradition arose out of conditions the sociological inquiry had identified but could not fully describe. The inner experience of the worker, the clerk, the urban resident, the dispossessed agricultural labourer was the residual category of the nineteenth century. Older religious and moral vocabularies of well-being (in particular) had been weakened by industrialisation and secularisation, but not replaced. People were suffering and struggling in ways that the public health movement could measure in mortality and disease, but could not effectively address in the texture of daily life. Psychology and psychiatry, both newly institutionalised by the late nineteenth century, were the disciplines that filled the space.

Clifford Beers’s memoir, A Mind That Found Itself (Beers, 1908), became the founding text of the mental hygiene movement and is worth mentioning because of what happened to its argument subsequently. Beers had been confined in three asylums after a breakdown and wrote his book to expose the conditions and argue for reform. The movement that grew from it began with a broad conception of mental health that included the social conditions of distress as much as the treatment of those already ill. Within a generation, that broad conception had narrowed to the clinical. By mid-century, mental health was largely the province of psychiatric practice, focused on the individual patient, and increasingly on what was happening inside that patient’s mind or body rather than around it.

By mid-century, the move into the clinical was being formalised internationally. The World Health Organization's (WHO) founding constitution in 1948 defined health as:

“a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” (WHO, 1946)

This expanded what health included, and the addition of social well-being alongside physical and mental health remains its enduring contribution. On the other hand, it interpreted health as a state rather than a process, and placed a threshold of 'complete' that no person ever quite meets. The WHO definition has been the working definition in workplaces ever since, which is part of why the question of health and well-being has been so difficult to reframe.

Hans Selye’s work on stress, beginning in the 1930s and reaching its widely-read form in The Stress of Life (Selye, 1956), gave the depletion of the worker an empirically tractable form. Selye showed that the body responded to a wide range of demands with a common physiological pattern, adaptive in the short term and damaging in the long term. The damage was measurable. What had previously been described as a failure of will or character could now be understood as the predictable response of a biological system to sustained demand. Many scholars have since been influenced by this, and a tendency in the subsequent literature has been unable to escape. By locating stress in the individual's physiology, Selye implicitly suggested that stress could be addressed there as well, even when its causes lay elsewhere. Contemporary popular literature on stress largely extends this implication.

American psychiatrist George Engel's biopsychosocial model, proposed in Science in 1977 (Engel, 1977), was an explicit attempt to widen the frame once more. Engel argued that medicine had become biomedically reductive and could not account for outcomes that depended on psychological and social factors. His model proposed that biological, psychological, and social levels each contributed to health and that none could be reduced to the others. Engel's framework names the three-scale problem inside medicine without quite resolving the difficulty of holding all three levels together in practice, which takes me back to the difficulty the present article is trying to think through.

Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenesis, featured in Unraveling the Mystery of Health (Antonovsky, 1987), made a different and more radical move. Antonovsky asked not what caused people to become ill (pathogenesis) but what keeps some people well under conditions that should make them ill. His concept of the sense of coherence, the degree to which a person experiences the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful, identified a capacity that operated at the individual scale but was constituted by relationships at larger scales. A person’s sense of coherence is not, on Antonovsky’s account, a property they construct alone. It is built out of the relationships, communities, and conditions they have been part of. Among the figures in this tradition, Antonovsky is the closest precedent for the position taken by the Henley Development Framework and Personal Development at Henley.

The contemporary inheritors most visible to the popular reader have been positive psychology, founded by Martin Seligman in the late 1990s, and the resilience literature that has blossomed alongside it. Both have been grounded in and produced further legitimate research. Some argue that both have also been heavily colonised by corporate well-being (Davies, 2015), where the resilience of the individual employee is treated as the answer to organisational conditions that are themselves the source of the problem the resilience is meant to address. The neuroscience literature on stress, trauma, and neuroplasticity, which now dominates the popular shelf in books such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk, 2014), also sits in this lineage.

Though the science is in many cases serious, the popularised use that has been made of it tends to reproduce the scale-error in a more rigorous-sounding form: a sophisticated account of what is happening in the individual body or brain, deployed in support of interventions the individual is expected to apply alone.

