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Why Stupid Leadership Retreats Work

3 Oct 2026

Leadership retreats don’t work because of what happens on them. They work because a change of scene forces new ways of thinking and acting. Win over the people everybody copies while you’re there, and the change will survive the trip home too.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the btrmt. lectures podcast. For the article that inspired it, see Leadership consulting is usually more ‘feel good’ than ‘do good’.

Welcome to the Betterment Lectures. My name is Dr Dorian Minors, and if there’s one thing I’ve learnt as a brain scientist, it’s that there’s no instruction manual for this device in our head. But there are patterns. Patterns of thought, of feeling, patterns of action, because that’s the job of the brain: creating the patterns that gracefully handle the predictable shapes of everyday life. So let me teach you about them. One pattern, one podcast, and you choose if it works for you.

¶From cynic to something sweeter

Before I came to teach here at the Military Academy at Sandhurst, I spent a bit of time doing leadership consulting. I was training to be a brain scientist, doing my PhD at Cambridge, and neuroscience washing was, and frankly still is, very trendy. So they liked me to come into their workshops and their retreats and wow everybody with brain words. And because leadership development—or leadership transformation—is really just a fancy way of saying behavioural intervention, and I trained in psychology, eventually they started getting me to sort out their methods and their theories of change as well.

All throughout that process, I became very cynical about leadership transformation. I’ll talk about it in great detail today, and I’ll link to an article where I spent a lot of time denigrating it, because honestly it seems like a bunch of fluff, superficially. I left the enterprise very sceptical.

But now I’ve come back to teaching it here at Sandhurst, and my thoughts have developed a little bit. I think it’s worth talking about again since my last articles on it, because I’m a little bit sweeter on it. And in particular, I’m sweeter on it because I think the solutions to leadership development, leadership transformation, are so simple that it almost doesn’t matter if it’s superficial.

So that’s what I want to talk about today. The magic of leadership consulting, fluffy or not. Let’s get into it.

¶Three kinds of consulting

We ought to start off by defining leadership consulting. It’s a kind of management consulting, and there are three rough categories of management consulting you can think of when you hear of firms like McKinsey or Bain or Accenture. Three categories of things that they do for businesses.

The first one is the most tangible. You have operations consulting. It’s a technical delivery. You might say something like, “I don’t have enough money to run my company.” And an operations consultant would come in and say things like, “Fire these 50 people,” or, “Refinance these assets.” And then they’ll smile at you and point out that now your cash flow is much better, and you’ll use some of that improved cash flow to pay them. That’s operations consulting. Very tangible, very practical outcomes.

The next category is strategy consulting, which is a bit more abstract. Here you might say something like, “My product isn’t selling very well anymore.” And strategy consultants would come in and say things like, “Well, why don’t you market your product in this new way, to this new market segment?” Or, “Why don’t you rebrand, so you become relevant again?” Or it could bleed into operations: “Your supply chain produces widgets for this target market, but that same supply chain could also produce widgets for this other one. So with the same stuff, you could produce two products for two markets.” And whatever they’ve advised you to do, they’ll smile at you and point out that now you’re making heaps more money from a bunch more people, and you’ll use that money to pay them.

So, two categories. Operations consulting: very tangible, very practical benefit to the company. Strategy consulting: a little bit more abstract, but still a practical benefit to the company. And then you have leadership transformation, or leadership development consulting, which in comparison seems like a little bit of a scam. Because you’re going to come to these people and say, “My leadership team is fucked. They don’t know what they’re doing, or they don’t have a vision, or they’re not leading very well.” And unlike the other two categories, where they tell you to do things that make you more money, this group don’t often measure what it is that they’re doing. You’ll ask them—like I’ve asked many times—“How do you measure impact?” And they’ll say, like they’re all reading from the same textbook, “It’s very hard to measure impact.”

So while the other groups will smile and point out how much money they’re making you, and you’ll use some of that money to pay them, these people you just pay, and you hope that your leaders are better.

