I did not set out to write a trilogy. I set out to solve a problem I see in leadership today, which does not bode well for future leaders. Then the problem moved.
First, it looked like a leadership problem. Then it looked like an organisational complexity problem. Then, rather uncomfortably, it began to look like a civilisational management problem: the old machine model of business itself no longer fits the world we are in.
That is why I now see Fluid Leadership, The Simplicity Switch, and Rhizome Organisation as one conversation. They are not three separate books on adjacent topics. There are three passes at the same underlying question: how do we lead and build organisations that can stay effective, humane, and alive in a world that no longer behaves itself?
The order matters.
In Fluid Leadership, I began with the leader.
In The Simplicity Switch, I moved to the system around the leader.
In Rhizome Organisation, I pushed further and asked whether the system itself needs to be reimagined from the roots up.
That sequence still feels right to me. It feels earned.
Leadership today starts with the person in the chair
When I wrote Fluid Leadership, I was trying to make sense of something I had seen for years: good leaders fail when they cling too tightly to one way of leading. Not because they are weak. Often, because they are strong in one register and overuse it until it becomes a liability. The decisive leader becomes overbearing. The caring leader becomes vague. The visionary leader becomes detached from execution. The structured leader starts treating surprise as disobedience. I have seen all of that. I have probably done bits of it myself at some point.
That is why the book is so tied to the forty leadership styles. This matters, and I would underline it if I had a thick black marker to hand. Fluid Leadership is not merely a call to “be adaptable” in some airy, abstract way. It is an attempt to give leaders a broader repertoire. A more useful map. A way of learning from other approaches without blindly imitating them. The forty styles are there to help us see more clearly what leadership can look like under different conditions. They widen our options. They keep us from confusing our habits with wisdom.
I have always believed we can learn from each other as leaders. One of us may be naturally strong in a coaching mode. Another may understand how to steady a team in crisis. Another may know how to challenge people without humiliating them. Another may be gifted at building trust across a divided group. The point is not to copy these styles like a child trying on someone else’s coat. The point is to get a feel for what a moment may require, and to become more aware of alternate approaches when our default style is not enough. That is where fluidity begins: not in performance, but in awareness.
And fluidity is imperative now. I do not mean desirable. I mean imperative. The environment shifts too quickly. Teams are too diverse. The demands on leaders swing too sharply.
One week, you are dealing with uncertainty, conflict, budget pressure, and a technology shift that nobody fully understands yet. The next week, you are trying to restore morale after a bad quarter while keeping innovation alive. In that world, one or two preferred styles is not a leadership philosophy. It is a handicap dressed up as consistency.
But there is a catch. Fluidity is not shapelessness. I am not arguing for leaders who drift about pleasing whoever is in front of them. That sort of thing fools nobody for long. A leader still needs grounding in values, self-awareness, and judgment. In the book, I place real weight on beliefs, values, reflection, and awareness of context—for exactly that reason. The forty styles are guides, not costumes. They help you choose more wisely, but they don’t remove the responsibility to think.
That was the first insight: leaders need a wider repertoire than the one that comes naturally to them.
Then I ran into the second problem.
A more fluid leader can still be trapped in a thoroughly stupid system.
Then look at the machinery around them
That realisation took me into The Simplicity Switch.
I wrote that book because I had seen, in my many years of work in business excellence, too many smart organisations make life harder than it needed to be, then call the result sophistication. What began simply didn’t stay that way. Tools were added, then approvals, then frameworks, layers of reporting, specialist language, and hand-offs—until everyday work felt heavy, unclear, and quietly joyless. No one designed it in a single moment. It accumulated. A rule here. A dashboard there. Another meeting in the name of communication. Another sign-off, just to be safe.
And over time, almost without noticing, the organisation begins to move as if through treacle.
Complexity has a sneaky way of flattering itself. It likes to sound necessary. It likes to wear expensive language. It suggests maturity and control. Yet most of the time, what people call complexity is unresolved clutter. Or fear made procedural. Or growth that has not been thought through. In The Simplicity Switch, I wanted to push back against that and make a serious case for simplification as a leadership discipline, not a cosmetic clean-up.
The book begins with the need to see complexity and feel the urgency of it. You cannot simplify what you are still half-admiring. And many organisations do admire their own tangle. They mistake busyness for importance. They keep adding because it feels safe. Taking things away feels riskier somehow. But the costs aren’t theoretical. I have watched capable, thoughtful people slowly worn down by endless approval loops, duplicated work, disconnected systems, and meetings that seem to get in the way of the very work they’re meant to enable.
One example I used is a world-renowned German appliance maker. Different product lines and regions employed different methods, terms, systems, and reporting habits. The result was slower launches, weak coordination, and too much friction between teams who should have been collaborating. What improved things was not a grand speech about transformation. It was the hard, practical work of simplifying: bringing critical data into one platform, reducing unnecessary approvals, and creating a more shared way of seeing the work. In other words, fewer moving parts, more coherence. That is often what progress looks like. Less drama, more clarity.