The ecological tradition

The third tradition was the most reluctantly admitted into the conversation about human health. Its roots run back through nineteenth-century natural history and the conservation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its modern form begins with the recognition that human health cannot be separated from the health of the larger systems on which human life depends. To its advocates, this is not a matter of philosophical inference; it has been forced by evidence.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Carson, 1962) was the book that brought the ecological view into the mainstream conversation about health. Her case was specific. Synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, were entering the food chain and producing measurable harm to wildlife and to humans. The argument was disputed at the time, vindicated within a decade (the US banned agricultural DDT in 1972), and produced the political conditions for the modern environmental movement. The conceptual implications of her work extended beyond the specific case. Carson’s evidence made it impossible to continue treating the environment as a stable backdrop against which human activity, including human health, played out. In her account, the environment and the self (human bodies) act on each other, and the relationship between the two can no longer be treated as one-way.

The decades that followed produced a series of frameworks aimed at formalising the ecological view. The Brundtland Commission’s Our Common Future (1987) introduced sustainable development into international policy and gave the word ‘sustainable’ the broad currency it now has, which is also why the word has come to mean almost anything. James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, controversial in its strong form and largely accepted in its weak form, argued for understanding the Earth as a self-regulating system. Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life drew on systems-thinking traditions, including ecology, cybernetics, and complexity theory, to create a synthesis widely read outside academia.

One important contemporary anchor is Johan Rockström’s planetary boundaries framework, first published in 2009 (Rockström et al., 2009). Rockström and his colleagues identified nine processes that regulate the stability of the Earth system and proposed quantified limits beyond which the system risks abrupt and largely irreversible change. Several of these boundaries have now been crossed. The framework has become the most cited account of the ecological conditions on which human life depends and the basis of the planetary health movement that the Lancet has championed since its 2015 commission.

The syndemic concept, developed by Merrill Singer in the 1990s and brought to wider attention during the COVID-19 period, describes how biological, social, and environmental conditions interact to produce patterns of disease that no one level produces alone (Singer, 2009). COVID-19 was, in this sense, a syndemic: a viral disease whose distribution and severity were shaped by underlying chronic conditions, which were themselves shaped by social inequalities, which were themselves shaped by the ecological pressures that increased the likelihood of zoonotic (animal to human) spillover in the first place. Richard Horton’s Lancet editorial in September 2020, framing COVID-19 as a syndemic rather than a pandemic (Horton, 2020), marked the concept's entry into widespread public policy discourse.

The management practitioner who is also a lifelong learner, learning about planetary boundaries and trying to apply the lessons to their own life, finds that the connections are real, but making them concrete is really elusive. The ecological view is too large for the individual to act on directly. Elsewhere, I have said that this is a problem of critical thinking; until we know how we think, we will not be able to change what we think. So, the easier alternative is to ignore it, or to turn it into a purely personal project that does little to address the conditions that produced the problem.

Back to the bookstore in 2026

Three traditions, each with a serious empirical and conceptual literature, each addressing one of the scales at which health and well-being are actually constituted. The reader who walks into the shop looking for help with the exhaustion, anxiety, or depletion that brought them in is probably not directed to Marmot, Antonovsky, Carson, or Rockström (or, to Gregory Bateson, which is where I head to first. For reference, dear reader, Blackwells has Steps to an Ecology of Mind in the Anthropology section). They are directed to books that will teach them to manage their own nervous system, optimise their morning, or rewire their attachment patterns, often in 10 easy steps.

The shelf is organised around the question the reader has been trained to ask: “What is wrong with me and what can I do about it?”

I don’t think this is a failure of science or a triumph of pseudoscience. I just think we are asking a malformed question, and most of us cannot quite formulate it differently without help. The popular register has filled the spaces left by the three traditions, partly because the grand streams (the science of the “-ologies”) are difficult and slow, and partly because the appetite is for the solutions, not the questions. What is more, each tradition has been most accessible only to specialists in its own field.

This is the condition Part 3 has to address. I would like to say something about what I think Sustainable Health and Well-being is for, given what we know about how the traditions above ask different questions. What is wrong with the conditions, what is wrong with the institutions, and what is wrong with the relationship between human activity and the systems that sustain it?

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References

Antonovsky, A. (1987) Unraveling the Mystery of Health: How People Manage Stress and Stay Well. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bateson, G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Chicago University Press

Beers, C. W. (1908) A Mind That Found Itself: An Autobiography. New York: Longmans, Green.

Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Chadwick, E. (1842) Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain. London: HMSO.

Davies, W. (2015) The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. London: Verso.

Durkheim, É. (1897) Le Suicide: Étude de Sociologie. Paris: Félix Alcan. Translated by J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (1952) as Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Engel, G. L. (1977) ‘The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine’, Science, 196(4286), pp. 129–136.