¶Superficially fluffy

If you’ve ever paid attention to any trade magazines—the Harvard Business Review, or the Atlantic, or some of the pieces in things like The Economist or the Financial Times—you’ll find the superficially fluffy aspects of leadership development consulting everywhere. Concepts I complain about a lot, and I’ll link some examples because I don’t want to spend too long on these old complaints of mine: concepts like emotional intelligence, or the chimp brain, the lizard brain, the amygdala being the fear centre of the brain, evolutionary narratives about how we’re poorly designed for the modern world. All of this stuff comes from the leadership transformation world. And all of it, once you penetrate past the surface, is superficially fluffy.

So the question is: why do people pay for this kind of material when, unlike the other two categories of consulting, this one has no obvious financial benefit?

¶A narrative for problems nobody can solve

I’ve written about this before, but the reasons are manifold. The first is that leadership transformation actually has a pretty clear value proposition for organisations undergoing any kind of complex change, any kind of uncertainty, or facing complexity.

I used to work in particular in sustainability transformation consulting. Sustainability isn’t as trendy as it was just a couple of years ago—2021, 2022, I guess. Back then, everybody really cared about sustainability. And it didn’t matter whether the business leaders cared, because all the other stakeholders did. Governments wanted them to be more sustainable. Special interest groups and consumers wanted sustainability from the businesses they bought from. Shareholders too. And even to recruit and keep top talent internally, you’d often need some sort of narrative around sustainability. So just pragmatically, it was something businesses had to engage with.

It’s different now, for some reason. Even as very scary reports are being put out by, for example, the government in the UK, which I’ll link to, the public narrative is very quiet about climate. I have some ideas about that. I might relegate those to a footnote.

But it’s a perfect example of complexity, because even when everybody did care, business leaders wouldn’t know what to do. Firstly, because working out what sustainable changes a business could make that would actually have an impact is something nobody really had a good idea about. The features contributing to the climate crisis, and the facets of social inequality that feed into this kind of problem, are complex dynamical systems that are really not very well understood. So for business leaders trying to solve this problem, there aren’t even very many good questions, never mind good answers to those questions.

And secondly, the expectations of any multi-stakeholder group will often be in tension. This is a good example. Governments want sustainability for certain reasons, which are not the same as the reasons consumers might want sustainability, which is not the same as what top talent might be interested in. And all of these things might be at odds with the financial interests of shareholders and the business itself, even if those groups also wanted sustainability. They might not want the same kind of sustainability, even if each was a useful, sustainable direction to move in.

So it’s a very complex issue for leaders to grapple with. A lack of direction from the problem of sustainability itself, and then the troublesome desires of all these different stakeholders, meant that even if business leaders tried to implement some sort of package of sustainable change, it was going to come out lightweight and unsatisfactory.

Now, the point of leadership transformation consulting, in the face of a problem like this, isn’t to solve sustainability as a hard problem, because there aren’t many people doing a good job of that. What it can do is help leaders get a handle on a narrative that gives them a starting point. The leaders might not know exactly what they’re trying to achieve, but with the help of leadership transformation consulting they can come up with a narrative that helps them move forward. It helps them gather the organisation around a vision of the future and start moving in a direction, communicating with stakeholders, making sure they can move towards answers as and when they find them.

That has its own sort of value. It’s not a financial value, but it is a felt value for the leaders of an organisation. They’re facing a challenge, and they step away from an intervention like this with a capability to address the most important aspect of that problem: how are we going to lead people in the face of an uncertain future? All of this without necessarily knowing what the answer to that uncertain future is.

¶Education as entertainment

In addition to that, you also have entertainment value. Again, I have an article on this that I’ll link to, but a lot of education is now just entertainment. Think of the pop psychology books that populate airport bookstores. The pop psychology I’m talking about is exemplified in the work of Malcolm Gladwell, who, for those who don’t know, is a journalist who writes fantastic narratives that trigger these sort of aha moments in you when you’re reading his books.

