A few months ago, I was in Seattle. Having never been there before and being a collector of the Starbucks mugs from whatever City I visit, I set out to buy a Seattle mug. (I do not actually like Starbucks coffee all that much, but I like their mugs as a memento).

First, I walked with Diane my wife, to the original Starbucks shop near the famous Pike Market. As we approached, I saw people milling around outside. Didn’t look like a queue, looked like a confused circling.

When we arrived, the shop was closed. This is a city that must have circa 10000 people or so coming in and out a day on cruise ships. A City where going into the original Starbucks must be on the tourist agenda. But yet, the shop was closed for 2 weeks. ‘Preparing ‘for the world cup apparently.

I thought fair enough. Loss of revenue obviously being charged to the marketing budget, and as a big company they may see a business case in making a move like this. (I come from a business schooling that would struggle to countenance shutting an asset down for 2 weeks, but there we are)

Never mind, I said to Diane, we can walk 20 minutes up the hill here and visit the Starbucks ‘flagship’ shop, where surely, they will have mugs and limited edition ones to boot!

Off we went. About 10 minutes into the journey, as we headed up towards Capitol Hill in Seattle, Diane started to doubt me. ‘Are you sure you know where you are going?“ she asked, from bitter experience of me not knowing where I am going but carrying on anyway.

Yes, I do, I said indignantly. Pointing to the tourist information and the advice of my friend Claude, as well as Apple Maps.

When Apple Maps told us we had arrived, we saw only a closed down unit. Confusion reigned. (And a stern talking too was given to me- for once again embarking on a wild goose chase without checking my facts)

When I got back to our hotel, I asked the concierge what is going on. (Claude had expressed equal surprise, concern and an apology for the ‘Starbucks debacle’. Claude at least was on my side! - as per its programming)

Oh yes, the Concierge explained, they shut that store last September. Very suddenly. Was a real surprise to us as it was very popular. They recommended another store nearby and if that didn’t work, they told me I could buy a Starbucks mug in Target. Yes, you read that right, in Target.

Reader, the next Starbucks store was shut too. The two I found open, did not have the merch. Target delivered. (Diane had left me to it by this stage)

Now I asked my friend Claude what the root cause of this multiple closure could be. It stated that downtown Seattle had office occupancy rates only in the high 30% (which I have not verified), and rents were very high. The downtown was experiencing a hollowing out as businesses went towards to suburbs.

Made sense I suppose, but surely not the flagship store?

Then I spoke with the locals. I find that speaking to human beings does trump speaking to an AI, even if, irritatingly, they tend not to agree with you all the time. They told me that their opinion was that the shops were closed because they were unionised, that was the common denominator behind the specific closure I had seen. And the locals, it turns out, are not alone in their theory. The flagship store I had been hunting was in fact one of the first Starbucks stores to unionise, and it closed in September 2025 as part of a restructuring that shut hundreds of stores across the country – a disproportionate share of them unionised. The union has filed charges over these closures. Separately, back in 2023, the National Labor Relations Board formally accused Starbucks of illegally closing 23 stores from an earlier round, including 8 in the Seattle area, and sought to have them reopened. Closing stores in retaliation for union organising would be illegal; Starbucks denies wrongdoing in both cases and says its closures follow ordinary business reviews, and that is a question for the legal process to settle, not for me. But such power moves are, it is fair to say, a feature of U.S. industrial relations.

Starbucks was rich enough to close its primary tourist magnet for 2 weeks, so I am guessing it is not struggling for cash. I can see how less footfall and high rents would make individual units unviable. So, I would find it sad if the locals’ theories proved true too, after all what a testament to the failure of employee relations management it would be to have to close your flagship store because it unionised?

Managing the collective side of employee relations can be an added value competitive advantage done well. Unions can help improve productivity if the relationships are healthy. To decide as a Business that you simply do not have this capability, and your only recourse is exit, is a stain on the HR and employee relations profession. For this reason, I really hope that it was not Starbucks motivation at all.

I watched the new UK PM being interviewed on the BBC the other week. Burnham is clearly a thoughtful politician, prepared to engage with the dilemmas of governing in the 2020s. Yet the questions kept getting in the way of the interview.

‘What do you think of Donald Trump?’ A classic of its kind. A gotcha question, designed to drive clicks. There is no universe in which a new British PM condemns the president of the United States in his first weeks in office. We learn nothing by the asking. The only purpose is mischief; on the off chance he mis-speaks.

Tell me what you think about Prince Harry? Will you condemn XXXX ? These are questions for a politics of reality TV. Nothing on the real dilemmas, nothing seeking context so we can understand the inevitable trade-offs of governing. A politician who answers fully will generate a quote to be stripped of its context within minutes. One who replies robotically, as they are now trained to do, gets condemned for being, er…robotic, and the interview is a waste of everyone’s time. Boris Johnson found a third way. Keep talking until the clock runs out. The interview thwarted, the public none the wiser.

It was not always like this. When I was younger, I religiously watched David Frost on a Sunday morning on the BBC. He got the very top people on his show, and they seemed flattered to be asked. He was relaxed, conversational, welcoming, and he routinely made the news. With substance, not clickbait. Ask Neil Kinnock. During the 1987 election run up Frost drew him into explaining that Britain’s response to nuclear attack would be to make any occupation untenable, using all the resources of guerrilla resistance in lieu of a deterrent. It cost Labour dear. Kinnock said afterwards that Frost had lulled him, like talking to an old friend. Brian Walden achieved much the same on Weekend World on ITV again on a Sunday, through deep research and the patience to let a genuine argument develop. Both men were interested in the issues and, as importantly, in the people sitting opposite. Politicians felt they had made it when the invitation arrived. Serious people having serious discussions.

The easy conclusion is that the interviewers have simply got worse nowadays. I don’t think that is what has happened (Not entirely anyway). Times have just changed. Each new technology carries a new worldview with it and washes the old one out. The political interview is a small, well-preserved fossil record of those waves of worldviews being washed through.

The political interview was born in the age of newsprint and radio. Words were all there were, so the focus was on the words and on listening. The interviewer’s job was to elicit, the audience’s job was to attend, and deference set the terms. The story goes that Attlee, asked in 1951 whether he had anything to say about the coming election, replied ‘no’. And that was that.

Television changed all that. The famous story told about the Kennedy and Nixon debates is that radio listeners scored them for Nixon, and viewers for Kennedy. Everyone drew the lesson back then in 1960, image and emotion now carried the day in the TV age. Yet the first television generation, Frost and Walden among them, had learned their trade in the listening era. They used the intimacy of the screen to draw people out rather than catch them out. The grammar of the old technology survived for a while inside the new one. It usually does. (The ‘Ghost network’ at it again!)

Then came the internet and rolling news. A channel that must make news every hour turns the interview inevitably into a machine for manufacturing content. Pace replaced patience. Paxman asking Michael Howard the same question twelve times was magnificent theatre but told us almost nothing. The interview became a performance with its own highlights reel, and politicians responded rationally. Message discipline. The robotic answer. The media-trained non-person.

Social media has compounded this. Its worldview is that every opinion is equal and every moment is content. An interview is no longer watched, it is harvested. Thirty seconds of it will travel further than the whole hour. Interviewer and politician now perform for a clip neither of them really controls, judged by an algorithm serving each of us in our own private bubble. The ‘gotcha question’ is in this context not lazy. It is the optimal strategy for the technology. Meanwhile politicians try to route round the whole game, communicating direct on TikTok, where they are unchallenged and unexamined.

So, what comes next? We are entering the age of Paradox, in which the governing skill is holding tensions. Growth and sustainability. Security and openness. Speed and deliberation. Governing in the 2020s is dilemma management, which is precisely what Burnham was trying to talk about while being asked for his opinion of Donald Trump, and Prince Harry. An interview fit for this worldview would take the trade-off, not the slip of the tongue, as its raw material. What does this policy cost, and who pays? What would have to be true for it to fail? What have you changed your mind about? Questions a thoughtful politician could actually answer and be judged on.

There are signs the supporting or driving technology to enable this shift is arriving. When AI can generate infinite clips, clips become worthless. Lets hope that ‘the gotcha’ is being automated into oblivion. Our attention will move to what the machines cannot fake, which is a person thinking, at length, in front of us. Notice where politicians already go when they want to be heard: the long-form podcast. One or even three hours, conversational, unhurried. Closer to Frost’s sofa than to the modern-day duel.

Worldviews however can overlap, and when they do, they sometimes rhyme. The listening that newsprint and radio forced on us may return at a higher turn of the spiral. The first interviewer to relearn what Frost knew, that people reveal themselves when they are heard rather than hunted, will own the new podcast medium. Candidates are already emerging. And the politicians brave enough to think aloud in their company might even benefit. I wonder will Andy Burnham take that risk?

On 19 July, Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in New Jersey to win the World Cup. Ferran Torres scored the only goal, in extra time. It was a tight miserable, boring game. As a contest of ideas though, it was compelling.

Argentina defended their title around a star, Messi, ten men in his service. Spain brought no cult of the individual. Their low-key coach, Luis de la Fuente, has spent thirteen years inside the Spanish federation. He took the Under-19s in 2013 and won the European title with them in 2015. He won the Under-21 title in 2019 and Olympic silver in Tokyo. Rodri, Fabián Ruiz, Mikel Merino and Unai Simón all played for him as teenagers. Questioned about his squads, his answer was simple: “I know these footballers and I make my decisions based on how much I know them.”

The collective beat the star. The coach who grew up with his players beat the model that depends on a spark of greatness for a tournament. I think that is significant beyond Spain winning a world cup. It is the clearest sign, yet that football is changing ‘waves.’

I originally made this argument in my first ever Substack in September 2024, at far too great a length. Almost nobody read it. Fair enough. I don’t give up easily though. Here it is again, shorter, with a World Cup final as the hook this time.

In the 1950s the American professor Clare Graves spotted recurring worldviews in his students’ writing and showed how they evolve upwards in a spiral of complexity. The model has since been applied to politics, business and leadership. FC Midtjylland have reportedly used it to build a team. Apply it to football and you can also see that the game’s history falls into waves. Each one rises, dominates, decays and seeds its successor. Regular readers will be sick of hearing about them; Alan Watkins and I applied them to HR in our book from 2019, H. (R) evolution.

The first wave of football was paternalism. (Shocked I hear you say!). The game was codified in the English private schools, first as the Cambridge rules, then in October 1863 at the Freemasons’ Tavern as the Football Association rules. Its purpose was to develop gentlemen fit to run the Empire. The Church was midwife: Everton, Fulham, Manchester City and Southampton all began as church teams. Referees wore black, the uniform of priests. Muscular Christianity the ethos.

By the 1880s the purpose was control. Let’s call it the Power, wave, shall we? Industrialists needed thousands of workers turning up sober and healthy for work each day, so they built model villages and adopted football teams, kick-off at 3pm as the Saturday shift ended. They wanted to ensure that their workers focused on something other than organising themselves into trade unions. Football teams were a great distraction. Thames Ironworks became West Ham. The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway team became Manchester United. The gentlemen of the Corinthians gave way to the working men of Blackburn Olympic, Cup winners in 1883. Professionalism was legalised in 1885 after years of shamateurism. This was the power wave, and its pivotal figure was the star player. Crowds paid to see individuals, from the goalscorers to the twenty-stone goalkeeper William Foulke. The power approach remains popular today. We all want to see the star player after all.

The 1925 offside change announced the process wave. Herbert Chapman built the W-M formation to exploit it and the manager, and his tactics became the pivotal figure. The game became less about scoring goals than securing the win. Hungary dismantling England in 1953, Ramsey’s wingless wonders in 1966: process triumphs. Jimmy Hill (player, manager, chairman, pundit) epitomised the age championing as he did the end of the maximum wage (And much else). For those of us of a certain age this is the golden era of ‘proper’ football. (The sheer visceral violence of the Leeds V Chelsea cup final, muddy pitches, turning up and paying a shilling to get in on the day, jumpers for goalposts etc, It wasn’t all good: we will not mention the bespoke toilet arrangements involving match programmes, used on the terraces ) Process calcified into catenaccio, stadia decayed, and the wave decayed tragically at Ibrox, Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough.

