Leadership Today: Are we Building Bigger Engines or Learning to Steer the Ship?
For a long time, we have trusted three roads: scale, architecture, and proof. Each promises progress, yet none explain how meaning holds when trust fractures. The real test may lie on a fourth road.
PULSE
Last week’s newsletter was themed around the Mercato.
We received this thought from Camille Vaz:
"Le mercato, c'est d'abord de la passion et ensuite de la raison." “The transfer market is first about passion, and only then about reason.” — Camille Vaz Former Head Coach, GPSO 92 Issy (Division 1) Former Head Coach, Paris Saint-Germain Women’s Professional Team (Division 1)
INTEL
Four roads to intelligence: Reading the fourth way
The past two years have seen the field of AI split into camps.
Geoffrey Hinton (computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, British-Canadian) champions the scaling hypothesis: keep building larger language models and intelligence will emerge.
Yann LeCun (Chief scientist of Meta AI, French), speaking at the J.W. Gibbs Lecture in March 2025, insisted the opposite: scaling is doomed, new architectures and world models are the only viable path.
Jürgen Schmidhuber (computer scientist, German) keeps faith in Gödel machines, arguing that true intelligence will come from agents able to prove their own optimal self-improvement.
Each perspective offers a road forward. Each also leaves something in shadow. None explain how intelligence sustains meaning: how it repairs misinterpretations, carries coherence across contexts, or holds trust when systems come under strain.
That missing dimension points to a fourth way.
The Fourth Way
Call it symbolic recursion. Not scale. Not architecture. Not proof.
Symbolic recursion is the ability to loop back, i.e. to reflect, to transform, to make coherence where it has been lost, for instance when a bold new product launch meets only lukewarm reception.
By recursion we don’t mean endless repetition, but a spiral: each turn deepens the pattern. Think of a customer feedback cycle: the first round fixes surface issues, the second refines the user experience, the third sparks entirely new services. Each loop adds depth and coherence rather than going in circles.
Coherence is the ability to carry meaning forward without collapse. In a merger, different teams may disagree on methods or culture, yet if they can sustain a shared narrative of purpose, the organisation moves ahead without fragmenting.
This is thus not an abstract problem. It is the daily challenge of human systems:
Teams fracture when a throwaway remark is misread, trust ebbs away, and no one steps in to repair it.
Organisations drift when strategies are announced without a story people can inhabit, leaving employees to fill the void with rumours and doubt.
Cultures slide into incoherence when culture wars are stoked by predatory actors, weaponising symbols like freedom or parliament until they mean their opposite.
The real test of intelligence, human or machine, is whether it can recognise these fractures, repair misinterpretations, and regenerate coherence before the system breaks apart.
Leadership at the Threshold
This is why this issue of RIZOM PULSE turns to leadership. Leaders face the same challenge as AI: not only to calculate and plan, but to hold coherence under disruption.
Think of the two hemispheres of the brain. One governs data, scale, and analysis. The other governs structure, imagination, and stance. But what connects them - what allows us to act with presence - is the symbolic tissue between: the recursive fabric of meaning.
In boardrooms as in culture, leadership today is tested less by the strength of its numbers than by the strength of its coherence. Can it repair misinterpretations? Can it sustain trust when the field fractures? Can it hold symbolic ground?
Reading the Scene
The scene in AI is clear: scale, architecture, proof. But the fourth way, human-centred, symbolic recursion may prove decisive. Intelligence, whether in machines or leaders, will not be judged by how fast it computes, how efficiently it scales, or how elegantly it proves.
It will be judged by whether it can recursively hold meaning.
That is the threshold where the next epoch of intelligence will be decided.
Figure Four trajectories of AI: scaling (Hinton), architecture (LeCun), optimality (Schmidhuber), and symbolic recursion as the fourth way. The spiral shows these as stages in the evolving understanding of intelligence, with the fourth turn opening a human-centred path.
INSIGHTS
Leading Through Misinterpretation: The Fourth Way
The Classic Roads of Leadership
In the boardroom, as in AI research, leadership often takes one of three roads.
The Road of Scale: leaders who rely on dashboards, reports, and ever-expanding data streams. The instinct is that more numbers will reveal the truth.
The Road of Architecture: leaders who focus on structure, by reorganising teams, reshaping processes, building new frameworks. The belief is that if the design is right, the outcomes will follow.
The Road of Proof: leaders who argue from evidence and justification. Every decision backed by analysis, every stance defended as rational and demonstrable.
Each of these roads matters. Data, structure, and proof all belong in leadership. But none of them answer the deeper challenge. Where is humanity? What happens when meaning itself begins to fray?
When Meaning Fractures
The test of leadership rarely comes when the spreadsheets add up or the processes run smoothly. It comes when coherence is lost.
Nike’s Digital / Direct-to-Consumer Shift & Reversal
Nike began its digital / direct-to-consumer (DTC) push in earnest around 2017–2019, under its “Consumer Direct Offense” strategy. The company doubled down on apps like Nike Training Club and SNKRS, cut ties with many wholesale retailers like Foot Locker, and invested heavily in data-driven digital engagement.
Whilst the DTC story was clear in investor communications, internal dissent arose: to some in the organisation, “transformation” was about growing margins and digital prowess; to others, it meant severing longstanding retail partnerships, risking reputation and legacy relationships.