For example, one of his books is called Outliers, and the idea is that there’s no such thing as talent, really. Take all the people we think are talented. Bill Gates is an example he uses: he seems like an outlier, a technological prodigy. But when you investigate Bill Gates, you find he had this long and deep and unusual history of access to technology before everybody else did. At a young age, he was working with computers through—I can’t remember—his father’s company or something like this. So actually, it’s not so much that Bill Gates was talented, but that he had opportunities other people didn’t. And the book goes through multiple examples of this, demolishing our idea of talent.

A lot of leadership transformation consulting is like this kind of airport psychology book. And there’s a sociologist, Professor Murray Davis, who wanted to come up with a sociology of the interesting. He tells us exactly what’s going on in this kind of airport psychology book, which is the same thing you see in a lot of leadership transformation consulting.

What Murray Davis says is that the theories of the world—the academic theories of the world—that we find interesting aren’t necessarily the theories that are true. The theories we find interesting are the ones that violate our weakly held beliefs. They’re hot takes on stuff we don’t really care that much about. And the reason these are interesting is that if I tell you something you already know, you’re not really going to be impressed by it. You’ll just nod along and forget what I told you; you already knew it. And if I tell you something that violates your strongly held beliefs, you’re going to have a hard time accepting what I’m saying. But if I tell you something that shocks you—it violates your expectations, but you don’t really care that much about it—then you’re going to walk away with an aha moment. This feeling that you know something new, that your view of the world has changed. And that is the stuff we find interesting.

That’s the Malcolm Gladwell secret sauce, and it completely saturates the leadership transformation world. What these organisations do is take leaders away, make them do some fake yoga, some fake meditation, some strange and bizarre activities, and feed them this kind of violation of their weakly held beliefs. So they come away feeling smarter, as well as having this capability to communicate around whatever complex issue they need to communicate. It’s like the company theatre pass, I think I wrote in a previous article. And that’s worth paying for, I think.

¶A charisma-based product

The last thing I’ll point out, and it’s related to these other two features of the landscape, is that leadership transformation is almost entirely charisma-based. I said this before, but nobody was really measuring what they were doing. People will talk about measurement these days. They’ll often do culture measurements, for example—culture being the sort of general bin that organisations put problems in when they don’t know what the problems are. If you don’t know what’s wrong with your organisation, it’s a culture problem. So a lot of these leadership transformation firms will try to do culture measurements, but serious measurement is uncommon.

So nobody had a methodology that anyone could say worked, because nobody was measuring it. What all these methodologies were, were things people believed in. And they believed in them because of the leaders of these leadership transformation firms. I worked for a firm called Imagine, which was founded in part by Paul Polman, this sort of sustainability guru, ex-CEO of Unilever. And what people were buying was less the Imagine method and more Paul Polman and the other co-founders. They were buying the charisma of these people.

And again, I think that’s worth paying for. You want to be charmed. You want to see yourself reflected in the other. You want to benefit from the successes of the people you look up to. I’m not saying any of these things are a bad thing.

¶And yet it works

Why I’m saying all of this is because, if all of it is true, then leadership transformation shouldn’t work. It should just be a product of superficial fluffiness that solves these three problems, and it shouldn’t actually help leaders be better leaders.

What’s interesting is that it does. It does work, despite the fluffiness. It does work despite the fact that it doesn’t solve the problems; it just gives people a language to talk about them. And it does work despite the fact that nobody’s really measuring it, not within their organisations. But when you look across the board at leadership development, you find that leaders are better leaders.

That surprised me. And it surprised me until I got here and started studying it in earnest. I think I know why, and I think the solution to this strange paradox is actually very simple. That’s what I want to talk about today.

¶Development is not transformation

There’s something important to tease apart here, because there’s a distinction between leadership development and transformation consulting.