Cruyff’s Holland however, had shown us a different future as early as 1974. Guardiola and Klopp turned total football into tiki-taka and gegenpressing, and the coach and his support team (note, no longer manager) became kings. Off the pitch, Sky bought the new Premier League and turned a game into an entertainment business. Spurs had floated on the stock exchange back in 1983. “There used to be a football club over there,” said (apocryphally), Keith Burkinshaw, our process wave manager, on his way out. This was “ a whole new ball game’ - the profit wave. Wages spiralled, agents multiplied, governance lagged. It peaked and started the decline, morally at least, with the 2015 dawn raids on FIFA in Zurich and the botched breakaway super leagues. Every wave crashes. This one has, and Gianni Infantino’s recent botched partial sale of the world cup, ‘the world cup!’, to private equity encapsulate the wave break.

The seeds of the next wave always sit within the current one. The people wave first showed itself in Brazil as early as the 1980s, when the sociologist Adilson Monteiro Alves and the doctor turned footballer Sócrates ran their club Corinthians as a democracy, every employee voting, players to bus drivers. You can see it today at St Pauli’s, which declare no place for homophobia, fascism, sexism or racism. In Forest Green’s sustainability. At Grimsby Town, centred by its progressive owners as the anchor of the local community, in Wrexham’s story of belonging (let’s see how long that lasts as they hit the big time?). In Germany’s fan-owned clubs, in non-league crowds up ten thousand a week on pre-Covid levels, and in the collegiate rise of the women’s game. The iconic coach Bielsa has argued for years that football is a cultural expression, a form of identification, not a business. It is (or should be) people wave in its values.

On the pitch, the people wave envisions the team as a collective. Recruitment on fit, not fame: the thinking behind Brighton and Brentford. Squads over stars, sports science over folklore, the sporting director curating the whole.

And now the people wave has a World Cup. Spain beating Argentina was the collective beating the star model on the game’s biggest stage, delivered by a coach whose method is patience, continuity and knowing his players since boyhood. People beating power. Waves announce themselves with moments. The Dutch in 1974 gave us a glimpse of the profit wave to come (They lost remember to the process kings of West Germany). De la Fuente’s Spain may be remembered as the arrival fully of football’s people wave

Every wave breaks and a new one rolls in. The people wave is fragile. Like Bielsa’s teams, it struggles to endure. What follows is the paradox wave: two football cultures at once. A global, AI-assisted entertainment product, matches war-gamed virtually before they are played, tournaments reshaped around events, half time shows, hydration breaks, and sports entrepreneurs and investors. Let’s not be fooled for a minute that the ‘selling the world cup’ concept is all Infantino. It is the essence of the profit wave in decay.

The paradox will be that alongside it; we will have a local, community-rooted game fuelled by identity and connection. The Grimsby Towns of this world. We will watch the profit wave game still. But in our hearts, we will belong, or want to belong, to the second, community led game. Those of us raised supporting a big club (well, in my case Spurs) will increasingly find it hard. It will become increasingly difficult to really identify with players earning over £40K plus per day, yes, per day, and a game that is increasingly being ‘sweated’ by its private equity masters. Watching crypto company adverts at half time, and knowing that the club you once knew, is long gone. We have to face the fact that we are ‘legacy fans’ now, who will just need to learn to surf football’s paradox wave.

In February I told anyone who would listen that we were about to rerun 1973. The Strait of Hormuz carries a fifth of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied gas. Once it closed, I expected $200 oil, rationing, and shortages of everything made from hydrocarbons, which is most things. The analysts who spent March predicting a $200 oil price have quietly moved on to predicting something else. I can’t criticise them, because I was predicting the same. Five months on, Brent crude peaked at $126 and sits under $80 as I write. Petrol is dearer for sure, but it appears that the newspapers are bored of the petrol price story for now (In the UK). The biggest supply cut in the history of oil has produced, in the West at least, a murmur not an earthquake. So how did I get it so wrong?

After all, it seemed so logical back in Feb. The 1973 embargo removed about 6 per cent of world supply and quadrupled the price, and we still talk about it half a century later. (Regular readers will remember me reminiscing about ‘doing my homework by candlelight’) The Strait of Hormuz closure took out up to a fifth of world supply and, yet the oil price never even doubled (for long). An oil shock three times the size of the biggest oil shock in history is turning out to be an anticlimax of sorts. Something structural and systemic must have changed, and I for one didn’t notice it.

Part of it is timing. Luckily, the Iran war arrived into a glut; the IEA had been expecting a surplus of nearly four million barrels a day this year and the world’s tanks were full. Part of it is plumbing. The Saudis built the East-West pipeline to the Red Sea after the tanker wars of the 1980s and it has run flat out at seven million barrels a day. The Emiratis built their line to Fujairah after Iran last threatened the strait in 2008, then walked out of OPEC in May so they could sell every barrel through it. Nearly half the “lost” oil simply went round the outside. The strategic reserves, fifty years of being mocked as very expensive holes in the ground, released about a billion barrels. Even the blockade leaks: Iran now charges tankers a dollar a barrel to pass its own minefields. And then there is America, which in 1973 was the embargo’s target and is now the world’s largest producer, roughly self-sufficient, running exports two million barrels a day above normal within weeks.

The biggest surprise, and the point of this story, was and is China. It seemed it simply stopped buying. Imports reportedly fell 40 per cent, about five million barrels a day, an OPEC cut in reverse, while it ran down a stockpile estimated at 1.4 billion barrels. It capped pump prices, cut refinery runs, switched chemical plants to coal, and daily life carried on. It could afford all this because more than half its new cars are now electric, and because it had spent years filling caverns for this moment.

Under all of that sits the systemic bit The world now uses about half the oil per unit of output that it did in the 1970s. Electric vehicles, mostly scooters and small cars in Asia, already displace around two million barrels a day. And the market now believes oil demand is close to its peak, so nobody is hoarding against a decade of scarcity the way they did in 1979.

I should be careful with “we”, though. The shock has not been contained everywhere; it has been pushed onto the countries that still depend on Gulf energy. Bangladesh expects to lose a third of this year’s LNG cargoes; factory power cuts have doubled to five hours a day, the garment sector, 84 per cent of its exports, is running at half capacity, and four of its five urea plants shut down mid rice season. Pakistan and Bangladesh between them have paid an extra billion dollars for spot gas. In the Philippines diesel has roughly doubled, and Manila is watching both its fuel bill and the 2.5 million Filipinos working in the Gulf. India has nine million citizens there and some $50 billion a year in remittances riding on the region staying employable. Seen from Dhaka or Manila the crisis has very much arrived. It just hasn’t arrived to the same extent yet in the West.

There is another question that puzzled me: why did Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hurt us so much more? The 2022 shock was palpable in Britain in a way this one is not, and yet on paper the 2022 event was smaller. Three reasons. Gas is not oil: oil is global and its pain spreads thinly across a single world price, while pipeline gas is regional, has no quick substitute, and sets the price of European electricity, so gas at ten times normal became everyone’s heating bill. Russia was our supplier: Europe spent forty years building its dependence, that was cut off, whereas four fifths of Hormuz oil went east, so this time we are watching someone else’s artery. And timing: 2022 landed on post-Covid inflation and stimulus money; 2026 landed into a glut. I would add a fourth. The LNG terminals Europe threw up in a panic that winter have perhaps kept this crisis off European bills.

None of which means the story is over yet. There is a good chance I might be wrong about being wrong. Everything that has cushioned this shock is a stock, not a flow. Inventories are draining at record pace, the strategic reserves will need refilling, and China’s cavern arithmetic works for a year or so, not indefinitely. The fertiliser problem is only now reaching the fields: the Gulf ships a third of the world’s traded urea and half its sulphur, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is already warning about next year’s harvests, and food prices lag fertiliser by a season or two. If the strait stays half-shut into 2027, my guess is a second and stickier rise in oil prices, a food spike that lands hardest on poor importers, and balance-of-payments trouble in Bangladesh, Philippines, Pakistan and Egypt . “Wrong” may yet turn out to be “early”, a slower, meaner, longer lasting crisis than the one I predicted.

So, what should we learn? First, that redundancy works, and that we business executives who spent twenty years sneering at it were very wrong. Every shock absorber I have described here, was built between crises and seen at the time as ‘poor investment’: the pipelines to nowhere, the holes in the ground, the shale wells drilled at a loss, the subsidised heat pumps, windmills, solar panels and EVs. Meanwhile the fashionable disciplines were just-in-time, lean inventory and efficiency, an entire management system that treated any slack as a sin and demanded quick investment return. Risk planning, long term capital spends, stock build as an insurance, the dullest of activities, (no growth there after all), turns out to be the one that saves us all in the end. Who knew?

Second, the war has done something that Governments have only toyed with: it has put a whacking great tax on carbon. (I will call this the ‘Trump Paradox’). Expensive oil is doing more for the energy transition than thirty years of climate summits. Chinese solar exports jumped 80 per cent in March; the Philippines has bought $400 million of panels since February; Pakistan is saving billions through the solar boom it started before the war; China shipped two million EVs abroad in five months. Every one of those purchases is permanent. Nobody un-buys a solar panel when the strait reopens. The blockade meant to remind the world it needs the Gulf, is bit by bit teaching the world it doesn’t.

Which points to the obvious Western to-do list: hold stocks of the things that matter. Now and in the near future, rare earths, ammonia, grid transformers, and rebuild the capacity to make our own chips rather than relying on a single island in another contested strait. Ironically, we may congratulate ourselves now on surviving the oil chokepoint, but yet over the same last twenty years, in pursuit of the quarterly results and an outsourced cost base, we have built for ourselves a new future choke point. The country that refines 90 per cent of the world’s rare earths, processes two thirds of its lithium and cobalt, dominates solar, batteries and transformers, is the same country that just showed us, in real time, what it looks like when a planned economy decides to stop trading. China. The next Hormuz may be a different strait, and we may be jumping from one dire strait to another. After all there is ‘no money for nothing’. (IYKYK - I’ll get my coat).

It’s August. The newspapers are full of summer reading lists. So, a rather presumptuous Substack this week. I offer you nothing less than a reading list for life! Or more specifically, your working life. No beach reads from me, I am afraid.

When I give presentations on the HR Waves approach – you will know it by now surely? - 7 waves, paternalism, power, process, profit, people, paradox, planet (Keep up there at the back!). I am nearly always asked for some kind of reading list. The question normally assumes I will make a management book recommendation. I try to mumble something intelligent and leave it at that. After all, in these circumstances I find all roads lead anyway to Peter Senge.

However, I thought I might construct, for my own use, as much as anything, a fuller list. I used my friend Claude to research and tease out possibilities. So, some of the book recommendations below come from me, some from Claude, some from a mixture of the two of us, that is the surreal magic of AI prompting. Annoyingly, Claude has a tendency to agree with everything I say, it’s like being on one of those almost regal senior leader tours of far-flung offices and factories again…you know you are getting useful information, but filtered through what ‘people’ think you want to hear…

The list below is for anyone interested.

Wave 1 — PATERNAL

“I will look after you”

The Books here are all the classics written in or around the time of paternalism. (1840s-1900) Apart from Downton Abbey, which feels like it was. Hobbes who was ahead of his time, and Shakespeare who was even more ahead of his time.

Non-fiction: Smiles — Self Help · Owen — A New View of Society · Rowntree — Poverty: A Study of Town Life

Philosophy: Rousseau — The Social Contract · Hobbes — Leviathan

Fiction / Drama: Dickens — Hard Times · Dickens — Oliver Twist · Gaskell — North and South · Hardy — Far from the Madding Crowd · Hardy — Tess of the D’Urbervilles · Shakespeare — King Lear (play)

Film / TV: Downton Abbey

Poetry: Kipling — (I’ll leave it at ‘Kipling’, IYKYK)

Wave 2 — POWER

“Do as I say”

As this wave is still with us, having first arrived in the mid-19^th century in earnest, the offerings here range over time and space. Power, and power people, like taxes and death, are with us always.

Non-fiction: Ford — My Life and Work · Iacocca — Iacocca · Caro — The Power Broker · Caro — The Years of Lyndon Johnson · Greene — The 48 Laws of Power · Mackay — Swim with the Sharks, Lewis — The life and death of Peter Sellers.

Philosophy: Machiavelli — The Prince · Nietzsche — The Will to Power

Fiction / Drama: Puzo — The Godfather · Miller — Death of a Salesman (play) · Warren — All the King’s Men · Shakespeare — Macbeth / Richard III / Julius Caesar (plays,) Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

Film / TV: Succession (HBO) · The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)

Poetry: Shelley — Ozymandias. Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’, is this Wave’s anthem.

