Reflections 25th January

The frog who jumped

Mark Carney speaking at Davos on Wednesday demonstrated that leadership is not a discipline but a personal practice full of risk, requiring clarity and courage. It was a reminder that politicians with purpose are an inspiration. We could do with more of them.

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I’ve become quite attached to my frog over the last few posts. What started as an idea has become a bit of a theme and a useful metaphor. Then, unexpectedly, Mark Carney turned it from metaphor to model for me.

It has been quite dispiriting watching so many timid frogs as the water boils, persuading themselves that the water is not really hot, that it is the way of things, and that hegemons of every stripe are people we must just tolerate.

Then a frog jumps, and everything changes.

“The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.”

Mark Carney at Davos

One of the first things we talk to people about when it comes to resilience is a mindset that nobody is coming to rescue us. It’s not defeatist, it’s honest. There are lots of people who can help us, but it’s neither their job nor their responsibility.

We have to work where we are with what we’ve got, and make a decision: to jump or to stay.

Although we can make the decision at any time, I suspect that the opportunity peaks in an ever-smaller window. Most of us end up in the workplace as a function of the circumstances of our birth and upbringing, and the opportunities we’ve had for education. We enter full of ambition and hope, and generally, around fifteen years later, we’ll have a clear idea as to whether we are going to be a “human resource” or, if we’re part of a tiny, lucky minority, somebody with agency and the power to determine our own future.

Increasingly, for the majority, this is the point at which the water begins to bubble around us. There are, naturally, those of us who convince ourselves we’re in the minority, but know at heart we are not, because, whether as individuals or as companies, the reality is that the minority is seriously tiny, protected by high walls made of money.

At this dangerous point, the difference between becoming a hostage and jumping is honesty.

I have written about the nature of conversations, moving from “private disquiet” to “shared naming”, and the power of the “Quiet Before”. What Mark Carney did was name it and make it real for our geopolitics. I suggest we need to do something similar for the world of work.

What I think we are seeing, as we feel the water bubbling, is the separation of the process of work from its texture. In analysing processes to the point where we can potentially automate much of it, we have removed what makes it human.

Just as trust has been shredded in our geopolitics, what I have described as Mētis, the qualities we bring that make what we do work at a human level, is being equally shredded in the workplace. Work is becoming soulless in the pursuit of performance.

There is a price to be paid when organisations and communities are forced to move at the pace of process, not insight or understanding. Instruction overrides inspiration. Innovation becomes a box to tick rather than a place to explore, and our work becomes the equivalent of William Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills”, run for the benefit of distant owners we will never meet.

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I have been watching current real-life examples, and thought I would share two.

The Games Business and the Frog

I have a long-standing interest in the video game sector and have watched it go through its post-pandemic exuberance and now confront the costs of technology consolidation and irrational exuberance in previous investments. In the way these things happen, my email this week showed me a pretty clear example of the similarities between what is happening in geopolitics and in our large corporations.

A major games company announced a significant organisational restructuring, paired with multiple product cancellations, delays, facility closures, and substantial cost-cutting plans spanning two years. Leadership described this as a “reset” and “the last phase” of cost reduction.

The company introduced a shiny new organisational model built around specialised business units with distinct characteristics: financial autonomy with full profit-and-loss accountability; vertical integration combining product development and market delivery; and specialised expertise focused on specific market segments, with dedicated expert leadership, and performance incentives explicitly tied to measurable business outcomes.

The units are supported by centralised service functions providing project-based expertise and operational support, while corporate headquarters maintains control over strategy, resource allocation, and governance.

The argument is that this structure will enable faster decision-making closer to the creation process and decentralised creative leadership” within a framework of clearly defined financial autonomy and accountability.

Concurrent with the restructuring, the company has mandated a return to full-time on-site work, with limited flexibility for remote arrangements, justified as essential for collective efficiency, creative dynamics, and “sense of belonging.

What interests me about this is not the restructuring itself, which is pretty business school boilerplate. At scale, some coordination is genuinely necessary. Aligning large numbers of people across complex deliverables requires structure. But the approach bundles together necessary coordination with process optimisation whilst stripping out the unmeasurable human elements. The Mētis. Treating these as inseparable presents choices as necessities.

The restructuring aims to resolve the tension between creative work and business accountability by assigning profit-and-loss ownership to creative functions. It treats creativity as an output that can be optimised through proper organisational incentives and structures, rather than as an emergent property of particular working conditions.

It frames control mechanisms, mandatory co-location, financial accountability, and performance incentives as “enablers” of creativity.

But this obscures a fundamental choice: prioritising process predictability over creative emergence. The claim that physical proximity “enables” creativity treats correlation as mechanism and avoids the harder question of whether the conditions being created actually support creative work or merely make it more measurable.

The structural design places financial accountability as the primary organising principle, with creative autonomy granted within that framework. It inverts the relationship between constraint and creativity, treating financial performance as the container within which creativity must operate, rather than creativity as the source from which business value emerges. Accountability precedes expertise in the formulation.

The core issue for me is that this makes honest conversation about trade-offs impossible. Employees can’t name what’s being asked of them because leadership frames constraints as enablers. The alternative would require acknowledging that, at certain scales and market pressures, we optimise for different things. Process predictability, financial accountability, and systematic delivery may genuinely matter more than individual creative autonomy. That’s an honest trade-off, not a failure. But it requires naming what’s being sacrificed, not claiming that control structures enable the very emergence they constrain.