Skill transfer on leadership training is pretty good. And that doesn’t rely on any of the stuff I just talked about: whether people like the course, whether they’re inspired by the charisma of the trainers, whether they get these aha moments or not. I’ll link to some literature on this, but leaders become better leaders when they’re trained in leadership, typically. You could probably bet on that result, as long as you keep in mind the standard caveats. The further they get from the classroom, the more the effects of training shrink. The more open the skills, the more sensitive they are to the work environment: if you’re working on emotional intelligence, or visionary leadership, or something like that, the actual work context is going to have a huge effect on how much that new skill transfers to the workplace. And of course, it’s probably true that the leadership programmes that offer themselves up for this kind of measurement are going to be more effective than the ones that didn’t agree to be measured. But all of that aside, training leadership skills is, in general, very doable and very measurable.

The transformation side of things is a more oblique proposition, because transformation consulting is not so much teaching leaders how to do leadership as teaching leaders how to be different kinds of leaders. Transformative leaders, inspiring leaders, visionaries. This kind of collective vision, discovery and delivery I was talking about at the beginning. These programmes are the ones that accumulate the kind of fluff people notice. I’ll link here to a couple of trade magazine pieces (HBR, McKinsey) that demonstrate what I’m talking about, because I’m not the only person who’s noticed the fluffiness.

You take a group of leaders, whatever their skill set, who are facing a problem. You put them somewhere. Something happens to them to help them gather around a collective vision of the future. And then they come back into their organisation and they themselves are inspired. They themselves feel more capable of handling that complex and uncertain future, irrespective of their individual leadership skills. That’s the distinction I think is important.

If that’s what leadership transformation consulting is about, then there are two very coarse mechanisms that explain why it doesn’t matter how fluffy it is. That explain how this kind of extraordinary change happens very naturally when you take a bunch of people away for what’s essentially a grown-up summer camp. These transformation retreats. And that’s what I want to talk about, because I think a lot of people could benefit from using these two things to solve really complicated problems—in their organisations, but also in their personal lives, with friends, with family.

¶The nervous system is an input–output machine

The first one, because I’m a brain scientist, is to me the most compelling. It’s one of the basic properties of the nervous system. Nervous systems include the brain, but I’m talking about the nerves throughout your entire body: the peripheral nervous system, this more ancient system of the spine coordinating your reflexes, and your central nervous system, this more evolutionarily recent system perched on top of the spinal cord that does much more complicated stuff. The whole thing is, at its core, an input–output machine. It takes the environment in through the senses, through the perceptions. It draws that in through the spinal cord, up into the brain. It does some kind of processing and transforms that input into an appropriate, evolutionarily adaptive response. You see something being thrown at your head; those impulses come into your nervous system and get transformed into the motor response to dodge out of the way.

And almost all human behaviour—I can’t confidently say all human behaviour, because we can’t explain all human behaviour, or even all animal behaviour—but a substantial proportion of it is this transformation of input, what comes in through your senses, into output, how you behave, how you respond as a result.

A lot of the nervous system’s architecture is designed to make this process really, really streamlined. When you practise something, what you’re doing is practising a certain transformation until it becomes really rigid. You can see this in the development of white matter in the brain. Think of the rough distinction between grey matter—neurons, nerve cells, the actual things that send messages to prompt your responses—and white matter, these sort of fatty cells that live all around the grey matter, all around the neurons, and are responsible for speeding up processing. Helping things work faster, respond faster, not get interrupted. What you see is that the more you practise something, the more white matter grows around that particular route from input to output. What’s happening is the brain is saying, “This thing we do all the time—let’s designate a bunch of infrastructure to it, to help that thing work faster and better.” Which is one of the reasons changing habits is so hard. You have all this infrastructure around your old way of doing things.

¶We love to change the mapping

So this is one of the fundamental properties of the brain: transforming input into output, taking perceptions and making them into actions. And what we love to do, to try to change how we behave, is to intervene on this transformation of input to output. That mapping of perception to action. We like to try to change the ways we think and respond to stimuli.