Wave 3 — PROCESS

“We will follow the rules”

Process arrived early in the twentieth century but really hit its stride after the second world war. Later works on process, (post 1990s) tend to focus on the downsides of bureaucracies, mainly through (often affectionate) humour.

Non-fiction: Taylor — Principles of Scientific Management · Drucker — The Practice of Management · Sloan — My Years with General Motors · Hammer & Champy — Reengineering the Corporation · Mintzberg — The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning,Mintzberg — Understanding organizations: Finally!

Philosophy: Weber — Economy and Society · Kant — Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Fiction / Drama: Kafka — The Trial · Heller — Catch-22 · Asimov — I, Robot · Le Carré — The Spy Who Came in from the Cold · Herron — Slow Horses · Shakespeare — Measure for Measure (play)

Film / TV: Brazil (Gilliam, 1985), The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perring, BBC (1976-1979), Yes Minister (BBC 1980-1988)

Poetry: Auden — The Unknown Citizen, Untermeyer —Portrait of a machine

Wave 4 — PROFIT

“Let me share my vision”

The 1980’s and beyond. Thatcher, Reagan, privatisation, shareholder capitalism. Very much the playlist of my working time.

Non-fiction: Welch — Winning · Peters & Waterman — In Search of Excellence · Porter — Competitive Strategy · Collins — Good to Great · Hamel — Competing for the Future, Ulrich— HR Champions

Philosophy: Smith — The Wealth of Nations · Friedman — Capitalism and Freedom

Fiction / Drama: Wolfe — The Bonfire of the Vanities · Lewis — Liar’s Poker

Film / TV: Wall Street (Stone, 1987) · Glengarry Glen Ross (Mamet, 1992)

Poetry: — an open question, is there any poetry about profit or performance? I can think only of songs – the ballad of Muhannad Ali by Paul Coppola. Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the best’ is perhaps the iconic song of this wave. I remember the field sales teams blaring it out from their company cars back in the day! And I suppose Queen’s ‘We are the champions’ too (As a spurs supporter I have not had many occasions to chant this particular number).

Wave 5 — PEOPLE

“Change with you”

Arrived in society in the swinging ‘60s (‘all you need is love’) but didn’t turn up in the workplace until post 2008. An unstable wave, presently receding.

Non-fiction: Pink — Drive · Edmondson — The Fearless Organization · Semler — Maverick · Schein — Organizational Culture and Leadership · Brown — Dare to Lead · Sapolsky — Behave

Philosophy: Rawls — A Theory of Justice · Maslow — Motivation and Personality

Fiction / Drama: Eggers — The Circle (dark fall of the wave) · Shaw — Major Barbara / Pygmalion

Film / TV: Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)

Poetry: Whitman — Song of Myself. Most pop music of one kind or another populates this wave, does it not?

Wave 6 — PARADOX

Holding contradictions

I hope the description of our future, or not as the case may be, especially where the work shows that the ‘systemic’ can also be dystopian.

Non-fiction: Senge — The Fifth Discipline · Watkins — Coherence · Handy — The Age of Paradox · Martin — The Opposable Mind· Johnson — Polarity Management · Smith & Lewis — Both/And Thinking · Laloux — Reinventing Organizations, Wilber & Watkins— Wicked Problems

Philosophy: Hegel — Phenomenology of Spirit · Wilber — Sex, Ecology, Spirituality · Handy — The Empty Raincoat

Fiction / Drama: Le Guin — The Dispossessed · Eliot — Middlemarch · Forster — Howards End · Forster — A Passage to India · McEwan — Atonement · Tolstoy — War and Peace · Asimov — Foundation · Shakespeare — Hamlet / The Tempest (plays)

Film / TV: The Wire (HBO), Invictus (Warner Bros, 2009)

Poetry: Yeats — The Second Coming

Wave 7 — PLANET

“Integrating the whole”

If we do not end up destroying the planet, this is the future after the future. Our society focuses on regenerating the earth instead of extracting from it. Some dystopian material is included too though, to ‘tip my hat’ to demotivational visioning.

Non-fiction: (These are sort of the nearest, but I think the book is yet to be born) Raworth — Doughnut Economics · Mazzucato — The Value of Everything · Polman — Net Positive · Mackey — Conscious Capitalism · Daly — Beyond Growth · Sapolsky — Determined, Giles Hutchins- The Nature of Business

Philosophy: Sen — Development as Freedom · Habermas — Theory of Communicative Action · Wilber — Integral Spirituality

Fiction / Drama: Robinson — The Ministry for the Future · Butler — Parable of the Sower · Banks — The Culture series · Asimov— Foundation and Earth, Shriver — The Mandibles

Film / TV: Don’t Look Up (McKay, 2021), Interstellar, (Nolan 2014), Inception, (Nolan 2010).

Poetry: Heaney — The Cure at Troy

Cross-Wave Threads

I think the mark of a ‘great’ is when their work Criss-crosses a number of waves, capturing full spectrum humanity:

Asimov — I, Robot (Process) → Foundation (Paradox — the plan meets its limits) → Foundation and Earth / Galaxia (Planet): the full wave arc encoded in one writer’s career. I first read him as a teenager, and his work has been relevant through my life- still connecting to my experience. (Though emerging revelations about his behaviour to women does raise the ‘love the art not the artist dilemma’)

Shakespeare — King Lear (Paternal) · Macbeth / Richard III / Julius Caesar (Power) · Measure for Measure (Process) · Hamlet / The Tempest (Paradox): the complete wave diagnosis of human nature across four centuries and all of his plays. And so much ahead of his time. He will surely only have experienced paternalism and power himself?

Sapolsky — Behave at People (understand before you judge) and Determined at Planet (dissolves the meritocratic myth entirely): the most radical modern cross-wave thinker in the table. His work is grounded in interdisciplinary sciences, which itself must be the future of thinking.

Wilber — Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Paradox) and Integral Spirituality (Planet): the philosophical spine of the upper waves. Discovering Wilber for me was intellectually life changing. His latest ‘Finding Radical Wholeness’ is probably the best written summary of his thought.

Caro — The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: how Power-wave leaders are made by systems as much as by will. The definitive case study in personal and institutional power, across two subjects. Although not strictly multi -wave, I believe Caro is the best at capturing the deep and rich dynamics of power in action since Machiavelli. And as I said at the start, power and power people will always be with us. For that reason, it is essential to understand the dynamics and that is why he makes it on to this list of my ‘greats’.

One final comment. Please do not take any of the recommendations above to the Beach with you, they are not for ‘light enjoyment’ and fun. There is every chance that if you do go to the beach with one of the above, it may spoil your holiday. These are works that deserve to be ‘suffered’ through. The books are best ‘enjoyed’ in a darkened room on a winter’s night with a solitary light casting an atmospheric shadow over you, as you read, watch or listen.

Ok – if you have got this far. Thank you for reading. But before you go, do not forget H (R) evolution 2019, by Watkins and Dalton too… This one can be read anywhere, anytime, any place . (Recommended for when it rains)

I have been digging into my Irish family history lately, the way you do once you hit a certain age. My maternal grandfather’s people farmed Caherdorgan North, on the Dingle Peninsula above Smerwick Harbour in the west of Ireland. As I learned more about the people, their way of life and their challenges, one name kept surfacing: the Reverend Charles Gayer, chaplain of what the district knew as the Dingle Colony, the evangelical mission built to win Irish-speaking Catholics away from Rome, during the period of 1825-1855.

In February 1846, the first winter of the Famine, Gayer’s men were working a disputed field at Caherdorgan when my ancestors Nicholas and Michael arrived with a neighbour and a crowd of twenty or thirty behind them. Nicholas told Gayer’s steward it would be better ‘to have the land under the sea than see any more work done on it’ and took the spade out of his hands. They were tried for ‘riot’ that July and sent to prison. (By 1850 however they had the land back, anyway, rent being paid to Lord Ventry same as before).

It’s almost too neat a Kerry family history, isn’t it? The proselytising rector, the evicted Catholic family, the Famine as backdrop. Maggie O’Farrell, hold my beer.

Except two years after he’d had my family put away and had tried to put them on the curb, the same Gayer was nursing and feeding the starving of Dingle, Catholic and Protestant alike, until the famine fever that was killing his parishioners killed him too, in 1848. The mission he’d built didn’t outlive him by more than a generation. Most of the converts drifted back to the church they’d left once the money and the man who’d driven it were both gone.

So who was the Rev Gayer? The man who put my ancestors in prison over a field? or the man who died caring for a parish even though many hated him for it?

It appears he was both.

My first instinct, like most people handed an inconvenient second half to a story, was to keep the villain and quietly lose the rest. It makes for a cleaner narrative. Wronged Catholic family, wicked proselytising rector, the end. But it isn’t the honest version, and honesty aside, it isn’t even the interesting one.

The interesting version isn’t either simply that Gayer had a good side and a bad side, like some Jekyll and Hyde. It’s that the role he played over the field, and in the fever, ward came from exactly the same place in him. Not two Gayers, taking turns. One man, one quality, doing what he felt was right and so was compelled to.

The quality he had was ‘righteousness’, a specific and dangerous kind of certainty that you know what these people need better than they know it themselves. And the reality in life is that: it’s righteousness, not plain decency, that actually often gets things done. Plain decency doesn’t run a mission colony or empty a fever ward. Gayer had certainty, and certainty is what lets a person go at something with everything they’ve got, without the small nagging voice that stops the rest of us halfway. It isn’t that his righteousness sometimes pointed him at good and sometimes at harm. Doing either, at the scale he did both, needed the exact same absence of doubt.

Solzhenitsyn captured it in the Gulag Archipelago. The line separating good and evil, he wrote, doesn’t run between nations, or classes, or parties. It runs through every human heart. Usually that gets read as a comment on original sin, a bit of bad in all of us. I think he was making a sharper point than that: the line doesn’t separate the righteous from the wicked at all. It runs straight through the righteous themselves, because righteousness is a force rather than a virtue, and a force that just makes whatever you were already doing, more compelling to you.

I do not think that righteousness is all one flavour. There’s the kind that wants to pull people in, convert them, save them, improve them, whether they asked to be improved or not. And there’s a colder kind that wants to punish, to ‘other’. Gayer’s was unmistakably the first sort; whatever else you say about him, he wanted more Catholics in his Protestant church, not the eradication of the catholic people. It’s a distinction that matters a great deal once you start applying this kind of thinking somewhere much darker than a Kerry parish, which is exactly why I’m not going there.

So the lesson I’ve landed on isn’t the comfortable one, that everyone has good and bad in them, so who are we to judge. Let’s move on.

That lets us all off far too lightly.

The records of Gayer that survive were written entirely by people who opposed my ancestors and our ‘tribe,’ and the record of my family that survives, generous, put-upon, ultimately vindicated, is one I’ve just built by reading past everything in that record that doesn’t flatter them. I have done to Gayer roughly what his own supporters did to my ancestors in 1846, most specifically in the way the Kerry Evening post of the March 4^th reported their trial^[1].

I have a view of what was ‘right’ – a belief that there is a ‘right side of history’, and a relief that ‘my people’ were on the ‘right side’.

Which is exactly the uncomfortable insight here. Am I not, in the statement you have just read, being righteous ? And is it not the case that righteousness itself, anyone’s, mine included, without any curiosity or doubt at all, is the one force in this story that conjures up both ‘right and wrong’. Righteousness can build either a fever ward or a prison cell, with the same energy, and the same clear conscience.

Without any doubt or curiosity, righteousness cuts either way. But righteousness with curiosity and doubt is of course, no longer righteousness. Is it?

^[1] With thanks to Kay Caball of mykerryancestors.com

As a Spurs supporter, I anyway expected the worst, like most in England, I watched the world cup semi-final asking, whether this time, this time, it could be different?

When England went one – nil up, I must admit I did wonder. After all, hadn’t the English FA now invested a fortune in employing a tactical genius as the manager? Was it not the case that this group of players were unincumbered by past failure? Was in not also the case that Harry Kane was at his peak, and Jude Bellingham was exploding onto the world stage?