Engels, F. (1845) Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. Leipzig: Otto Wigand. Translated and edited by V. Kiernan (1987) as The Condition of the Working Class in England. London: Penguin Classics.

Horton, R. (2020) ‘Offline: COVID-19 is not a pandemic’, The Lancet, 396(10255), p. 874.

Marmot, M. G., Rose, G., Shipley, M. and Hamilton, P. J. S. (1978) ‘Employment grade and coronary heart disease in British civil servants’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 32(4), pp. 244–249.

Rockström, J. et al. (2009) ‘A safe operating space for humanity’, Nature, 461(7263), pp. 472–475.

Selye, H. (1956) The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Singer, M. (2009) Introduction to Syndemics: A Critical Systems Approach to Public and Community Health. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Snow, J. (1855) On the Mode of Communication of Cholera. 2nd edn. London: John Churchill.

van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.

World Health Organization (1946) Constitution of the World Health Organization. Geneva: World Health Organization.

This is the third aspect of the Henley Development Framework, completing the group of three Foundations after Self-awareness and Self-accountability. The full working definition runs as follows.

Sustainable Health and Well-being is the point of return. As an ultimate reality check for assessing choices, roles, ambitions, dilemmas, and hopes, it keeps you honest.

‘Sustainable’ means a system is able to look after itself over time without losing its identity and boundaries, or its conversation with its environment on how to change. This is the capacity of providing enough for its own continuation in terms of energy, attention, and relationships through continuous change.

The term ‘Health and Well-being’ applies at different scales. Individually, it includes your physical and mental state at a given time. Socially, the quality of relationships and interdependencies that allow a system, whether family, team, organisation, or society, to function. Globally, it encompasses the territory of Wicked Problems that cannot be solved once and for all, only navigated with care. Health and well-being are not entirely private. Each is also a property of the environments you participate in and influence. The workspace is one of the main contexts where your health is made or unmade.

Three elements of the Framework’s approach to Sustainable Health and Well-being are worth drawing out before proceeding.

The first is what is meant by sustainable. The word has been so colonised by corporate and environmental discourse that it has come to mean one thing - financial survival- and simultaneously almost anything (therefore increasingly to mean very little). In this framework, it has a precise sense:

A system is sustainable when it is able to look after itself over time. This is characterised by the work done to keep the system in existence. Health and well-being is not ‘a thing’ that does the work, the work is what health and well-being is. Sustainable health and well-being is not an outcome.

The emphasis is on the system’s own capacity for self-maintenance, not on the absence of stress or the presence of resources. A system that is being looked after by something else is not sustainable in this sense, however well it may be functioning at any given moment. A managed lawn requires constant external intervention to remain a lawn, and would revert to something else within a season if the intervention were withdrawn. A meadow sustains itself, and the work of being a meadow is done by the meadow. The same distinction applies to people, teams, and organisations.

The second is the phrase “without losing its identity or boundaries.” This is what separates sustainability from mere endurance. Endurance is the capacity to keep going under load. Sustainability is the capacity to keep going as oneself. A working life conducted in unsustainable conditions can be endured, often for many years, but the cost is paid in the gradual erosion of the very properties that made the work meaningful in the first place. The manager who comes through a decade of overload still standing has not been sustained. They have been worn down to a different shape, often without noticing, because the change has happened in small enough increments that each one passed for adaptation.

The third is the move to scale. My definition specifies three: personal, social, and global. Health and well-being cannot be discussed independently in each of these (they are not separate domains). They are nested, and the conditions at each scale shape what is possible at the others. A person whose individual habits are exemplary will still become ill in a toxic working environment. A team whose members are individually well will still fail if its purposes and relationships are corroded. A society whose institutions are healthy will still be undermined if the ecological conditions on which it depends are degraded.

Most conventional accounts of health and well-being address only one scale at a time and have difficulty when the realities of the others intrude. I treat them as constitutive of one another, which is why the definition is more demanding than it may at first appear.

Three examples may make these elements more concrete.