Go back to Stoicism, for example. According to Epictetus, we’re disturbed not by things, but by our judgements about them. And what we should try to do is stop judging, accept things the way they are. That’s the basic Stoic promise. I mention Stoicism not just because it’s trendy at the moment, but because it’s the ancestor of one of the most dominant forms of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioural therapy. Ellis and Beck both acknowledged the debt to Stoicism that informs CBT, and CBT is much the same thing. You go to the CBT therapist and they’ll say, “You have these automatic patterns of thinking and behaving, and what we want to do is intervene on them and change them.” Your automatic cognitions, your automatic behaviours: how can we change these things?

The related Buddhist-inspired revolution of mindfulness-based practices is the same thing. You sit, you observe the way your patterns of thought happen, and you try to distance yourself from them so that you can adopt new patterns. Whether you’re talking about meditation or more new-age retreats, it’s often focused on this: observe the transformation of input to output, and see if you can change it.

Psychodynamic therapy is very similar: reinterpreting present experience in light of its origins. Where did it come from? Why does it lead us to behave this way? How can we change that? Or, outside the therapeutic modalities, think of stress inoculation or growth mindset or resilience programmes, which are super popular in the military and the high-performance space that surrounds it. A lot of the stuff I’m getting inundated with now looks at how these things affect you, how they produce these automatic behaviours, and how you can concentrate on the opportunities for growth and resilience rather than responding the ways you’re accustomed to.

It’s even the point of pharmacotherapy. SSRIs and anxiolytics literally adjust the transformation of inputs: you’re chemically changing the processing of your nervous system so that it produces different responses. And I could go on. Reframing, gratitude journalling, affirmations, critical thinking and moral reasoning training like the lectures I deliver, media literacy. Any of this stuff is trying to help you adjust the way your perceptions are transformed by the nervous system into responses.

What’s interesting is that in all of these domains, it’s really not very effective. It’s very hard to teach, and it’s very hard to get effective change. I’m going to have to link some references, or at least give you an AI prompt or something so you can interrogate it yourself, because it can be kind of complicated to compare methodologies. I’ve listed a whole bunch of intervention programmes, and comparing them all is not straightforward. But if you’ll allow me to be a little rough, you’re looking at something like 10 to 20 point changes over things like placebos or ordinary care, or whatever already existed. What that means is something like one to two people in every ten will get better at whatever they’re trying to get better at because of this kind of intervention, who wouldn’t have if you’d just left them alone. And in psychotherapies specifically, something like half will relapse within a couple of years. I don’t have an intuition about what this looks like in non-psychotherapeutic interventions—coaching or education or resilience training or whatever—but I imagine it’s going to be very similar to the psychotherapeutic outcomes.

So we love to intervene on this transformation of input to output. It’s the main thing we try to do when we try to change human behaviour, even though it’s very difficult to do.

¶Change the inputs instead

And there is an easier solution. I just think we’re kind of scared of it. The easiest solution is that we could just change the inputs. We could just change the environments that are producing these outputs. Rather than trying to change the transformation of input to output, you just change the input altogether, and the input–output mapping starts to break down. You have to develop new ways of thinking and behaving, because the inputs are different.

This can be remarkably effective. Think of rehab, for example. If you look at any statistics around rehab, while people are in rehab it’s incredible at changing behaviour. Or think of Alcoholics Anonymous, which beats cognitive behavioural therapy—the most popular form of therapy—by something like 25 per cent for keeping people sober for a year. And the difference between AA and CBT, even though AA isn’t necessarily clinically informed, is that AA works mostly by keeping you going to meetings. You’ve got new people, new places, new routines that are being maintained. This changed environment persists, and that’s the thing that helps maintain the new behaviours.

You can find a lot of examples where just changing the environment seems to be an extraordinarily effective way to change behaviour. There’s a famous example: the Katrina parolees. I’ll link to this in the show notes—a 2010 paper or thereabouts. People’s neighbourhoods were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and parolees who moved away as a result reoffended less than parolees who stayed. A similar programme in the US, Moving to Opportunity, gave families vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighbourhoods, and what you saw were extraordinary changes in obesity and diabetes. And children, I believe, ended up earning substantially more as adults than the ones who didn’t move. I’ll find some links to those so you can double-check my work.