I should of course have known better. I think Harry Kane is great, but in truth he never did turn up for the crunch games when he was at Spurs. So why would he for England? The tactical genius appeared to adopt the same defensive tactics as had our very own homegrown (not tactical genius) Gareth Southgate, his predecessor. And the players were as worn out and drained by a long and intense premier league season as English players always are. The players from the premier league champions, Arsenal, in particular, made little to no contribution to the national cause. (Bit hard on the injured Rice I know, but what could have been if he and Saka were fully fit?).

After the defeat my reaction was very much driven by the emotional side of my brain. I jumped onto whats app to share with my son the view that ‘it was all the managers fault- what was he thinking?’. My son agreed, as did his friends, as did the pundits, as did the newspapers. Hurrah! we all had our culprit!

I am the same when I drop a cup that smashes, or cut my finger chopping vegetables, or mess up a DIY job. I instinctively look for something or someone to blame. Who distracted me? Who left that cup there? How can I be expected to do this job with these crap tools?

I suppose this instinct does come a little from my limiting beliefs. But I am not sure I am alone. It seems to me that as human beings we always want an explanation for why something happened. An opportunity to identify a root cause, so that we can ensure that the thing that went wrong can never happen again.

Ahh, if only life were like that. If only we could all learn as we go and be guaranteed the right formulas for success.

Learning as we go is a must, guaranteeing the right formula for success is a dream.

The English FA have spent the last 20 + years putting in place the infrastructure to support a successful national men’s football team. To be fair, it has worked to the extent that the team now regularly make semifinals and even finals. In my youth, England often failed to even qualify for tournaments -so with all objectivity, it is a job well done.

The thing is, life is random. The small breaks here or there. In football it can be inches, a spin on a ball, a player’s moment of hesitation.

Was the England coach really to blame for the semi-final defeat? Was it not the case that when he made his defensive substitutions the players were already being forced back, and on the verge of conceding. True, he made a call to stiffen up the defence in light of the game state, rather than seek to change the game state by throwing caution to the winds. My guess is that whichever way he had gone, England would have probably lost. The players were cooked after they took the lead, emotionally and physically. If Thomas Tuchel had decided to throw caution to the winds, myself, my son, my son’s friends, the pundits, the newspapers would all now be condemning him for naivety instead.

You see my learning is that in a random world, our belief that we can control events is a fallacy. Sure, we can do everything ‘right’. We can work hard, pay our dues, put in the hard yards. This is always necessary in life, but never sufficient. Doing the right thing only earns you the opportunity to get lucky, It does not guarantee you the outcome you want- think you deserve.

So, what should we take away from Wednesdays game – applying the logical side of our brains?

England did all the right things. They prepared properly; they employed the best coaches they could. They put together a team capable of progressing deep into the tournament. They created a collective team spirit. They got the process right.

However, it wasn’t enough – and more often than not, life is like that. What might get England over the line in the future is unpalatable to most of us. The missing ingredient that might enable an ‘extra inch’ would be to reduce the length of the premier league season, (so less teams in the premier league), get rid of the league cup ensuring the domestic tournaments had less games- putting less strain on the players. Now, a lot of us don’t want that, And even if we did it, it would be no guarantee either, as events are random. But it is probably the next lever to pull, if we want England to have more chance of getting ‘those needed breaks.

In life it is the same. We can and should always strive to improve. Find the next thing so we can the best version of ourselves. Failure to do this means giving up on ourselves and life. But paradoxically those with a profound winning mindset understand ‘the fallacy of control ‘and play the game (of life) with more of a sense of freedom than the rest of us. That may just be why they seem to win more often.

I have just finished reading ‘The unanchored Central banker’ by Manoj Pradhan and Charles Goodhart. Charles Goodhart has been an economist I have followed over the years. He is a former Chief adviser to the bank of England and is most famous for Goodhart’s law “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’.

Pradhan’s and Goodhart’s book made crystal clear something I had suspected all along. The so-called triumph of central bank independence, in maintaining low inflation for the last 20 years, had little or nothing to do with the skills of the central banks. In fairness, they didn’t mess things up, and that was always a possibility in the absence of bank independence, but for sure, they didn’t create the ‘goldilocks’ conditions we enjoyed from 1995 to 2008 either.

It was China all along!

Economics at its most basic is simple. (He says!). Demographics plus technological progress tends to equal growth. The rate of growth needs to be above the rate of interest in an economy for society to thrive, and for that to happen you need productive people and investment in new technology to drive productivity. Simples!

We had that golden formula after the fall of the Berlin wall. The labour force exploded, new workers from the east of Europe, women taking their place in the workplace. We had the emergence of China into the world economy. Billions of people, all working at low wages, deflating the global economy.

High savings rates in the fast-growing Asian economies then piled in, making money cheap, as millions upon millions of people looked to invest their ‘nest eggs’.

Together, these forces pushed growth above interest rates, multiplying investment and giving governments room to act. It was a genuine win-win—except, of course, for low-skilled workers in the West who lost jobs to cheaper Asian factories or saw wages squeezed by immigration. At the macro level, though, the economy had rarely looked better. Put another way, the rich and prosperous Western middle classes, along with the poor emerging from poverty in the East, had never had it so good.

The Central Bankers took the credit, Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, who died aged 100 a few weeks back, became ‘the man who knew’. (When you look at his life it was something else, lived to 100, longest serving Fed Chairman, husband and boyfriend to glamourous TV celebs, genius level data geek, talented jazz musician who played with some of the greats …)

But it wasn’t Alan Greenspan ‘who knew’. It wasn’t the central bankers we should all have been thanking, it was Deng Xaoping.

Now, Pradhan and Goodhart warn us that all this has now gone into the reverse cycle.

China is no longer a source of deflation; its government is in fact fighting against price decreases. They call it ‘Involution’. For sure, the markets are flooded at the moment with the cheap cars and solar units, but the trend is for this to change shortly if the ‘anti- Involution’ campaign starts to bite.

The demographics have also gone into reverse. Other than Africa, replacement rates for the population are falling below 2 – the level required to maintain current population levels. Meanwhile western economies have decided to inhibit immigration, meaning that our increasingly ageing population will retire with no one left working to pay the bills. Government finances are now under real pressure- simply not able to tax the working population enough to pay for the increasing demands of the old.

The Asians are staring to reduce their savings rates; the middle east is bringing money home. Less liquidity is available than before

In short, interest rates are now higher than growth rates in the western world. Demographics are falling (so we have less productive people) and investment in new technology is likely to start falling given less liquidity. Again simples! But a less fun ‘simples’ now…

What about AI? I hear you, and the little voice in the back of my head say. Are we not seeing unprecedented investment in AI? Could AI not address the demographic challenges?

Well, it could. A lot of the investment is coming from the cash flows of the Big 7 themselves, so investment levels are not yet constrained by likely rising market interest rates. But it is one hell of a ‘hail Mary’ isn’t it?

If the AI boom turns to bust (as it must in part – see the railway industry of the late 19^th century, and the last internet bubble at the end of the 20^th century), then things will start to look a bit ugly.

This time, there will be no Deng Xaoping to bail us all out, I fear.

The other day, a two-by-two diagram popped into my head. Those of you reading this who know me of old, will probably not be surprised by this revelation.

Well, on this occasion, the Y axis measured a societies capability to compromise. That ability to work along or muddle along in a society. To accept when you have lost, to go with the rules, to conform happily or at worst grudgingly.

The X axis measures the diversity of world view in a society. The more world views, the more diversity. By world views I fall back on the waves framework for simplicity. Paternalism, power, process, profit, people, paradox and planet. In my experience, we tend to operate through one or two world views as an instinct, mine are paradox and power. That can be good or bad depending on what I am dealing with.

The diagram is drawn out below- and labelled with some consequences for each quadrant.

The top left, where world views are less diverse and we have a societal ability to ‘rub along’ has been, I think, where the western world has been since the second world war. Particularly after the war, my generation’s grandparents and parents, conscious of their recent experience of extremism and populism, had developed a real capability to compromise together. The ‘war time’ spirit I suppose it was called. The world views at time were largely process orientated, as a reaction to the power dynamics of the war, with a heavy dose of paternalism chucked in. Post war Britons were taught to respect their elders and leaders. A managed democracy was therefore a comfortable outcome. Not too much a diversity of world view and an ability to follow the agreed outcomes of whatever the agreed process was.

Not all parts of the world were in this happy place. Post colonial societies were lumbered with dysfunctional power world views post-independence and an inability to compromise due to the legacy of divide and rule tactics by their colonisers. Not surprisingly this led to dictatorships and repeated military coups of one kind or another. Authoritarianism being in many ways the obvious governing solution to dysfunctional power dynamics and a low capacity for societal formation, going back to Hobbes’ leviathan.

In the last 30 years or so, as new generations have been born and grown up across the world, this simple democracy v dictatorship dynamic has become complicated.

The profit world view clashed initially with the process world view. We muddled through in the 1980s – 2010s, but the strains were becoming evident everywhere. In developing nations, the profit world view moved some of them triumphantly from dictatorship to managed democracy. (In Southeast Asia and Latin America specifically and some African countries, Botswana most famously). In others, dictatorship became coupled with kleptocracy as profit world norms were absorbed by their elites. In the western world, politics got gradually more polarised.

After the great financial crash in 2008, we saw ‘people wave’ views join the party and become prominent. Also, some paradox thinking emerged. A veritable rainbow of world views is now available across the world.

This is putting a strain on the system. Pushed there by the increased diversity of world views available to us, we are all now on the right-hand side of this two by two. There is a lot more room now for misunderstandings and dispute than we have had in the last 80 years or so in the world. Now fuelled of course by social media.

So, what will become of us?

I see 3 scenarios:

1. We lose our ability to compromise, and to bring a Hobbesian order, society falls back to dictatorship/ kleptocracy, where even if there are now more world views - we will only be allowed to express the power view of the world. I fear we may be seeing this where the populist right is now gaining in popularity. Once in power, we know their playbook is to control, to ‘other’ and to ensure compliance. We all go bottom left

2. We become ungovernable. We go to the bottom right quadrant. You could say a ‘post war Italy’ scenario, (although I suspect that is not truly fair to post war Italy,) but you get the picture. Here, we seek to accommodate all the world views with extreme forms of proportional representation, coupled with increasing intolerance and ‘othering’ or ‘cancelling’. Real broken ‘people wave’ stuff. Nothing will get done, governments will become empty vessels, and those countries that by contrast went into the bottom left, the populist / dictator/ authoritarian route/ quadrant, may well then seek to dominate the international order through power dynamics.

3. Ideally, we learn to compromise and transcend differences together. This leads to integrated politics—decentralised yet unified as needed, accommodating both multinational and local perspectives. Such an approach allows diverse views to be represented without undermining decisiveness, helping us benefit from the wide-ranging worldviews of the 21st century rather than be overwhelmed by them. We make it to top right.

This best-case scenario requires a step up in the quality of our political and business leaders. It also requires each of us to be more tolerant and less angry. I hope we can all do it. But I am not sure we can. But as Gandhi said, ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’. So, I guess it starts with us, if it starts anywhere.

PS: Still available for De-motivational speaking tours. (Cruise ship gigs preferred).

The EU referendum happened in June 2016. I was living abroad at the time and was consuming my UK politics largely through my own social media bubble. I was pretty sure that the result of the referendum would be Remain. As it happens, on the day of the referendum itself, 23 June, I was in the UK. In a reasonably prosperous part of the UK, where my social media bubble would have confidently implied a resounding Remain vote.

Well, when I spoke to the taxi driver, my ears pricked up. All about immigration, more money for the health service and making our own laws. Maybe he was an outlier I thought. But no, I went to the barbers. Now, I like my hair done in silence, but on this particular day, I was open to listening. Again, the same script was repeated. Immigration, more money for the health service, making our own laws. Reader, I was in Cambridge! I would never have expected these views to be expressed, even if held, in that part of the world.

As I sat to watch the referendum results in my hotel that night, my confidence was gone. Having ‘sniffed the UK air’, I could tell something was amiss.

We all know what happened next. People can say they were lied to, but as far as I recall other views were available at the time. They can even say now that Brexit wasn’t really tried, it was undermined. The argument so beloved of the aged communists of my youth. But however you look at it, the voters asked for it and we got it.

Most reports now say that Brexit has so far cost the UK economy 6-8% of GDP. That is 90 billion in lost tax revenue. Just think what that could be paying for.?

