Leadership as Advocacy: Building Antifragile Organizations for a Disruptive World
When the World Is Wild, Leadership Must Be Too
In stable times, leadership could afford to be managerial. Predictable. Linear.
But these are not stable times.
The exponential curve of generative AI, geopolitical upheaval, stakeholder pressure, and environmental volatility has rewritten the game. Most organizations are still trying to play with last decade’s playbook.
Here’s the hard truth: leadership is no longer about control (and it probably never was). It’s about creating the conditions for emergence.
The organizations that will survive and thrive in this age of disruption aren’t those with the tightest command structures. They’re those where leadership is reimagined as a system of advocacy: a distributed, trust-rich network that empowers bold thinking, cultivates adaptive behaviors, and builds resilience not by resisting uncertainty, but by learning from it.
Ancient Roots: Advocacy as a Moral Function of Leadership
Laozi, the 6th-century Chinese philosopher, wrote in the Tao Te Ching: “The best leaders are those the people hardly know exist.” He described leadership as wu wei — effortless action — where influence flows not from authority, but from alignment with natural rhythms. The best leaders don’t dominate. They clear the way for others to flourish.
Socrates led not by commanding, but by questioning. The Socratic method is a blueprint for leadership-as-inquiry: surfacing deeper truths, challenging assumptions, creating space for truth to emerge from dialogue rather than decree.
In modern terms? Great leaders don’t hold the answers. They create brave spaces where better questions can be asked.
This is not passive. It’s principled. It’s advocacy for:
New ideas
Underrepresented voices
Long-term thinking in short-term systems
The Neuroscience of Resilient Teams
Neuroscience shows us that human brains, and the cultures we form, are wired for adaptive response, but only under the right conditions.
The brain’s prefrontal cortex, responsible for innovation, ethical decision-making, and strategic planning, is exquisitely sensitive to emotional context. In psychologically safe environments, it lights up. In fear-driven environments, it shuts down and reverts to defensive, reactive behavior (Platt, 2020).
Translation for leaders: If your culture is ruled by anxiety, you're unintentionally shutting down the very cognitive systems that drive innovation.
Here’s where antifragility comes in. Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term to describe systems that benefit from volatility: like muscles that grow stronger through strain, or forests that regenerate after fires (Taleb, 2012). Organizations can function the same way if their leaders:
Encourage dissent as a feature, not a bug
Normalize experimentation and small-scale failure
Celebrate learning as the highest form of progress
Antifragile cultures don’t bounce back — they bounce forward.
Organizational Psychology: Distributed Leadership, Emotional Contagion, and Brave Spaces
Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety makes the case plainly: teams don’t innovate unless they feel safe to fail in front of each other (Edmondson, 2018). That safety doesn’t come from silence. It comes from a culture of leadership as advocacy:
Leaders who listen more than they talk
Managers who sponsor people’s ideas, not just review them
Executives who make visible bets on the unfamiliar
In distributed leadership models, everyone is a node in the system: not just executing but shaping the work. That includes advocating for unpopular truths and championing contrarian thinkers.
Why does this matter? Because emotions are contagious. Daniel Goleman’s research on emotional resonance shows that leaders set the emotional tone of a team, whether they mean to or not (Goleman, 2001). A leader’s tolerance for risk, openness to surprise, and willingness to learn is biologically mirrored across their team.
Advocacy, then, is emotional leadership. It signals: We have your back, even when you take bold steps.
AI and the Leader’s New Toolkit
Leadership today isn’t just about human judgment; it’s about how humans integrate with intelligent systems to see more clearly and decide more wisely.
AI doesn’t replace leadership; it augments it. But only if leaders trust it enough to:
Challenge their assumptions with data
Explore edge cases and alternative scenarios
Invite AI-generated perspectives that contradict the consensus
The danger isn’t AI making decisions. It’s humans outsourcing judgment. True leadership in the age of AI means staying accountable while being open — using tools to amplify insight, not automate authority.
The organizations getting this right are those where AI literacy is widespread, and decision-making is a shared, transparent process, not a black-box-driven bottleneck (McKinsey & Company, 2024).
Anthropology: How Societies Survive Disruption
Across human history, groups that survive crisis do one thing well: they empower boundary-spanners—those who move across domains, challenge orthodoxies, and connect ideas others don’t see.
From wartime resistance networks to post-earthquake communities to startup cultures under existential pressure, the lesson is the same: top-down command fails in the face of chaos. Collective intelligence wins.
Anthropologist Mary Douglas noted that in uncertain times, “rituals of clarity” become essential—structured, repeated practices that help communities orient around purpose and possibility (Douglas, 1966).
For modern organizations, these rituals include:
Leadership standups that reward truth-telling
Cross-functional forums that surface insights from the edges
Storytelling sessions that honor past risk-takers and cultural rebels
These are not “nice-to-haves.” They are structural scaffolding for antifragility.
The New Leadership Mandate
If leadership today is about building adaptive capacity, then the traits we need in leaders have shifted:
Yesterday: Directive Tomorrow: Inquisitive
Yesterday: Controlling Tomorrow: Catalyzing
Yesterday: Heroic individualism Tomorrow: Networked advocacy
Yesterday: Risk-averse Tomorrow: Disruption-ready
Yesterday: Information gatekeeper Tomorrow: Signal amplifier
This doesn’t mean chaos. It means coherence through principled flexibility: staying grounded in purpose, while staying open to possibility.
Leadership as a System of Advocacy
You don’t need one visionary at the top. You need 100 or 1,000 leaders across your organization who:
Champion unorthodox ideas
Hold space for learning in public
Advocate for the people and perspectives others overlook
Antifragile organizations don’t fight disruption. They metabolize it.
They turn friction into fuel.
They make tension generative.
They turn breakdowns into breakthroughs.
And they do this because their leaders act as advocates — for people, for possibilities, for progress that doesn’t yet have a name.
How are you enabling disruptive voices, and what’s one risk you’ll advocate for this quarter?
Works Cited
Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger. Routledge.
Edmondson, AC. 2018. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Goleman, D. 2001. Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance. Harvard Business Review Press.
Gopnik, A. 2016. The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McKinsey & Company. 2024. Tracking the Talent Metrics that Matter.
Schein, EH. 2017. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 5th ed., Wiley.
Taleb, NN. 2012. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House.
Want to be part of the (r)evolution?
I’m putting the finishing touches on a book with my colleague Andrew Lopianowski—HumanCorps. If you have stories of organizations unleashing advocacy-driven leadership, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s build the future together.