One of the things we teach here is the Good Samaritan study, a famous study from the ‘70s. The experimenters put a slumped person in a hallway where they knew seminarians on their way to their next class would see them—a person who obviously needed help. And whether these seminarians stopped to help depended mainly on whether they were in a hurry, not on their religiosity. What’s kind of funny is that they were even on their way to talk about the Good Samaritan. Now, I don’t know if that study survived the replication crisis. It’s notable that I don’t know of anything like it since 1973. But the general effect remains. When you look at experiments that have these outsized impacts, it has nothing to do with the intervention. And even some of the problems with the replication crisis come from the fact that what was being changed was not the intervention, but the environment.

So changing the environment is an extraordinary way to transform people’s behaviour, because it means those input–output mappings have to change. Rather than concentrating on the transformation of input to output, if we just concentrate on producing a different environment, of course you’re going to see change.

¶What the retreat is really doing

I think that’s what leadership transformation retreats are fundamentally based on. You’re taking a bunch of leaders out of an environment that forces them into these deeply trodden input–output mappings, these cultural patterns of behaviour that are very strong. Organisational culture, what it means to be a leader, people looking up to them. And the more senior you are as a leader, the more deeply entrenched these patterns of behaviour are.

But you take these people and you put them somewhere new. On the top of a mountain, sitting on a sheepskin, as we used to do at Imagine. Or even just a conference room in a different city, a different place. And you get them to do different stuff. This fake yoga, this fake meditation, stuff they don’t ordinarily do. Take their socks off and touch grass. Weird stuff. Superficially, it all looks very fluffy. But by changing the environment in such a dramatic fashion, you’re going to get different ways of responding to the world. Different patterns of thinking and behaving, different input–output mappings. And so long as you’re any kind of good facilitator, and you can direct those changes towards the problem they’re trying to solve, it would be very surprising to me if you didn’t come up with new ways of thinking and behaving around that problem. Whatever they were stuck on, they’re much less likely to be stuck as a result.

¶Why it doesn’t stick

And then there’s the difficulty of leadership transformation. One of the big critiques is that it doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick around and make an impact over the long term. In fact, that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to measure: measuring over the long term is really not in the interests of leadership transformation companies. And if I’m right, and all leadership transformation is this kind of environmental change, it’s fully explained by this.

You take people to rehab, and they’re remarkably successful at recovering from their addiction. But as soon as you put that person back into the old environment, whatever fragile web of new patterns of thinking and behaving they’ve developed is completely demolished by the old inputs produced in the old environment, and so by the old input–output mappings. It’s the same with leadership transformation. It’s the same with whatever yoga retreat you go away for. It’s the same with training transfer from programmes. The insights you generate in these places, the new patterns of thinking and behaving, wither on the vine, because they’re completely overridden by whatever that old environment produces.

So you need to capture that somehow. You need to create a framework in which those kinds of fragile insights are maintained over the long term. I’ll talk about that in a bit, because I think one of the reasons I’ve been successful in delivering that kind of change, in the organisations I’ve been a part of and in the stuff I teach here at Sandhurst, is just as comprehensible. But I’ll talk about that in a moment.

I just want to point out that this trick of changing someone’s environment to transform their behaviour, to help them develop new input–output mappings, is possibly the most powerful tool in the arsenal of human behaviour change. And if it’s the reason leadership transformation can be so superficially fluffy and nonsensical and still deliver outcomes, then it almost doesn’t matter what you do. You just need to make sure you direct those interrupted patterns of thought and behaviour—the result of changing the environment, changing those inputs—towards the right thing, and you’ll come up with some sort of insight, some sort of solution to the problem you face.

But then you’ve got to capture it.

¶Identity leadership

The article this podcast is based on details the process by which it was captured: my generalisation of the pattern I thought worked in capturing these kinds of insights and actually delivering them after the retreat was over. What’s interesting, as I return to it, is how neatly it overlaps with my more general interest in destructive cults and mundane cults, as well as my specific interest here at Sandhurst in ethical leadership and the catastrophic group behaviour that so concerns the military. So I’ll link to the previous article, but I want to summarise it in new terms here.

