Escaping the Cage of Solutioneering

Rebalancing Leadership for an Age of Unravelling

For half a century or more, leadership and organisational development have promised transformation. New theories and methods have proliferated, systems thinking, design thinking, co-production, behavioural insights, agile frameworks, appreciative inquiry, asset-based development. Each has been presented as a way to unlock innovation and build more humane institutions. Yet our institutions remain stubbornly resistant. Health and care systems are hollowed by exhaustion. Schools are crippled by performance measures. Public life is frayed.

What unites these many “solutions” is not their novelty, but their genealogy. They are children of a deeper cultural logic, rooted in utilitarian ethics and scientific materialism. Leadership development, as it has been practised, assumes that progress can be achieved by rationally mapping problems, identifying levers, and manipulating systems. In this lineage, imagination, soul, and mystery have been rendered as suspect. What counts is only what can be measured, controlled, and replicated.

This logic easily crosses into scientism: the belief that the scientific method is not just one valuable way of knowing, but the only valid way of knowing. In this worldview, what cannot be mapped or modelled is dismissed as irrelevant or untrue. Systems thinking becomes a diagramming exercise. Archetypes flatten into categories. Co-production becomes a ritual of workshops. Community assets become commodities to be used. What begins as a creative metaphor or liberating insight hardens into technique, and technique ossifies into bureaucracy.

The cost of this trajectory is the loss of imagination and discernment. We train leaders to manage complexity by suppressing the very capacities that might allow them to live with it: the ability to dwell in uncertainty, to listen for what is emerging, to discern rather than dictate. In Iain McGilchrist’s terms we privilege the grasping, categorising left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, relational right. In Bohm’s words we ‘kill the creative tension in which newness might arise’.

If leadership development is to matter in our time of crisis; climate breakdown, democratic erosion, collapsing care, then we must rebalance the curriculum. We must recover the practices that awaken the right hemisphere: parables, myth, poetry, music, art, contemplation, silence. These are not luxuries. They are disciplines of perception. They train us to perceive wholes rather than parts, to attune to the implicate order, to sense coherence rather than merely calculate outcomes. They reawaken what Whitehead called “prehension”: a felt grasp of interconnectedness before it is carved into categories.

This is not a call to abandon rationality or science. It is a call to place them in right relation. Science without imagination becomes sterile. Management without soul becomes tyranny. To find our way forward, we need both: the analytic clarity of the left hemisphere and the spacious, relational awareness of the right.

That is why I have developed The Thread—a journey in listening and relating, a space where leadership development is not about competencies or toolkits but about awakening perception. Through parables, dialogue, silence, art, and music, we practice rebalancing. We recover the imagination, humility, and attentiveness that our institutions desperately need.

We cannot continue on our current trajectory. The age of solutioneering has run its course. What we require now are leaders who can dwell in paradox, who can imagine new forms of life, who can weave care back into the fabric of our organisations and communities.

So here is my invitation: if you feel the truth of this, join me in The Thread, or work with me in other ways. Together we can begin to cultivate the capacities that scientism has suppressed, and rediscover the imagination without which our future will not hold.