Now, if it were the case that the referendum was a one off, I could have more sympathy with us, the British voter. We were lied to and manipulated by social media tricks, weren’t we? But hang on a minute. The UK electorate had a chance to rethink Brexit in the General Election of 2019. Did we rethink? Oh no! We doubled down on ‘Getting Brexit done’.

Now I understand the psychology of being conned. You do not want to believe it has happened to you. You can double down and make things worse. OK, so let’s again give the electorate in the UK the benefit of the doubt. After all, in 2024, we did overwhelmingly vote to reject the architects of Brexit and all their works, didn’t we?

Well, ‘up to a point Lord Copper’. In the last local elections in May this year, only 18 months into a new government, the voters in our wisdom, have decided that, no, we now need to double down again in backing either the Brexit snake oil salesmen or alternatively the party that tells us everything will be great if we just tax the rich more. And fails to tell us their definition of ‘the rich’, as anyone with an income over £50,270.

When do we start holding ourselves accountable, as voters, for the politics we get? Encouraged by social media and the tabloids — and I include the Daily Telegraph in that — do our voting choices not encourage political parties to infantilise us? That we cannot be told the truth? That fairy stories are what we like?

They tell us we can leave the huge single market on our doorstep with no consequences. Fairy story. They promise change while insisting they will stick to fiscal rules and avoid raising taxes. Fairy story. They suggest we can live in a land of “milk and honey” while someone else, not us, foots the bill. Fairy story. Some even tell us we can simply rejoin the EU, as if nothing had happened. Fairy story.

At what point shall we hold ourselves accountable for treating politics as if it is a reality TV show? Where we think it is wise to elect a guy as PM who was funny on TV back in the day? Now the UK has chewed through its 6^th prime minister in 10 years, have we not had enough of the drama? Or are we hankering after the ‘next season’, show run by the histrionic political commentators.

At what point do we, the votes realise that we are getting exactly the politics we deserve? That we are treated like political children because our voting and polling behaviour tells the politicians that we act like political children? Too immature to cope with handling our current reality? Wanting only simple messages. Believing in fairy tales and punishing those who try to tell us more grown-up stories? Then crying foul when the fairy tales turn out to be…. Well, fairy tales.

In 1979, the new wave/ punk rock group, The Jam got their first number one hit, with the song ‘Going Underground’.

As a sixth former, I remember them singing the line in that song that ‘The public gets what the public wants, but I want nothing of what we’ve got’.

Never thought for a moment back then, that this would be my reality circa 45 years later.

In a previous post I described the AI fork, the same agentic technology producing two completely different organisational futures, depending on the network you deploy it into. Several of you wrote back asking what the darker version actually looks like in practice. So, I thought I’d write a story. What follows is a future case study really , rather than a story. The people are made up. The mechanism is not.

Most technology disaster case studies have a villain. This one doesn’t. That, as it turns out, is the problem.

The CTO in this story is good at her job. The board is asking the right questions. The senior leaders who respond to each crisis with more oversight and tighter controls are doing exactly what experience and good instinct tells them to do. Everyone is trying, doing what they have been trained to do. Yet, the organisation is still, slowly and with the best of intentions, walking itself off a cliff.

It is January, and the A.I. agents go live. The business case was careful, the pilots were encouraging, and the governance framework would make a compliance officer weep with gratitude. Slide four: forty-seven processes automated. Slide nine: efficiency projections that even the CFO finds credible. The board Q&A is positive, full of intelligent questions about data security and audit trails. But, nobody asks what the deployment will do to the people network underneath the org chart. Not because they are negligent. Because it genuinely does not occur to anyone that there is a question to ask.

The agents do exactly what they were designed to do. They route information through official channels. They initiate processes through reporting structures. They are fast, auditable, and consistent in a way that no human team ever quite managed to be. They are also, completely invisibly, routing around the two or three percent of people who are the organisation’s real connective tissue. The ones new starters get quietly pointed toward in week two. The ones who always seem to know what is happening three floors up before the briefing lands. The ones who, when a project is quietly dying somewhere across the business, somehow already know and have already made a call.

These people do not appear in any workflow diagram. The agents do not know they exist. The CTO does not know they exist. The consultants who designed the process roll out; definitely didn’t know they exist.

By April, something feels different, but nobody can say what. Her name doesn’t matter, it is likely to be someone you dont know anyway. She has been at the company for eleven years. Her job title is unremarkable. But for a decade she has been the person two departments call when something needs to happen that the formal process does not quite cover. She knows which escalation path actually works and which one disappears into a queue. She knows from a single conversation at the coffee machine, when a relationship between two teams is starting to fray.

By April, the workarounds she used to broker are now ticket systems. The judgment calls she used to absorb are now escalation paths. She is not being sidelined deliberately. She is just becoming, incrementally, optional. In an organisation running on efficiency metrics, optional is a dangerous place to be.

She is not the only one. Across the business, in ones and twos, the people who carried the informal network are quietly stepping back. Some disengage. Some start updating their CVs. A few get caught in the summer headcount review, and what leaves with them is decades of accumulated relational capital that has never appeared on any balance sheet and has not been seen.

The clusters they bridged are now increasingly isolated. Problems that used to surface four weeks early, carried by a trusted relationship, a quiet word, a call that was never logged anywhere, now surface as crises. Fast, unexpected, where-did-that-come-from crises. The early warning system has been switched off. Nobody noticed the switching because it never appeared on any dashboard, it wasnt in the project plan.

By July the senior team is worried, and to their credit they are trying hard to understand what is going wrong. The AI deployment was supposed to improve visibility . Instead, things feel less visible, less in control. The response — the response that any experienced leader would reach for — is to get more visibility. More structured reporting. Tighter approval chains. A third AI workstream is launched to give leadership better real-time data on what is happening across the business. They are not wrong to want these things. They are just pulling the wrong lever.

More visibility inevitably leads to more centralisation which in turn means fewer informal connections, which means less early warning, which means more crises, which means more centralisation. The leaders are not becoming authoritarian. They are becoming frightened. And frightened leaders who are also conscientious reach, entirely naturally, for more information, more oversight, more control. The agents, faithfully executing the authority structures they have been given, amplify every turn. The organisation that set out with genuine People wave intent — voice, trust, distributed ownership — is moving, click by click, toward something that looks considerably more like a Power wave outcome. Command and control. Delivered at machine speed. With a wellbeing programme and a sustainability report tastefully attached.

There is research that makes the mechanism precise. When AI is controlled by senior management and deployed through formal authority structures, hierarchy deepens as a structural consequence of who holds the controls. The same technology, distributed differently and built around genuine human connectors, produces the opposite. Same tool. Opposite outcomes. The network you start with, and the choices you make in January, determine which future arrives by December.

Most organisations will not choose consciously. They will just deploy.

The brake exists. It just has to be applied before July, not after. Before deployment begins, map the network — not the org chart, the actual pattern of trust and connection underneath it. Find the people whose phones will ring less in April. Involve them in the design of how the agents will work in their part of the world. They are the ones who know which human touchpoints carry real relational weight and which are genuinely transactional. An agent deployment built with them looks materially different from one built without them. Then agree a trigger in advance: a network health threshold at which deployment pauses and those people are brought back into the redesign. Not a retrospective review written after the crises have arrived. A pre-committed circuit breaker, set before anyone has too much invested to pull it.

The governance conversation around agentic AI is almost entirely about data — what agents do with information, how decisions get audited, who is accountable for automated outputs. Right questions. Not the only ones. The question I am yet to hear asked in any governance framework is this: what are the agents doing to the human network the organisation actually runs on? There is no network health impact assessment in the standard toolkit. No gate that asks what this deployment will do to informal connections over the next eighteen months.

The organisations that start asking it now will look back from 2029 with some satisfaction. The ones that don’t will ask themselves the ‘George Best’ question - ‘when did it all go wrong ?’

Joseph Kennedy – father of the future president – sold his shares just before the original Wall Street Crash, when his shoeshine boy started tipping him stocks. The logic was simple. When everyone is in, there is no one left to buy. Time to leave.

I think about Kennedy every time I go on the London tube. Buy crypto. Invest in ETFs. Get into the market. The shoeshine boy is back. He is a tube advert now.

The question is not whether there is a bubble. It is whether you know which side of it you are on. I don’t, for what it’s worth. I have predicted ten out of the last two recessions. Keynes said it best: ‘the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent’. Take none of this article as advice. Take it as one amateur’s attempt to count the shoeshine boys. Right now I can count four, and they are connected.

Crypto first. When something genuinely valuable is being sold, especially something financial, it tends to find its buyers without the need for a Premier League shirt sponsor.

Private equity is the second. The original model was straightforward: buy underperforming companies, make them leaner, sell for more than you paid. But private equity ran out of underperforming companies about ten years ago. So it moved into public services – GP surgeries, care homes, water companies – anything with government-backed cash flow. When that seam ran dry, it moved into shadow banking: no longer buying companies, but lending money to others, all off balance sheet and invisible to regulators. American 401k pensions are now being opened to these vehicles. The UK is likely to follow. As Mrs Merton might have said: what is it, do you think, that attracted an industry that has already run out of road twice, to our pension money?

Then there is AI. Investment over three years has apparently exceeded one and a half trillion dollars. The technology may be genuinely transformative – as the railways were two hundred years ago. And as with the railways, most of the investors will still lose their money. The shoeshine boy here is anyone who tells you they know which AI company will be the one that doesn’t get wiped.

Which brings me to SpaceX. Operating at a net loss, valued at circa two trillion dollars. When it enters the major stock market indices, tracker funds – which is most of us, through our pensions and ISAs – will own it whether we chose to or not. Overvalued AI stocks, an unprofitable rocket company, and our retirement savings, all in the same room. I smell tulips.

Now stay with me, because what follows gets technical before it gets considerably more alarming. This is not another Lehman Brothers. In 2008 a bank failed – catastrophic, but the sovereign bond market held, and governments could borrow cheaply to fund the rescue. What concerns me now is that the thing that might break is the very instrument governments use to mount a rescue. That has not happened before in the G7.

A small number of very large hedge funds – Citadel, Millennium and their kind – have quietly become the dominant buyers of US Treasuries and UK gilts. They got there through the basis trade: spotting a tiny gap, usually a few cents, between the price of a government bond and a futures contract on that same bond. To make real money from a few cents you must borrow heavily, sometimes eighteen dollars for every dollar of your own. As Seth Klarman put it, it is like ‘picking up pennies in front of a steamroller’.

The borrowing comes from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, who take the bonds as collateral and hand over cash. The funds buy more bonds, pledge those too, receive more cash. Round and round, eighteen times over. Three prime brokers, dozens of funds, trillions of dollars, all running the same trade. In 1998 a single fund, Long-Term Capital Management, did something similar and nearly brought down the system. Today dozens of the largest funds in the world run near-identical positions through the same three banks. The systemic risk is not any one fund’s leverage. It is that when it goes wrong, they all go wrong at once.

I am watching what happens in Japan most, as we have already had the dress rehearsal for disaster. In August 2024 a single unexpected quarter-point rate rise by the Bank of Japan crashed Tokyo’s market by twelve percent in a day, the worst fall since 1987. For thirty years Japanese investors have borrowed cheaply in yen and put the money into higher-yielding assets abroad, US Treasuries among them, now an estimated five trillion dollars of overseas holdings. As the Bank of Japan raises rates, Japanese domestic bonds become worth owning again. Nobody in Tokyo needs to make a political decision. The arithmetic does it for them.

So here is the scenario. Not a prediction. A plausible sequence, none of it far-fetched. It is a Tuesday morning in October. The Bank of Japan announces a further rate rise, reacting to oil price spikes as the oil market yo-yos due to the ongoing impact of the Iran war. By the time New York opens, Treasury yields are drifting up and the price gap the basis trade depends on is moving the wrong way. JPMorgan’s risk desk runs its numbers. The collateral posted by Citadel and Millennium is worth less than when pledged. The calls go out: more collateral or close positions, today.

Citadel starts selling. So does Millennium. So does every fund running the same trade, all getting the same call from the same three banks at the same time, selling into the same falling market. Prices drop further; collateral is worth even less. Private equity’s shadow banking vehicles find their credit costs spiking. Pension funds, needing liquidity, start selling too. It is a doom loop, and it accelerates.