I want to talk about a fairly new academic concept called identity leadership. It’s a contested concept, but I think it’s a very useful frame for thinking about how groups encourage each other to maintain behaviours, how those behaviours and norms of group behaviour can change, and how we can intervene on these things to produce—in the military, ethical behaviour, but outside the military, just on-target behaviour. The kind of things you want people around you to do. And the way you do that is by identifying the social identity of the group.

The concept of social identity comes from a deeply technical literature, and I don’t want to get into the weeds, but the concept is fairly intuitive at its most superficial level. Our social identity is who we are when we’re a member of a group: who we see ourselves as being, who we want to be. What kind of person would be a part of this group, and how much of that kind of person do we want to be? It’s different from our personal identity. Our personal identity is very messy, and it’s changeable from group to group; we change the aspects of ourselves that we represent to each group. But a social identity is who we are and who we want to be, and it’s reflected by the groups we’re a part of.

What identity leadership talks about is that some members of a group end up embodying this generic sense of who people want to be when they’re part of the group. There are certain people we look to, when we’re in a group, to figure out how to communicate that we’re a part of it. In the military, this is often the non-commissioned officers rather than the officers themselves. In the workplace, it’s the people you go to talk to over the water cooler, the popular ones. In high school, it’s the trendsetters. You know who these people are. Whoever it is in your group that you look to, to figure out how to be. The people you look to and say, “If I want to be more of a member of this group, I need to be more like that person.” That’s the identity leader.

And identity leaders have no obligation to be the actual formal leaders of a group. In the military they’re often not: platoon commanders and command responsibilities rotate through in a way that doesn’t allow them to embody the identity of really local groups. It’s often the case in organisations too, particularly big ones, where leaders are rotated from country to country or business unit to business unit. Identity leaders are people who are more stable, more plugged into the local goings-on. The people everybody looks up to. And what’s interesting about identity leadership is that these people are the ones who determine the norms of behaviour that everybody follows.

¶What cults teach us about identity leaders

I want to take this back to cults to make it really concrete, because I have a series on what I call successful prophets. We love, in destructive cults in particular, to focus on the narcissistic, charismatic leader. We say, “How could people have been led so astray, if it wasn’t for this supernaturally charismatic leader who doesn’t care about people and makes them do his bidding until they kill themselves, or commit murder, or do a bunch of crimes?” And when you look very closely at these groups, the leader actually had nothing to do with it.

What really happened is that the leader, or the values the leader represents, gets taken up by a bunch of individuals in the group. A bunch of people who represent those values and hide the terrible behaviour of the leader themselves. And in doing this, they embody the social identity of the group. They become identity leaders. They become the people everybody looks to for how you should think and behave. The leader themselves is almost secondary, because it’s not the leader people are paying attention to. It’s the emblem the leader represents—the values the leader represents—embodied in this second group of people, often a cadre of individuals deepest in the organisation. And they’re the ones who create the behavioural norms that end up with these cults engaging in such destructive behaviour. The successful prophet is the leader who’s sublimated themselves to the identity of the group. I’ll link to an article and a podcast on that too. But the point is that the formal leader is not what’s important. The identity leader is what’s important.

¶Making the change stick

So, back to the point. How do you make a behavioural change—a pattern of thinking and behaving formed on one of these leadership retreats—stick?

Well, you have to identify the identity leaders among the group, the ones everybody looks to for how to think and behave. And all you need to do is get these people invested in the idea. In my previous article, I talked about my sort of mercenary approach to sustainability, because often these business leaders don’t particularly care about sustainability. They’re doing this sustainable development leadership transformation retreat because they’ve been told to—by the government, by their shareholders, by somebody important. They’ve decided they need to do something on sustainability, even if they don’t care. So you need to find a reason to make them care.

