We have been conditioned to think in structured ways, with more or less fixed dogmas, to frame and to fit things in place. We see organizations and our professional lives in squares: that organization, that sector, my department, my role, my team, my leadership style. This mental geometry offers safety, but it also works as a subtle mechanism of control: we set boundaries to ensure predictability.
Within this logic, we imagine reality as a set of vertices and borders that we can expand or shrink according to time, experience, or need. However, the current world profoundly challenges this perspective. Artificial intelligence questions what we understand as knowledge; organizational change seems permanent; and the very notion of stability is now almost illusory. Resisting this flow does not protect us: it only makes us feel further behind.
Planning, whether organizational or personal, is no longer an exercise in linear projection. Everything emerges from what is dynamic. As physicist and philosopher Karen Barad reminds us, nothing exists separately: we are both effect and cause of relationships that continuously intersect. There is no comfortable exteriority. We are always inside what we create and what creates us.
This way of reading reality is particularly relevant for those who lead. Because if we are inevitably involved in producing the world we inhabit, the responsibility of those who influence broader networks is even greater. The more disruptive and uncertain the context appears – often due to a lack of sufficient information or lack of connection – the stronger the tendency to build walls. But these walls belong to the same vocabulary of squares: cutouts of reality that isolate, when what we need is connection.
We see these social squares every day: the “us and them” between generations in organizations; “immigrants yes, but not all”; the “I have nothing against it, as long as it’s not near me”; or the “I even have friends like that”. These are expressions that reveal symbolic and sometimes very real boundaries that reinforce the creation of closed groups, echo chambers that seek to reduce discomfort and increase the feeling of control through the repetition and amplification of narratives. Narratives that are not of general articulation, but of boundary and polarization, which generate leaders who promote and value styles similar to their own, often misaligned with the needs and demands of the context.
But to navigate the present and the future, we need precisely the opposite: fewer barriers, more collaboration. Relationship as method, not as exception. It is through interaction that creativity and critical thinking arise, especially relevant in a time when we also need to learn how to relate to artificial intelligence.
We have been talking about diversity and inclusion for years, but often as narrative more than practice. When decisions about minorities continue to be made exclusively by the majority, the problem is not only the decision itself, but the profound lack of understanding of the reality on which it falls. Engagement and empathy are leadership competencies and indicators of good management.
If we look at history, we see that progress emerges from exchange: the trade routes of the Age of Discovery, the relationship between creatives and investors in the start-up ecosystem, the encounter between patrons and artists. None of this is static. Everything is built through interaction.
Thus, more than leaders who draw squares and settle inside them, we need leaders who understand that there are no linear careers, uniform paths, or leadership styles to be reached as if they were fixed destinations. Development – our own, that of others, and that of organizations – takes place in the space of “becoming”, in the territory of discovery, relationship, and experimentation. I will not be a good leader “when”; I will be a good leader “by being”, every day.
Duarte Silva, Development Manager Executive Education at CATÓLICA-LISBON