Here is where the AI valuations and SpaceX walk back into the room. These are stocks priced on the assumption that the winner will be worth more than the GDP of France. When that story cracks ,and a leveraged bond sell-off is exactly the shock that cracks it, they do not just dip. They correct toward what the businesses are actually worth today. This is not a reset. It is the bubble finding its pin.

By Wednesday, sterling is falling, gilt yields are spiking, mortgage offers are being withdrawn, and two or three banks are sitting on assets that were worth considerably more on Monday. Rachel Reeves goes to the despatch box. She knows the playbook: in 2008 Alistair Darling guaranteed every pound in every account, the single act that stopped the run on Northern Rock becoming a run on everything. She stands up and tells the country that every pound in every bank is safe.

But here is the trap. A government guarantee is only as good as the government’s ability to borrow, and the market it would borrow in, the gilt market, is the very thing in freefall. The instrument of rescue and the source of the crisis are now the same instrument. This happened to Ireland in 2008; the UK and the EU bailed it out. The UK has burned its boats with the EU, and Trump’s America is an unreliable friend.

The Bank of England is the last backstop. It can buy the gilts nobody else will, printing the money to do it. But its balance sheet is already swollen from two rounds of quantitative easing, and printing money to prop up the currency while inflation is already a worry is the kind of decision that has historically ended badly. Argentina style, badly. The emergency lever is still there. It is just considerably less powerful than the first time anyone pulled it.

This is not a conspiracy. Nobody designed a system where government bond markets run on hedge fund leverage, where AI valuations prop up bank collateral, where a quarter-point rise in Tokyo puts a British chancellor at the despatch box guaranteeing every deposit in the country while the market she needs to fund it is in freefall. It is what happens when decades of cheap money causes everyone to reach for the same returns, through the same institutions, in markets far more connected than they appear.

Those who know me will know my tendency to catastrophise. None of this may happen. Markets have a distinguished history of staying irrational for longer than anyone thought possible. Keynes was right about that as he was about most things. But I can only tell you that I am seeing shoeshine boys everywhere.

I am watching the Japanese economy like a hawk. Who knew Japanese interest rate management could be so interesting.

That Substack however was about AI as most people currently experience it. A tool you use. Something you ask questions of, that writes things for you, that speeds up tasks you were already doing.

This post is about something different. Something that is already arriving and that, as far as I can see, most organisations haven’t thought through at all from a human/ network interaction perspective. It’s called agentic AI, and it doesn’t just change what your people do. It changes the structure of the organisation itself.

What agentic AI actually is

For the past two years, when people have talked about AI at work, they’ve mostly meant generative AI, systems that respond to questions, draft documents, summarise meetings, write code. You ask, it answers. You’re in control. The AI is a tool, and a powerful ( and flattering ) one.

Agentic AI is different altogether. An AI agent doesn’t wait to be asked. It is given a goal — process these applications, manage this inbox, coordinate this project — and it works toward that goal autonomously, making decisions, initiating actions, sending communications, routing information, without needing a human to approve each step. A small team of two or three people can now supervise a network of fifty or a hundred specialised agents running end-to-end processes. Onboarding. Performance monitoring. Meeting scheduling. Customer queries. Supplier coordination.

The question this raises isn’t primarily about productivity, though the productivity implications are significant. The question is: when AI agents start doing those things, when they’re routing information, initiating communications, making decisions about who needs to know what , -what does that do to the way your organisation actually works? Not the org chart. The network underneath it?

The network is the thing that actually matters

If you read the tick post, you’ll remember the main, organisations have two structures. The one that’s written down, and the one that actually works. The one that works is made of relationships, the person everyone quietly goes to, the connector who knows what’s happening two departments over, and the manager who surfaces a problem four weeks before it becomes a crisis because somebody told them something in passing. That informal network is where the real work happens and where the early warning system lives. It’s also what thirty years of restructuring has been gradually damaging, invisibly, while the org chart looked fine.

Now introduce agentic AI into that picture. An agent routing information doesn’t use the informal network. It uses whatever it has been programmed to use, usually the formal hierarchy, or the data connections it has been given access to. When it sends a communication, it isn’t drawing on the human judgment of who actually needs to know, who has the relationship with that person, who will carry that message with the right context. It sends it because the workflow says to send it.

That sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Every time an agent substitutes for human judgment about human relationships, routing information, initiating a process, making a decision it changes who is connected to whom and how. At scale, across thousands of interactions a week, agents can reshape the whole shape of an organisation’s network without anyone noticing, without any governance, without any measurement. The restructuring that nobody approved.

Two futures, depending on where you’re starting

Here’s where it gets interesting and worrying. Agentic AI doesn’t have one inevitable outcome for organisations. It has at least two very different ones, depending on the state of the human network it’s deployed into.

If you’re in the trough, network architecture already depleted, ghost networks already masking the damage, social media already filling the gaps, then agentic AI does what social media did, but faster and with more authority. It routes information through channels that bypass the informal connectors. It initiates processes that nobody has the relational context to catch when they go wrong. It sends communications that feel processed rather than human, further eroding the trust that was already fragile. And because agents are faster than WhatsApp, the timeline compression that social media introduced just gets worse.

If on the other hand, you’ve rebuilt your network, that is if you have genuine human connectors, intentional bridge relationships, a management layer that carries real context rather than just processing instructions then agentic AI is something else entirely. Us, humans occupy the hub roles: the people with the relationships, the judgment, the context. The agents cope with handling the high-volume, low-judgment connections that used to consume our time and attention and generate frustration. You end up with something that the network science actually has a name for — a small-world, scale-free architecture, - where information reaches anywhere quickly and flows through people who genuinely understand it. This is what the most advanced organisational forms will look like when they actually work. The agents make it possible, at a scale that would be unachievable with humans alone.

Same technology. The network you start with determines which future you get.

The governance question nobody is asking

We’ve spent the past decade building frameworks to govern what happens with data. GDPR. Data protection impact assessments. The right to explanation. These matter. But they are all focused just on data, on what information is collected, stored, and used.

Nobody is yet as far as I can see, building equivalent frameworks for what AI does with networks. How agent deployment changes who is connected to whom. How information flows. Whether the informal connectors who hold the organisation together are being bypassed or supported. There is no network impact assessment. There is no governance gate that asks: what is the current state of our human network, and what will this deployment do to it? This is the ghost network problem I wrote about a few weeks back, the invisible damage that accumulates behind apparently healthy metrics reappearing at a new scale and a new speed. Agentic AI can do in months what thirty years of restructuring did gradually.

One question that matters

I’m not arguing that organisations should hold back on agentic AI. The productivity case is real. I do not think they can. But, the organisations that figure the network effects out will have a genuine advantage. I’m arguing specifically that the deployment decision and the network question are the same question, and they need to be answered together.

Before you deploy agents at scale, map your human network. Not to protect it from AI but to know what you’re building on. Where are the connectors who carry the judgment agents can’t replicate? Where are the key relationships that move information across parts of the organisation that don’t formally connect? Where are the people who always seem to know what’s about to go wrong before it does? Those people are not incidental to agentic AI deployment. They are its implied governance infrastructure. Without them, agents don’t just do tasks less well. They reshape the network in ways that make the whole organisation less able to catch what’s going wrong.

The tick ends at what we call the Planet wave, humans, agents, and abilitty to work responsively at scale in a way never achieved before . That future is possible. But I am increasingly convinced that you get there by knowing where you are on the tick first and rebuilding the workplace networks that makes agent deployment safe. It will be madness and a recipe for failure to deploy into a trough and hope for the best. The organisations that will manage agentic AI well are not those that move fastest. They will be those that map their network first.

I have in my golf bag a special club. Called, the chipper, it is a mix of a putter and a wedge. It means that when I am 30 feet or so from a green, I can pick this club out of my bag, make a putting motion, and the ball will lift lightly into the air before landing more or less where I intend it to be on the green.

Now, many golfers look through their nose at this club. It is a relatively new invention, and for some it feels a bit like cheating. After all, part of the exquisite skill of golf is to be able to take your wedge and deftly chip a ball onto the green before reaching for your putter.

It is true that there is no greater satisfaction than orchestrating a deft chip. The issue is that such delights cannot be relied upon when using a normal wedge. The chipper club gives you an advantage.

Sometimes I put the chipper in my bag, other times (if wanting to make things more difficult for myself), I leave it at home.

The chipper club reminds me of AI. Every week I am blown away by the increasing utility of the chatbots. Especially when researching a report or seeking to find references. Asking the chatbot for a first draft of your report is an obvious step, and before you know it, you’re working with the AI to write the report in totality.

Now, AI lies of course. Jamie Bartlett in his book “How to speak to AI and how not to’, references the quote an interviewer used about politicians ‘why is this lying b***std, lying to me?’ as a good heuristic to also use when you approach AI output. I have certainly found that AI generated research content needs repeated challenge and specific prompts to correct and refine it. (Even after that I still cannot bring myself to fully trust it).

Despite all this, for the same reasons I often use the chipper club, I will be using AI as part of my writing and research ‘golf bag’. (No AI has been used in the writing of this sub stack however – you can probably tell!).

As with the chipper club, which only comes into play when you have worked your way up to 30 feet or so from the green, AI generated material is only useful if the user knows how to prompt properly, is reasonably expert in the field and can spot nonsense, and assumes that the AI is lying, so checking and refining appropriately.

Sometimes I deploy the chipper club, and it fails abysmally. The same will be true when I use AI, I am sure. But as my local Golf Pro said when I asked him about the ethics of using a chipper club – ‘why make things more difficult for yourself when you don’t have to?’

That is all well and good. For now. AI at present is an exceptionally powerful useful chatbot. But, with the additional coding capabilities and ever improving agentic offerings, things are getting a bit scarier. AI is fast growing beyond the status of being just a club in our golf bag of life.

I do not yet feel confident to allow Claude access to my credit card. But I suspect within 1-2 years that barrier will fall. What will that result it in the real world, when our agents are all talking with each other, with us out of the loop? We are already seeing coding capabilities testing the very edges of cyber security. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are fast scaling autonomous killing machines. Within 10 years, what is called AI superintelligence may well be with us. This will be beyond anything the world has ever experienced, with the likely ability to duplicate itself, learn, plot and plan. If you want to scare yourself read ‘If anyone builds it, Everyone dies’ by the AI experts Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares.

Demis Hassabis, the founder of Deep mind, has called for an international institute to now oversee and control AI developments, modelled on CERN. Humanity certainly will need to see if we can build in an inflection point before we finally build a superintelligence that could pose a major threat to our very existence. But that will depend on whether we know when that inflexion point is, and whether the world leaders (political and business) are capable of co-operating at that point. I do wonder…

I do like Claude, but I am not so keen on Hal^[1].

^[1] HAL 9000 is the sentient antagonistic artificial intelligence computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film: 2001 a space odyssey

When working with management teams, I have often deployed an exercise I first learned from the McLane Group.

It is rather inelegantly called, I.E.S.P. Designed to test out the strength of a proposition or piece of work, it provides a quick way of getting feedback and then focusing discussion efficiently.

How does it work?

Well, someone proposes a course of action. After they have ‘pitched’, each member of the assembled group is asked to score (with a tick or a cross), the content against I.E.S.P.

I.-standing for the question- does it make sense? was it logical? Did you get the information clearly?

E- stands for the question – ‘was it emotional? Did the pitch generate any emotion in you?’

S. stands for spiritual or perhaps better, inspirational. – ‘Did the pitch inspire you? Talk to your soul?

Finally, P stands for the Physical, having heard the pitch – Do you know what you need to actually (physically) do?

As an exercise, it really speeds up proceedings – as by looking at the ticks and crosses on the flip chart, you soon get to see where a ‘pitch’ is lacking.

In my experience, most management pitches are fine on the I and the P. People have been trained through their educational years to be able to present information clearly, Managers know they need to add the ‘so this is what we need to do next’ at the end.

Sometimes emotion comes through too. Particularly if the proposal is dealing with restructuring or other clearly emotive questions

Rarely however are the presentations truly inspirational. When they are, you can sometimes almost feel ‘the spirit enter the room’ as the person speaks. Typically, this happens when the work has real meaning and a purpose, that resonates amongst the listeners.

I was reminded of this exercise when reading ‘The book of why’ by Judea Pearl. In this book the science of cause and effect is explored, A ladder of causation is offered.

The ladder has associative activities on the first rung. That is the basics of seeing and observing. On the second rung are Interventions, the doing and intervening and, on the third rung the counter factual, imagining, retrospection and understanding.

