Leadership Undevelopment™ — a live series of evidence-led interventions
Independent thinking. Better judgement.
Less, on purpose. Outdated models, management fads and performative busywork, stripped away in the room with your leadership team — one belief system at a time.
01
The problem
Traditional leadership development has focused on teaching models and frameworks — many of them outdated and evidence-light — rather than critical thinking, judgement and evidence-led practice.
The programmes are additive. They pile more frameworks, models and acronyms onto already overwhelmed people. The result is cognitive bloat, not capability.
The deeper problem is the foundations. Much of the industry rests on self-reported views and on biases that don't survive a critical lens: the heroic leader, the halo effect, survivorship bias, single-cause attribution, and a failure to acknowledge context, complexity and luck.
02
The premise
We don't teach leaders how to add value. We show them how to stop subtracting it.
This is not a training course, and it is not a reading list. It uses evidence-led provocation to challenge corporate conditioning that prioritises compliance over judgement.
The argument behind it is set out in Magnetic Nonsense.
03
What we critically examine
One intervention per belief system. The current series:
- 01Why we fall for nonsense — The evolutionary biases that make leaders easy prey
- 02The pseudoscience of success — What the airport business book gets away with
- 03The heroic leader myth — How much does the person at the top really matter?
- 04The role of serendipity — How much of success is simply luck? And can we create more of it?
- 05Corporate culture — Does it exist? Can it be defined, measured or designed?
- 06Power and powerlessness — The real roots of organisational dysfunction?
- 07The Sinek effect — Why soundbites sell and evidence doesn't
- 08The hidden cost of efficiency — Where the joy in work went
- 09The dark arts of consulting — How to spot them, how to resist them
- 10AI and the Turing Trap — Why automating the nonsense makes it worse
The experience
Each intervention takes one piece of received wisdom, holds it against the evidence, and asks: is this actually true?
We interrogate the claims together, including using AI to test the research organisations have been sold, then talk honestly about what to stop, what to keep and what to rebuild on solid ground.
04
Format options
Deliberately flexible, and still being shaped with the collective. The current thinking:
- The Provocation
- A single intervention — one belief system, one session — for a leadership team or event. The lowest-commitment way to experience the format and gauge your organisation's appetite for it.
- The Series
- The full programme, one intervention at a time, spaced over months so each unlearning has time to take hold before the next begins.
- The Intensive
- The strongest material compressed into one or two days — for teams that want the full reckoning in one sitting.
- The Pilot
- Run early versions with your leadership team and help shape the content, the format and the delivery. Co-development, not consumption.
05
What leaders leave with
A shorter list of things they believe, and far more confidence in the things that survive. Sharper judgement about the next framework, guru or consultant. A repeatable way to ask "where's the evidence?" without becoming the office cynic. And the time and attention that performative busywork was quietly consuming.
06
Who it's for
Senior leadership teams who suspect that much of what they've been taught doesn't hold up, and are curious enough to find out. Executives tired of initiative theatre. Boards and CPOs who would rather check than trust.