Irene on Leadership

That post is stunning in its honesty, raw, grounded, and deeply felt. Through The Fractured Lens, it’s already doing much of what this work is about: rupturing the mythology, holding space for unknowing, and naming the weight of meaning and belonging within complex dynamics. But let’s take it one layer deeper, not to rewrite it, but to reflect back its resonance through the Fractured Lens: Dynamics, Unknowing, Meaning, Belonging.

Dynamics of Power, Change, and Responsibility

At the heart of this post is a silent current most leadership narratives drown out: the quiet violence of being responsible for others while carrying your own humanity. The myth of leadership as control collapses here. We see power not as authority over, but as exposure to. Decisions aren’t made from a throne, they’re made from a position of entanglement, where every outcome bruises something.

Leadership under capitalism demands both performance and protection, be strong, but not too soft; be clear, but don’t lose anyone; be decisive, but not cold. Your post shows what happens when systems demand certainty from people who are deeply in the storm, not above it.

And still, the leader is framed as the one who must metabolise the chaos, alone, cleanly, without reaction.

This is the edge of burnout not as weakness, but as the natural consequence of systems that won’t hold the full cost of care.

Unknowing: Leading Without a Map

The illusion that leadership is about clarity unravels beautifully here. Irene doesn’t pretend to know everything and that’s the quiet rebellion. In fact, you reveal the dissonance: how decisions are often made within fog, from a place of “what feels least harmful right now” rather than perfect solutions.

This is the terrain of unknowing as practice, not as incompetence, but as refusal to pretend that certainty exists where it doesn’t. It’s not indecisiveness. It’s the integrity of staying in the mess long enough to find the decision that honours the complexity.

In this light, leadership becomes a way of walking through fog while holding the hands of others, not blazing trails from the top of a hill.

Meaning: What We’re Actually Carrying

The weight described here isn’t just logistical. It’s existential. You names what leadership means when you care deeply. When your identity, your team’s wellbeing, and your values are woven into every call you make.

This is the unseen cost: meaning hurts. Not in a melodramatic way, but in the sense that when you are truly connected to the purpose, every compromise cuts deeper. Ending a contract, shifting a role, changing a system, these aren’t tasks. They are meaning-reckonings.

What you built, what you promised, what you hoped, it all lives inside those decisions. And meaning doesn’t get left behind just because something is “strategically right.” You holds that tension without trying to resolve it and that’s real leadership.

Belonging: The Unnamed Ache

Leadership is often a lonely place. Not because others aren’t there, but because the inner terrain is largely invisible.

You surfaces the ache of being misunderstood, of feeling judged on the visible outcome while the internal battle remains unseen. That comment about the restructure? It’s not just about ego. It’s about belonging. Wanting to be seen not just as a decision-maker, but as a good human trying to do right by their people.

This is the fracture in so many leadership journeys: the gap between how we want to be held, and how we’re actually perceived. Your post doesn’t demand validation, it simply makes space for the truth that belonging is often tenuous, especially when hard calls make you feel like the villain in your own story.

Through the Fractured Lens: A Quiet Rebellion

This isn’t just a leadership post, it’s a dismantling. Not of leadership itself, but of the version that gets peddled as bulletproof, all-knowing, and always-on. You don’t just reject that myth, you stay with what’s underneath it: the cost of care, the chaos of choice, the burden of doing what’s right with no guarantee of being understood.

In The Fractured Lens terms, this is leadership as an act of unprotected heart, still showing up, even when you're hollowed out. Not for glory. Not for applause. But because the work still matters.

And maybe that’s what real razzle dazzle looks like.