The first two rungs of this ladder are where the Large Language Models are currently excelling. AI each week is improving how it sees and observes the world’s data. Through the power of its algorithms, it is quickly building the capability to identify correlations and link inputs to outputs. With advanced applications it can even now advance causal theories - telling us why doing x will give us Y.

But, can it yet tell us what could be ? What could have been ? The very top of the third rung of the causation ladder. As Robert Kennedy said ‘Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

Coming back to IESP- like most management teams, AI can do the I and the P now. Increasingly it can even approximate the E. But can it yet do the S ?

Now, whether AI can ever do the S is for me the crux of the matter. Those of us with a romantic and ‘Hegelian bent ‘like to think that there is a ‘world spirit’, or a ‘universal energy’ that connects all living things back to the big bang. We are one ‘big mind’, connected holistically. Those of us who want to have this worldview will surely be hoping AI never attains S or the very top of the third rung of causation. That level is after all is uniquely channeled through us organic lifeforms and is born out of our connectivity with the universe. Isn’t it?

If AI fails to achieve S, the third rung, we can then hold onto our respective beliefs in God, the Universe, universal consciousness, the spirit, the connectivity of the whole

Judea Pearl believes however that the third rung will be reached. He wrote in 2016 :

‘I believe that the algotrithmization of counterfactuals is a major step in making consciousness and agency a computational reality’

The latest LLM models are beginning to indicate that his intuition was correct. The outputs coming now from Deepmind’s / Google’s Gemini, Chat GPT, Claude, Perplexity etc. are appearing to be able to imagine what could be. Deepmind’s AlphaGo imagined completely new ways of playing Go ( ‘move 37’) , for example. In biology, the previously deemed impossible task of identifying the shape of folding proteins has been accomplished.

If this trend continues , and AI ends up achieving the S, so achieving the top of the third rung of causality- Then we may indeed now be looking into the face of God. ( Or the devil).

I want to show you a graph that gives it a name. It looks like a ‘tick’. It traces the last hundred years of organisational design through the lens of networks. And it shows exactly why most organisations are in the worst possible place at the worst possible moment, just as agentic AI is arriving.

Network structure across the seven waves of organisational design.

The downstroke

The story starts top left. The chart looks at how networks work in organisations. The Y axis measures how concentrated they are, they x axis, how connected. The oldest organisations (paternalistic) had almost everything flowing through one person — the founder, the patriarch, the boss who knew everyone. (See my co-authored book : HR(e)volution, Watkins and Dalton ). Not a great system, but an honest one. Everyone knew how it worked and where they stood.

Over the following decades, organisations got more complex. They worked through the waves of change. Command hierarchies arrived. (The power wave) . Then functional departments. (The process wave) Then matrix management and performance systems, the Profit era, GE and McKinsey. Not warm, but effective. If something was going wrong two levels down, it surfaced upward before it became a crisis. The network knew what it was doing.

Then, in the last 10 years or so, we decided that was the problem. And we have gradually been dismantling it. Flat structures, Agile, squads and tribes, the ‘Spotify’ model, this People wave was built on a real insight. The old hierarchy was too slow and too controlling. So, we delayered. Took out middle management. Replaced structure with culture decks and purpose statements.

The intention was and is right. The execution was and is incomplete. Because the management chain that we have been busy delayering, for all its faults, was doing something invisible: carrying the early warning signals. The person who knew the team in logistics was about to implode, four weeks before it became a formal issue. When that layer went, the signal went with it. And the line on the chart dropped toward the trough.

The trough

The bottom of the tick isn’t a destination. Nobody set out to be there. It’s where you end up when a transition is disrupted before it completes. When the old (and/or ghost) networks have been dismantled, and the new one hasn’t been built yet.

Two forces have now also arrived into that space before most organisations can cross it. They are exacerbating the problems and making things feel worse than ever. Before we muddled through, either the ‘ghost’ network ‘held the fort ‘until we had transitioned safely , or time itself helped us prevail But now, the forces of social media and AI have sped the world up, and disrupted the old pathways.

First, social media. LinkedIn. Glassdoor. Reddit. WhatsApp groups. Slack channels. These platforms have moved into the structural vacuum. They connect people — but around individual interest and algorithmic amplification, not organisational purpose. When the management chain was there, a concern followed a path: manager, HR, process. When it isn’t, it goes to a group chat first. Then Glassdoor. Then, sometimes, everywhere. What used to take weeks takes hours. Every HR process built on the assumption of confidentiality is now operating in a world where that assumption no longer holds.

AI has also arrived on top. Any employee can now research their rights, draft a formal letter, find relevant case law, and arrive at a difficult meeting better prepared than their manager. In principle that’s fair. In practice, for organisations that haven’t invested equally in their own capability, it’s a structural disadvantage. And when a manager sends a performance review the employee suspects was written by AI — language too generic, specifics too absent, something breaks in the trust that isn’t fixed by a better process. They don’t feel managed. They feel processed. This is not a technology problem. It’s a structural problem with a technology accelerant. The network was damaged. Social media filled the gap. AI arrived on top.

The numbers aren’t subtle. 117,951 formal workplace conciliation cases in the UK last year — the highest since the pandemic. £28.5 billion: the estimated annual cost of workplace conflict. Not just symptoms of difficult employees. But instead, this represents the downstream cost of the structural failure, that the tick uniquely describes.

The upstroke

The thing to remember about a tick, is that the downstroke is not the image. The upstroke is.

From the trough, the trajectory goes steeply up and right, toward organisations with genuine connection, distributed authority, and something the network science calls small-world plus scale-free architecture. In plain English: everyone is a few steps from everyone else, and there are some people — not because of their title but because of their trust and expertise — who are genuinely central to how information flows. It’s not the old hierarchy. But it’s not flat either. It’s something more intentional than either.

Organisations who genuinely build this have something the trough organisations have lost advance notice. They know a team is in trouble weeks before it becomes a formal issue, because the network carries that signal to someone who can act on it. In my view, people prefer to raise difficult issues via a relationship, rather than going straight to social media. That’s not soft — it’s structural.

And here’s what makes this insight more urgent than ever to act upon: agentic AI — the kind that doesn’t just answer questions but does things, autonomously, at scale is arriving right now. For organisations in the trough, that’s another force filling a space that was never properly designed. But, for organisations that have rebuilt their network architecture, it’s an accelerant. The same technology. Completely different consequences. Depending entirely on the structural state you’re in when it arrives.

The questions requiring a ‘tick’

Can you name the three people in your organisation whose departure would most damage how information flows? Not the most senior. Not the highest performers on paper. The connectors — the ones people listen too, the ones who always know what’s happening in another part of the business, the ones new starters get quietly pointed toward. If you can name them, you have a network. If you can’t, you probably don’t know what state you’re actually in.

What did your last restructuring do to those people? And when agentic AI arrives in your organisation -is it landing somewhere with genuine human connection and trust? Or is it landing in a trough, where it will do what social media did and more?

The ‘tick’ chart is not a diagnosis of failure. It is a map of where you are and a direction of travel. The truly networked organisations where people are genuinely connected, where problems surface before they become crises, where trust is the architecture not just the aspiration, is achievable. You just have to be willing to say honestly where you are starting from.

I have been involved in a lot of organisational transformations. And the thing that strikes me, looking back at the ones that went wrong, is that they rarely failed because the destination was wrong.

They failed in the crossing. Haunted by ghosts of the past along the way.

Every transformation has a before and an after. Leaders draw a line — old wave, new wave — and commit to crossing it. What almost nobody talks about is what actually exists in the space between the two. What happens to the organisation during the crossing itself. Because that is where most transformations die — not at the destination, but somewhere in the middle of the water, when the old network has started to break down and the new one has not yet been built.

I want to give that gap a name. I call it the ghost network. The old informal structure — the trust relationships, the real information flows, the people who actually get things done — does not dissolve when you announce a restructure. It persists. It routes around the new design. It quietly reasserts the old logic. And most leaders have no idea it is happening, because the instruments they are using to measure organisational health are calibrated to the wave they are leaving, not the gap they are currently stuck in.

Organisations do not fail because they chose the wrong destination wave. They fail because they underestimate the network cost of the journey.

The six transitions — and what goes wrong in each

In H(R)evolution, Alan Watkins and I described seven waves of HR and organisational thinking — from Paternalism through Power, Process, Profit, People, Paradox, to Planet. The transitions between them are where the danger lives. Here is what I have seen happen at each one.

Paternalism → Power

The old leader’s relationship web keeps running the place long after the title changes. The new leader has authority; the predecessor has the network. The predecessor governs from the margin.

Power → Process

Competing power networks calcify into permanent functional silos. The informal bridges that made the political network navigable are destroyed before the process pathways can replace them.

Process → Profit

Structural holes at silo boundaries are captured for personal gain rather than bridged for collective good. Information brokers become gatekeepers. The bridge becomes a toll booth.

Profit → People

The trust base needed for genuine People-wave relationships has been hollowed out by years of transactional logic. Culture programmes launch. Engagement scores nudge upward. The network doesn’t change. The old topology reasserts within 18 months.

People → Paradox

The connectors who held the People wave together become bottlenecks as the organisation tries to modularise. The bridges that enabled flow now prevent autonomy. Chronic oscillation between centralising and decentralising, every two to three years.

Paradox → Planet

The inner layer of highly connected leaders — built to manage internal complexity — becomes a defensive perimeter against external integration. The Planet strategy is real in intent and absent in the actual network. Ecosystem commitments announced. Relationships with communities, regulators, supply chains: near zero.

Three things I have learned the hard way

Ghost networks live on. The old network topology always persists longer than anyone plans for. The trust built through repeated interaction, the reciprocity established over years, the identity bound up in network position — none of that writes off on the date of the restructuring announcement. Transition planning must include an explicit strategy for the old network, not just a design for the new one. Who are the high-influence nodes in the departing topology? What are their incentives? How does the organisation create an honourable exit from structural influence without triggering the defensive entrenchment that comes from people feeling they are simply being displaced?

What Gramsci first saw in the world of politics, is the same in the world of Organisations, every transition destroys something in the old network before the new network can be born. The old has to be dissolved — because its continuation actively prevents the new from forming. But dissolve it too quickly and the organisation loses the coordination infrastructure it needs to function. There is always a gap. There is always a period when the organisation is running on not quite enough network. The question is not how to eliminate that gap — you cannot. The question is how long the organisation can sustain it, and what minimum viable network infrastructure must be preserved as you make the crossing.

The instruments of the old wave cannot measure that the transition is failing. In fact, it sends dangerous signals. Engagement scores can be rising while the underlying network is collapsing. Productivity can be holding while the trust infrastructure quietly dissolves. The ghost network often maintains output for a period after its legitimacy has gone. By the time the standard metrics flag the problem, you are already deep in the decay. You cannot navigate the transition with the dashboard of the wave you are leaving. You need instruments calibrated to the gap. A new dashboard, a new playbook.

So, what do you actually do?

Three things. They are not complicated, but they are consistently not done. Taking these new actions forms an integral part of the new HR playbook for the AI age.

1. Baseline the network before you announce the transition. The moment you announce a transformation, the nodes whose position is threatened start protecting themselves. Map the network — the real one, not the org chart — before that happens. Understand which nodes will be displaced, which bridges will be severed. This is not an academic exercise. It is transition risk management.

2. Sequence the network, not just the organisation. Network construction takes longer than structural redesign. Build the new network before the old structure is dissolved. Seed the connectors before the transactional logic is removed. Build the external relationships before the internal rich-club is challenged. Start earlier than feels comfortable.

3. Measure the transition with network instruments. Where are connections forming — and where are they dying? Who is being routed around, and why? Where is information flowing freely and where is it being captured? These are not technically complex questions. They just require someone with the authority and the curiosity to ask them — and to act on what they find before the standard metrics catch up.

The announcement is not the transition. It is not the change. It is not the new values or the new operating model. The transition is complete only when the network has reorganised to carry the new wave’s logic. Until then, you have only announced a gap. And the gap is always more dangerous than it looks. As they say on the London Underground: ‘Mind the gap’.

I always used to say that the England international football team were the Tottenham Hotspur of international football. Big in the 1960s, will often flatter to deceive, provide a great narrative arc, but never win the big prizes.