“But we have something too, the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength, and to act together.”

Mark Carney at Davos

The tragedy isn’t that this happens, but that it happens while claiming the opposite: that structure enables emergence, that accountability enhances creativity, that mandatory proximity fosters collaboration. It precludes the honest conversation about what’s genuinely being asked, whether people are willing to trade the texture of their work for the stability, however temporary, of employment.

It is an exercise in power rather than persuasion, and financial theatre.

The NHS and the Frog

We have watched the NHS long enough to know that it is never short of reform, but there is something different in the air now. It feels less like improvement and more like compression, a system being gently but relentlessly squeezed in the name of survival.

We know the pressure is real. Waiting lists that refuse to fall, staff exhaustion that no amount of applause can mend, finances that never quite add up, and dedicated professionals resorting to strike action. The water is truly bubbling.

What interests me is not that the system is being asked to change, but the way that change is being framed. We are repeatedly told that the answer lies in productivity, in standardisation measured in throughput; in clearer pathways, tighter metrics, smarter dashboards, and surgical hubs designed to move people through the system with industrial efficiency.

The language is one of liberation. Freeing clinicians to focus on care, removing friction, and making the system flow.

Having had recent personal experience of the NHS, I sense it differently. These are not people who need to be freed up to care, because it’s who they are. “Freeing them up to care” is a bureaucratic salve for management.

If, as we often must, we sit quietly we can listen in to the conversations of doctors and nurses, and hear a different story. Not of outright rebellion, but of a slow, accumulating disquiet. A sense that something vital is being traded away, not in one dramatic act, but in a thousand small, reasonable ones.

What is being separated, almost invisibly, is the process of care from the texture of care. Mētis-free medicine measured in money.

Coordination is, of course, necessary at scale. No health system can function on heroic improvisation alone, but coordination has quietly merged with optimisation, and optimisation with control. What began as a need to align interdependencies has become a drive to render care legible to the centre, such that what cannot be measured struggles to survive.

Clinical judgement, the subtle, situational craft that lives between protocol and person, finds itself squeezed between targets and templates. The tacit craft of medicine, its Mētis, does not vanish, but it becomes harder to exercise without friction, apology, or risk.

The language tells a story. We are told that metrics empower, that dashboards illuminate, and that standardisation protects quality. And sometimes they do, but when these tools become the primary way the system understands itself, they quietly redefine what care is. Care becomes what can be counted, rather than what must be judged.

It is a familiar move. In the games business, creativity is being placed inside financial containers and told that this is freedom. In the NHS, care is placed inside performance containers and told that this is compassion at scale. The linguistic dexterity is impressive. Control becomes care, constraint becomes support. Throughput becomes healing.

What is missing is the honest conversation about trade-offs.

An honest system might say this: “We are choosing speed over discretion, consistency over context. Some of the human texture of medicine will be lost, and we need to face that squarely.” That would be painful, but it would be real. Instead, the loss is denied by redefining it as a gain.

So many clinicians and developers find themselves in that dangerous middle space. Not broken enough to leave but not convinced enough to believe. Persuading themselves that this is just how things are now, that professionalism consists in enduring the slow narrowing of what their work is allowed to be. Hostage to their vocational instincts.

The tragedy is not that organisations must change. They always have, and always will. The tragedy is that they are being changed mechanically while claiming that nothing essential is being given up. Making what is at the heart of things for the patient, or the gamer, secondary to making the system more manageable for the bureaucracy makes the organisation rigid, not faster.

Like the frog in the warming water, the danger is not ignorance but accommodation. The quiet adjustment to rising heat, justified by language that insists the warmth is for our own good.

The real question is not whether the water is heating, but whether we are willing to name it honestly, and decide, together, what we are prepared to lose, and what we are not.

Because the moment we can say, without disguise or euphemism, “This is what we are trading away,” is the moment we rediscover agency. And perhaps, the moment a frog might yet decide to jump.

The First Frog

There have been those who find themselves in the quiet before and go first at naming it. It happens in all sorts of quiet corners, out of sight. It only becomes visible when enough are doing it.

Gal Beckerman, in The Quiet Before, reminds us that transformative change rarely announces itself with manifestos. It begins in quiet spaces where people find the language to name what they’ve been privately experiencing. The coffee houses, the salons, the margins where new vocabularies emerge. What Carney demonstrated at Davos wasn’t the beginning of something. It was the moment when enough private disquiet had accumulated that someone could name it publicly and be heard.

The question for those of us watching organisations systematically strip the texture from work is not whether we should speak, but whether we can find the spaces where honest conversation becomes possible, and where we can move from private disquiet to shared naming.

Because the frogs who jump first aren’t necessarily the bravest. They’re simply the ones who found others willing to say, together, “the water is too hot.”

In whatever corner of the workplace you find yourself, you have a choice: to be the first frog, or a frog waiting for the first frog.

Places to visit in relation to this post:

Changes in the Games Industry

Mētis

The Quiet Before

Mark Carney at Davos

Mark Carney on The Rest is Politics - naming the Quiet Before