I should be careful here, because simplicity can also become a slogan. I am not suggesting that everything should be simplified. Some environments depend on rigour, controls, and formal processes. A hospital can’t operate on good vibes and a whiteboard. A bank can’t afford to confuse freedom with carelessness.
That was never the point. The argument was never about making things simple for its own sake, but about clearing away what doesn’t belong—so what truly matters has room to work. Preserve discipline where it serves a purpose. Cut friction where it merely preserves history or habit.
That book taught me something important. Leadership is not just about who the leader is. It is about what the system lets people do. A gifted, fluid leader can still be neutralised by needless complexity. That is why the conversation had to move from styles to systems.
Still, even that was not enough. Because somewhere in the writing of The Simplicity Switch, another question kept needling me.
What if we are still spending too much time trying to improve a machine whose assumptions are already obsolete?
At some point, you have to question the model, not just the mess
That is where Rhizome Organisation came from.
By then, I had stopped thinking only about how leaders adapt or how organisations simplify. I had started asking what kind of organisation makes sense now, in a world shaped by volatility, human exhaustion, digital acceleration, social expectation, and environmental pressure. The machine model of the industrial age was built for repetition, control, efficiency, and standardisation. It was brilliant for that world. I am not interested in pretending our predecessors were fools. They were not. They built what their age required.
But too many organisations still run on those assumptions long after the environment has changed. They treat people as resources, separate thinking from doing, centralise authority, distribute anxiety, and then wonder why initiative is scarce and trust is thin. They upgrade the software but keep the underlying mindset. It may sound a little sharp. But I believe it. I have seen organisations that look modern on the surface, yet still run on very old internal logic. And the people inside them can feel it in their bones.
So Rhizome Organisation pushes towards a different image: the organisation as a living system rather than a machine. Not soft. Not chaotic. Living. Adaptive. Connected. Capable of learning through distributed intelligence rather than waiting for permission from a distant centre. The rhizome became my metaphor because it spreads laterally, regenerates, and finds new paths when blocked. There is a quiet toughness in that image that I like very much.
This was also the point where I became more explicit about inner work. I have come to realise you can’t shortcut this. You can relabel departments, redraw the org chart, bring in the language of self-management, and talk, quite elegantly, about purpose. But if the underlying consciousness stays the same, the old patterns find their way back—often looking newer on the surface, but carrying the same logic, just with brighter colours and worse jargon. Which is why the book places such emphasis on inner work. It’s where the real shift begins. You cannot build new results with old consciousness.
I was also trying to be practical. The book is not merely philosophical. It moves into self-management, shared purpose, regenerative design, and culture.
And now, because it would be odd to ignore it, there is one more frontier: AI. I touched it in The Simplicity Switch as a double-edged force that can simplify some things while creating fresh complexity. In the Rhizome Organisation, I went further. AI can either harden digital command-and-control or enhance distributed intelligence. It can reduce people to appendages, or it can free them for more human work. I do not think the answer is in the technology alone. It is in the consciousness and organisational design around it. Soil and silicon, not just software.
And this, for me, is where the three books finally lock together.
What I believe now
I believe leadership today begins with the person, but it cannot end there.
A leader must become more fluid because the environment keeps shifting and because human beings do not all need the same thing at the same time. That is the first move. Learn yourself. Read the context better. Expand your range without losing your compass.
Then simplify the system around you, because even a capable leader becomes ridiculous inside needless complexity. Cut the duplication. Challenge the red tape. Make the priorities clear again. Stop mistaking accumulation for progress. And treat simplicity as a discipline—not a tidy side project you get to later.
Then, if you are willing, ask the larger question. Not how to run the machine a little better, but what kind of organisation the future actually calls for. One built on control, or one built on trust? One that extracts, or one that regenerates? One that centralises intelligence, or one that allows it to spread?
That is where the rhizome begins.
I also believe this transition will be messy. Some leaders will use the language of fluidity to justify inconsistency. Some will use simplicity as an excuse to strip away thought, care, or necessary safeguards. Others will lean on the language of living systems to hide behind vagueness and avoid accountability. Fine words are cheap in business—I have seen enough to stay cautious.
In the end, the real test is behavioural. Are decisions moving closer to the work? Are people clearer? Is energy returning? Is trust rising? Is the organisation contributing something healthier to the world around it, not just defending margins while its people quietly go dim?
That, really, is the conversation across all three books.
The future of business is not simply better leadership training. It is not just learner process maps. And it is not a fashionable org chart with plants in the foyer and a manifesto about purpose.
It is a deeper rethinking of how we lead, how we simplify, and how we organise—so that businesses can stay effective without losing their soul, remain adaptive without slipping into chaos, and be ambitious without becoming extractive.
If I had to put the whole thing in one line, I would say this: the leader of the future is more fluid, the organisation of the future is simpler, and the business of the future is more alive.
That is the conversation I was really writing all along. A conversation I’m hoping many will join.
Also read:
I Go Deeper – Leadership Depth Coaching
The Problem with Fixing Leaders | Integrating What Is Brilliant | Depth Coaching
The Golden Shadow – Owning the Part of You That Scares You Most
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