With sustainability, it was often as simple as connecting it with their own child’s passion for recycling. Or emphasising the space for competition with their peers, by being the better sustainable leader. Or finding out whatever hobby they’re into—cycling, running—and igniting their passion for the natural world through that hobby. Getting them invested in the idea of sustainability for whatever personal reasons motivate them. And all you’re looking for is that aha moment. That Malcolm Gladwell moment of making something click for them: why this complex issue should matter to them, why they should buy into it.

And once you have them bought into the problem at hand, you’ve taken them from somebody who’s been sent away on a retreat to somebody who’s interested in what’s happening at the retreat. Then you have the means of making the behaviour stick, because these are the people everybody looks to for the norms of behaviour. All you have to do is facilitate that personal insight into some kind of collective vision. Get all of these influential nodes, these identity leaders, with their personal reasons to care, and simply have them talk to each other until they settle on some new norm of behaviour. Some new norm of talking about this problem that satisfies their own personal interests, but also lets them communicate that message to the people who aren’t there at the retreat.

What you’re doing here is protecting this fragile new way of thinking and behaving from the normative culture it’s going to return to. These environment changes fall apart when people go back, because the old environment takes over. The old patterns of thinking and behaving take over. But if you make the people responsible for that normative culture back home care about this new way of thinking and behaving, then you’re going to have that old system adopt the new way of thinking and behaving, and it’s much more likely to survive.

I’m not sure how well I explained that, if I’m honest, but what I’ll do is wrap things up and then let you go.

¶Two ingredients

I set up this podcast talking about how fluffy and superficially silly leadership transformation consulting seems. Something I’ve written about before, complained about a lot. An industry I stepped out of very sceptical and cynical about, but one I’m becoming sweeter on as I start to teach leadership here at Sandhurst, as I start to re-engage with high-performance organisational cultures.

And the reason I’m becoming sweeter on it is that I think the core of transforming the behaviour of groups—this thread I’ve been tugging on over the last few articles and podcasts—is actually extraordinarily simple, and relies almost not at all on people’s individual skill at delivering transformation, or on the activities they do to deliver it.

I think the core of transforming any group’s behaviour—in the catastrophic group behaviour I talk about when I’m teaching, in the organisations I’ve worked with, and even often in individuals—is a combination of two things.

First, they’ve stopped trying to change their input–output mappings, to intervene on their patterns of thinking and behaving. Instead, the change comes from the environment. You change the environment, and all of a sudden you have to change your patterns of thinking and behaving, because they don’t work anymore. They’re in the wrong environment. That behaviour isn’t as adaptive. You have to come up with new ones.

But then, to protect that, you need to do something else. The most successful change I’ve seen comes from changing the norms of behaviour that go back to the old environment. The old environment is just going to produce the same old patterns, and the new, fragile way of thinking and behaving is going to wither on the vine. But if, when you’ve taken these people to the new environment, you can get the identity leaders—the norm setters, the people everybody looks to—to individually buy into the idea, and then give them a collective vision, a common language to talk about this new way of thinking and behaving, then when you send them back to the old environment, that new pattern starts to propagate there. Because it’s part of the norms. It’s coming from the norm setters.

If those two ingredients are present, it almost doesn’t matter to me what happens on these leadership retreats. Which is hopefully a breath of fresh air for anybody who’s looking to change their organisation, to become a better leader, or even just to change their personal life, their personal groups, their personal patterns of thinking and behaving. It almost doesn’t matter what you do, as long as when you do it you change the environment, and you put in place the people who are going to help you maintain those new norms when you go back to the old one.

I think that’s a very tractable problem to solve. In a world faced with so many complex problems and uncertainties—from social media, to AI, to climate change, to the changing face of war fighting, affecting militaries and the civilian world alike—I don’t know, it’s something of a relief for a poor little teacher just doing his best to try to make change in the world. Hopefully I’ve convinced you of that too. But whatever the case, I’m going to leave it there. Until next time.

Anthologies: Betterment, Connection, Somatic Architecture, Collective Architecture, Wealth Architecture, Karstica, Successful Prophets, On Being Fruitful, On Leadership, On Culture

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