At the scale of an individual life, John Dodd offers something close to a working illustration. John, a Henley MBA alumnus and my guest in episode 12 of the Unfinished Business podcast, is Director of Satellite Maritime Safety at Inmarsat, where he is responsible for the safety systems used by 1.9 million seafarers globally. His career has spanned the UK armed forces, work as a motorbike stuntman, and more than twenty-five years in maritime safety. While at Inmarsat he led the implementation of a new safety system that produced a fourfold increase in the use of search and rescue services by global authorities, and the project won the International Maritime Rescue Federation Award for Innovation and Technology in 2023. He completed his Senior Leaders Apprenticeship and MBA at Henley in 2023, was named Outstanding Apprentice of the Year in 2022, and received an honorary Doctor of Maritime Studies from Solent University in 2024.

What makes John’s example useful here is not the accumulation of these achievements but the way they are arranged. A career that takes on this much weight, over this long a period, and in a domain where the consequences of error are this serious, would deplete most people. In John’s case, the demands of the work appear to renew the capacity to do the work. Each new commitment is grounded in the previous ones rather than added to them. The MBA was undertaken alongside a senior operational role, not in respite from it. The honorary doctorate was recognition of work that was already underway, not a pause from it. This is what sustainability looks like at the personal scale. It is not the absence of demand but the presence of conditions, internal and external, under which sustained engagement does not extract more than it provides.

At the organisational scale, the carpet tile manufacturer Interface offers a different kind of example. In 1994, the company’s founder, Ray Anderson, read Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and concluded that the industrial model on which his own business depended was fundamentally extractive, and that the cost of this extraction was being externalised onto the systems within which the business operated. The response was Mission Zero, a programme committed to eliminating the company’s negative environmental impact by 2020. The company is now pursuing a successor commitment, Climate Take Back, with the aim of becoming carbon negative by 2040. The Interface case is useful for its structural form as much as the ethical content of the commitment. The company has redesigned its operations so that they contribute to maintaining the conditions on which its continued existence depends, rather than running them down. This is sustainability at the industrial scale (literally), where an entity has redesigned its operations so that they contribute to the larger systems that sustain it, rather than running them down.

At the scale of a living ecosystem, the Miyawaki forest method makes the principle visible in its purest form. Akira Miyawaki, the Japanese botanist who developed the method in the 1970s, had observed that conventional reforestation produced fragile, slow-growing plantations that required continuous management, while the small remnants of native forest he studied around Shinto shrines were dense, biodiverse, and self-sustaining. His method involves planting many native species in close proximity, allowing natural competition and cooperation to produce, within two or three years, a forest that no longer requires human intervention. The forest can then look after itself. The contrast with conventional plantation forestry is precisely the contrast at issue. A plantation is managed. A Miyawaki forest sustains itself. The principle is not metaphorical. It applies to human systems as well as to forests, and the Miyawaki case is useful here because it shows the logic without the complications introduced by human consciousness and culture.

These three examples are not held up as templates to imitate. They are offered as illustrations of what the HDF definition points to when it speaks of sustainability, identity, and scale. Each depends on conditions being arranged so that the system in question can do its own work of self-maintenance.

The reason this aspect of the framework needs the treatment it is getting, rather than the lighter touch given to many topics in management education, is that the failure mode it addresses is now widespread enough to deserve closer examination. The mid-career managers I work with on the Henley Executive MBA arrive, in many cases, in a state of cumulative low-grade depletion that they have come to treat as the normal cost of doing serious work. They have been exercising self-awareness and self-accountability for years, and the result is not equilibrium but erosion. The first move many of them make, when the topic of well-being arises, is to reach for time management, prioritisation, or some refinement of personal technique, as though the problem were one of vocabulary rather than grammatical structure. The appeal to technique allows the manager to take action without examining what is generating the pressure in the first place. The cultural surround of well-being today, with its apps, programmes, mini-retreats (how many organisations hold awaydays in the office?), and protocols, has made this kind of avoidance respectable.

Your health is not a matter of personal optimisation but a property of the system you are, at the scale at which you live a life, embedded in the systems of which you are a part, and dependent on conditions that cannot be addressed by individual technique alone. This makes it a more demanding aspect to facilitate, because it does not yield to a method, and it makes it the more important aspect to ground, because the failure to do so leaves the rest of the framework without the durability it needs.

What follows in Part 2 is a survey of how health and well-being have been understood across different traditions of thought, paying particular attention to the scale at which each tradition has operated and to the moments at which the scales come apart and are put back together.

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References

Anderson, R (2011) Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, Random House Business

Hawken, P (1993) The Ecology of Commerce (1993), Harper Collins

Miyawaki, A (2004) “Restoration of living environment based on vegetation ecology: Theory and practice,” in Ecological Research 19(1): 83-90