Leadership
Situational, adaptive, servant, transformational — the social technology of mobilizing humans.
What kind of leadership move does this situation actually require?
Canonical thinkers
- Ronald Heifetz
- Robert Greenleaf
- James MacGregor Burns
- Daniel Goleman
Seed concepts
- situational leadership
- adaptive leadership
- servant leadership
- transformational
- transactional
- leader-member exchange
- power base
- emotional intelligence
- trust
- followership
- leadership
Underlined seeds link to their full glossary entry. Plain seeds are pending a definition page.
Typed connections
Full graph →How this layer reinforces, counteracts, or depends on the rest of the system.
- Explains·LayerOrganizational Psychology explains this layer
Org psych supplies the empirical base — psychological safety, climate — that leadership models then operationalize.
- Reinforces·LayerThis layer reinforces Innovation
Leadership that protects experimentation directly increases the rate at which novelty survives contact with the org.
- Generalizes·LayerMoral Philosophy generalizes this layer
Every leadership decision is a value trade-off — moral philosophy is the layer that names which trade was made.
Elements in this layer
29 HBEsTreating AI as more humanlike than it is.
Reduced vigilance with automated systems.
Federal oversight intended to protect tribal assets creates friction that devalues the land.
People look better in groups than as individuals.
Quantifying uncertainty in model outputs.
Exploiting trust to defraud — only works because the mark wants to believe.
Influence tactics weaponized — manipulation, coercion, exploitation of trust.
Tracking where training and inference data came from.
The capacity to recognize, understand, and manage emotions — your own and others'.
Tools, notebooks, and trusted others are literally part of your cognitive system — not just aids to it.
Experts believe news articles outside their field despite knowing their own field is misreported.
Confident outputs that are factually wrong.
We extend more trust, benefit of the doubt, and rope to 'our people.'
Persuasion power is a function of perceived expertise × perceived trustworthiness.
A pre-commitment to gatekeepers (curators, trusted reviewers, criteria) so the flood of content doesn't drown the signal.
Intuition is trustworthy only when the domain is regular, practice is plentiful, and feedback is fast.
Adults move through orders of mind: socialized → self-authoring → self-transforming.
Daniel Siegel's term for the capacity to perceive your own and others' minds — integrating insight and empathy.
Neurons that fire both when acting and when observing the action.
Neurochemistry of trust, bonding, and in-group loyalty.
Competent people become more likable after a small visible mistake.
Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness — drivers of social brain response.
Thinking about yourself in the third person reduces emotional reactivity and improves judgment.
Assuming one cause where many are at play.
Coordination problem where cooperation pays more but defection is safer.
Earned authority from publishing original frameworks that other operators adopt as their own.
The willingness to be vulnerable to another party's actions.
Matching trust in a system to its actual reliability.
Trust deepens when people can admit weakness without penalty.