My analogy has now got grander. I think the whole of the United Kingdom is the Tottenham Hotspur of the geopolitical world.

Both have had 6 different ‘managers’ in the last 10 years. Both see themselves as occupying a greater place on the world stage than their performance warrants, Spurs thinking themselves to be super league candidates, the UK clinging onto the seat at UN security council.

Both are unsure of their role in the world. Are Spurs an elite club with superstar players on elite wages? Or are they a club that buys low and sells high, developing potential? Or are they a confused mix of the two? Is the UK a financial superpower? A services hothouse? a reviving postindustrial economy? Is the UK part of Europe or separate? Or a mix of the two?

Keir Stamer is struggling to manage the sheer bureaucracy of government. He complains about the lack of activism in the civil service. How when you ‘pull a lever,’ nothing happens.

Spurs meanwhile appear to be erecting a similarly bureaucratic back office. Multiple overlapping suits, with ill -defined goals and little accountability.

The comparisons mount. Both have an ‘angry culture’. At Spurs, as I have written previously, everyone seems to blame everyone else for the state of the club. The players now are under the cosh. ‘Show ponies’, ‘in it for themselves’, ‘not fit to wear the shirt’ are some of the phrases I heard leaving the ground recently

Similarly, the UK electorate is fiercely anti- politician. “In it for themselves’ a ubiquitous throw away.

Yet it was once so different.

Brittania ruled the waves. An empire upon which the sun never set. (I know about enslavement, famine and oppression, but that is not the point I am making here). As little as 103 years ago, the British empire was at its geographic peak. A Kingdom that heralded the industrial revolution, parliamentary democracy, the theory of evolution, invented the TV, telephone, the early computer, the National Health Service, the BBC. A multi -national, multicultural superpower, for at least the last 200 years, as 4/ 3 (delete one number per your politics) nations came together as one, and waves of refugees and immigrants found a home and prospered. A country that gave the world the Beatles and Oasis (well, the Beatles anyway). As the veteran Labour politician from the 1960-1980s, Denis Healy summarized; ‘the British empire most of all gave the world two things: the word f**k and football’.

Spurs too have had the glory, glory years. As the song says, ‘My eyes have seen the glory of the cups at white hart lane’.

The first (and only) non-league team to win the FA cup in 1901. Their player Vic Buckingham (1935-1949) going onto to seed Total Football at Ajax.

Arthur Rowe’s (1949-1955) Push and run team, providing the world with the first prototype of total football in action. The great double team of 1961. The first club in the modern era to achieve the league and cup double, they were probably the greatest team in the world at that time. The first British team ever to win a European trophy. The history is storied. Blanchflower, Greaves, Mackay, Peters, Hoddle, Perryman, Ardiles, Klinsmann, Lineker, Waddle, Gascoigne, Modric, Bale, Kane, Son, the names cascade.

But, as it is for the UK, so it is for Spurs, the 1970s saw decline. A decline that has meant both have never attained the glories of the past. Sure, the 1990s brought some gleams of sunshine, Britain was cool under Blair, and Spurs were cool under Venables. But it was all false dawns.

Both my country and my football team face a new current reality. Both are at best mid ranking powers, with expectations of achievement beyond the reality of resources.

Both are struggling to adapt to the modern world where the Gulf states have more sway geopolitically/ own the football clubs. A world where we cannot pay for the level of military power, we are used to and now need/ the players we were used to and now need. And are struggling to find the ‘new thing’ the magic bullet that will make us great again. As Brexit has been for the UK, read across to the word ‘relegation’ for Spurs. Both incredible examples of self-harm.

The issue is, you cannot choose either your country (though I am an Irish dual national- so in my case Countries), or your football team. You are born into them. So, whatever happens as Winston Churchill proclaimed, ‘you have to keep bugg**ring on’. In case you are interested, my son and I have renewed our Spurs season tickets for next season…

Recently, I outlined the 9 key questions I believe Chief People Officers need to consider.

These questions covered, strategy, organization, networks, talent, HR organization and process and data strategy. For me, they represent the baseline, the key issues to address, especially for a newly appointed CPO.

However, they clearly are not the whole picture. Reward was not covered, employee relations was not considered in any depth, training and skills strategy were overlooked and perhaps most glaringly, culture was ignored. All these issues, if coherently addressed, are key factors in making an HR strategy a competitive advantage.

So why did I not cover these topics within the 9 questions?

Firstly, because I see them as an output from answering the 9 core questions. They represent the next level of detail. None of these issues can be addressed other than within an overall strategic framework. The 9 need to be answered first.

Secondly, and more importantly, each of these areas are ripe for a radical rethink. The nature of the questions to be asked is changing from the past. New technologies, social media, the changing nature of the workplace, the increasing complexity of the world’s economy and geopolitical realities mean that we have to think radically differently about culture, reward, employee relations and skills. A new set of questions is required, and new sets of answers are emerging.

So, what are these new sets of questions and answers?

1. How are you rethinking your business ‘worldview’ to cope with the coming ‘fourth turning’ or Paradox wave? I have written before about the concept of the ‘fourth turning’ captured in the work of William Straus and Neil Howe, and much quoted by many Hedge funders.^[1] A similar concept is described by myself and Alan Watkins in H (R)evolution. It describes the shift in worldview we are now living through. Such shifts happen once every 20 – 30 years. Once completed, they change our perspectives completely. Today, we are at an interregnum, and this represents a time of heightened risk. Are CPOs and CEOs having the necessary discussions now to anticipate these changes? To prepare their businesses and their people? If the paradox wave is coming, do you know what wave(s) you and your people are in?

2. Are you re-framing your approach to risk? Changes in worldview historically increased risk. ‘During times of volatility so called ‘Black swan’ events appear from nowhere. Technologies change business models overnight, and geopolitics becomes a major source of disruption. All this will require a re-think in the culture of our organizations. Command and control, centralized, top-down models will increasingly stall. Empowered, flexible, networked ways of working will thrive. The more top heavy, globalized and centralized your business is, the higher the risks you will run. In the world today, how we manage our people will be at the crux of managing risk. Do you have a risk management plan fit for purpose in a world of paradox?

3. Are you really empowering your teams and people? Have you remodeled your approach to employee relations to one of employee empowerment? The next wave will demand empowered teams and people. Really. Not just the talk of it. We will rely on empowered teams to take quick decisive decisions when faced with ever increasing complexity and the need for quick responses. Organizing for empowerment will be at the heart of competitive advantage. Do you have an empowerment strategy that goes beyond words?

4. Are you investing in people ahead of investing in tech? I have seen many incidences of Businesses investing in high tech solutions, and believing that these will be the magic bullets. Inevitably, the high tech takes time. During this time, they need to upskill their people, or bring in more people to address the tech glitches, so incurring both unexpected increases in people costs and increased depreciation costs. The project is then deemed a failure by all – and the deputy head rolls! A proactive, bottom up, people led approach to skills and training is needed in the new wave. Not a centralized, workforce planning led software model sold to you by one of the Big 4 Consultancies. Have you radically rethought your whole approach to skills and training for the new age?

5. Is your Reward strategy sophisticated yet simple? The Paradox wave will require us to transcend a number of polarities. One of which will be around how we think about reward. Reward needs to be simple, so that everyone can understand cause and effect. Close to teams, fair, ensuring accountability, yet be sophisticated enough to understand which behaviours are influenced by what lever, and which solutions crowd out required behaviors. Do you know which of your Reward solutions are truly separable? Are you thinking about the role of meaning in your reward strategy? Are you transitioning from transactional contracts to developmental contracts?

These 5 questions, taken with the original 9, constitute the new 14 points for a changing world of HR. Hang on, let me change that to 14 questions, after all the last time the world had 14 points to consider^[2], that didn’t turn out very well.

^[1] The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe

^[2] See President Wilson’s 14 points – Treaty of Versailles,

The first ‘personnel Director’ I worked for was quite an eccentric gentleman by the name of Ken Skinner. He recruited me into Unilever originally; I was told that he always looked for quirky characters!

Ken Skinner was about to retire when I started my working life in 1986, and he was a grisly veteran of the ‘hard-nosed’ industrial relations era of the 1960s and 1970s. In his time leading personnel at Birds Eye, he nurtured and developed IR professionals of the old school, whilst always insisting they maintained enough sophistication to thrive in the wider world of Unilever.

Ken was a believer in the power worldview of ER. He believed that management would determine what to do, and the trade union could then negotiate the price. He understood the contours of workplace power intimately. One piece of advice I remember him giving me was ‘always do what you say you will do’, In other words do not make idle threats or set deadlines if you have no intention of keeping them. This is a foundational element of the power ER strategy. After all, making threats when you do not have the power is pretty dumb.

Ken’s advice came to mind recently after the UK Prime Minister threatened to withdraw NHS training posts unless junior doctors ended their strike. While I tend to support the Government on this issue, I would have advised Sir Keir that this approach violates a key rule: ‘Always do what you say you will do’. The threat lacks credibility, since new doctors must be trained sooner or later.

Similarly, President Trump, another ‘power ‘worldview negotiator, is also appearing to break the rule of ‘not doing what you say you will do’. Threats or promises not delivered undermine credibility like nothing else. I suspect in the world of New York real estate, unlike in geopolitics, no one called his bluff.

I used to apply 10 rules of ER as a day-to-day practioner. The first being the aforementioned ‘do what you say you will do’.

Rule 2 was ‘Be Honest. Always tell it as its is’. Well, that’s pretty obvious I can hear you whisper. Obvious it is, but it is amazing how many times it is simply ignored. Good negotiators will not need to be liked. They will not seek to convince by poetry. They set the boundaries, never lie and build up the reputation for straight talking. That way when they say, ‘that is all I have to offer you’, they are believed.

Rule 3 was always about avoiding surprises. For management as well as trade unions and employees. Nothing speaks of a bigger failure than an issue bubbling up seemingly from nowhere, and nobody knowing quite what to do, A good ER practioner should be able to ‘sniff’ trouble out- lay out the scenarios- and weigh up options. If you are getting surprises and reacting all the time, then you are simply not acting strategically.

My rule 4 was about asking questions before you speak. Negotiating pros ask more questions than give answers. When receiving a pay claim, before reacting, ask it to be explained to you, never assume, never show your cards until the time comes to show cards. Curiosity is an essential attribute of a pro.

My favourite rule was rule 5. ‘Too clever by half solutions never work’. Particularly when dealing with international issues that have spun out of control, I invariably found that somewhere along the timeline someone, had made a ‘clever’ move. As if they thought they were playing a game of chess. They had deployed a legal loophole or played a ‘divide and rule’ card or some variant. Sometimes it worked in the short term. But it always blew up in the end. The more ‘clever by half’ your solution needs to be, the more the red flags should be waving.

Rule 6 was the obvious rule of ensuring you know you’re negotiating opposite numbers better than you know yourself. On one occasion a conciliator advised me and a full-time senor trade union official that he had never come across two people who knew the other sides issues as well as their own, as we did. We both took it as a major compliment. Knowing the issues your counterparts face is as basic as it comes. Once again, it is amazing how many times this simply gets ignored

I think I upset a Business group President once, when I realised one of my private ambitions during a particularly nasty dispute. I was able to say ‘It is not personal, it’s business’. (Men of a certain age relish quoting from the Godfather.) The very senior leader was not impressed, but for me it was still worth it. To do ER, you have to simply decide that you will not take things personally – ever. Rule number 7. That is hard.

Rules 8 and 9 were about the use of time. For domestic issues, time is your friend. One ER leader I worked for (again at Birds Eye – that was the IR school then), always advised that there were issues you could wait out, and they would go away on their own accord. Use process to manage them along. Do not commit to deadlines, process them to death, The secret of course was to be able to spot which issues this worked for, and which you needed to nip in the bud. Duncan Halliday, the IR leader I learned this from, had the sixth sense required

I only gained that sixth sense many years later, and in dawned on me when dealing with international issues. The longer you let an international issue fester, the harder it becomes to solve and the more costly solving it becomes. If an international issue emerges, nip it in the bud asap.

Finally, Rule 10. I always asked my people whether they know their 2% ers, the 2% of the workplace population who were the key opinion formers. Knowing them, listening to them and talking to them – is the job.

Now, since I alighted on these 10 rules, the world has changed. If anything, things are now more difficult and complex. I will share 10 new rules for ‘Collective HR’, (the new name for Mr Dog), in future posts.