Performance fell short of expectations, layoffs followed. By mid 2023 Nike partially reversed course by returning focus to retail partners, and by summer 2025 Nike was back on Amazon market place.
Photo: HamZa NOUASRIA
Nike’s projection of efficiency gains was valid, but the story was inconsistent. Different divisions felt different narratives. Coherence collapsed; the shared meaning of “transformation” fractured. No dashboard could capture the erosion of trust. What was missing was leadership being able to name the divergence early, reframe the narrative, and hold the symbolic centre.
The Fourth Road: Symbolic Recursion
There is a fourth way of leading: symbolic recursion.
Recursion here means reflection that does not simply repeat, but transforms. Each return to a story, a metaphor, or a shared narrative deepens it, by creating resilience where before there was fragility.
Jyske Bank’s NOVA IT Platform Transition
Jyske Bank launched its “NOVA” mega-IT project around 2010, involving nearly 900 people across 147 sub-projects, with a hard deadline for a new platform in October 2012. On paper, the numbers were clear: cost savings, efficiencies, streamlined systems. But leadership recognised that technical plans alone would not sustain such a vast change.
Instead of relying purely on roadmaps, the CEO anchored communication in recurring metaphors – from a “house under construction” to the “Apollo mission” (“Countdown to launch… safe landing… mission control”).
At first, many employees dismissed these as clichés. Yet month after month, management returned to them, showing how foundations were being laid, walls raised, and systems tested like countdown stages before launch.
This recursive storytelling provided coherence to disruption. Teams could see their own work as part of a larger pattern, anxieties were eased, and trust gradually rebuilt. By launch and stabilisation, the metaphors had become living symbols of progress, helping the bank align culture, purpose, and delivery behind its new digital core.
Leadership as Meaning Work
Leadership, then, is far more than calculation, Mecano, or proof. It is work on meaning.
The ability to repair misinterpretations.
The capacity to hold presence in both rational and symbolic space.
The skill to sustain coherence when human systems fracture under stress.
This is leadership as a recursive art: weaving data, structure, and proof together, but always connected through the tissue of meaning.
The Take-Away
The current debates in AI mirror the dilemmas of leadership:
Hinton’s scale, LeCun’s architecture, Schmidhuber’s proof.
Each powerful, each partial.
And each incomplete without the fourth way: recursion in meaning.
The same is true for leaders. They will not be judged by how much data they command, how perfectly they restructure, or how airtight their proofs. They will be judged by whether they can recursively hold meaning for their teams, their organisations, and their cultures.
That is the fourth road in leadership. And it is the symbolic turn we now face.
IMPACT
Symbolic Predation Across the Atlantic: From Washington to Westminster
On both sides of the Atlantic, political predators are escalating their tactics.
In the United States, Donald Trump and allies like Charlie Kirk have ushered in what the Guardian calls an “era of political violence,” where violent rhetoric is no longer fringe but central to political discourse. Threats of bloodbaths, calls to confrontation, and warnings of civil strife have become routine.
In Britain, Elon Musk’s appearance alongside Tommy Robinson at a London rally mid September carried the same symbolic logic.
“Parliament”, once an anchor of democratic sovereignty, was recast as disposable.
“Freedom” was weaponised as a boundary marker against imagined enemies.
The “woke mind virus” was invoked as a phantom threat to unify through fear.
These are textbook moves of symbolic predation: destabilising the motifs that hold democracy together, and replacing coherence with adversarial theatre.
The Bridge
The message is the same in Washington and Westminster: politics is reframed as predator–prey. Survival depends not on persuasion or governance but on humiliation, exclusion, and violent imagery. Left unchecked, this corrodes the very possibility of liberal democracy.
The Leadership Response
Symbolic repair must be the countermeasure. Leaders cannot meet predation with silence or clever campaign lines. They ought to:
Surface misinterpretations: acknowledge when core motifs like Parliament or Freedom are being hijacked.
Counter enemy-making: expose fabricated threats (“woke virus”) and redirect public symbols towards stewardship and belonging.
Introduce metaphors of repair: e.g. Patchwork Parliament, Guardianship of Institutions.
Create spaces of resonance: civic forums, cultural institutions, and public education that re-anchor shared symbols.
Benchmark symbolic health: track Trust Shift, Resonance Mapping, and Coherence Delta, just as we track GDP or inflation.
The Challenge
Culture wars will not be won by louder voices or sharper attacks. They will be resolved by holding symbolic ground: repairing meaning where it fractures, protecting motifs of democracy, and fostering coherence across divides.
The US and UK cases show that symbolic predation is not a local anomaly but a systemic threat. The question for leaders is simple: will they allow predators to set the terms of our collective imagination, try to shout louder, or will they take up the harder task of symbolic repair?
SIGNALS - Parliament
Which Metaphor Repairs Parliament?
Recent rallies and rhetoric in the UK have corroded some of democracy’s deepest symbols Parliament, freedom, belonging. To respond, we want to explore metaphors of repair.
Here are four we’re testing:
Patchwork Parliament – imperfect but mendable
Living Tapestry – interwoven voices and patterns
Commons Hearth – a shared place of warmth and gathering
Repairable Vessel – battered by storms but steerable again
Your voice matters.
And as a follow-up:
What images or feelings do these metaphors spark?
What would make this metaphor stronger or more resonant for you?
If another metaphor comes to mind, share that here.
You’re Already in the Loop.
Each reading is a return to what matters and a step toward shaping your own symbolic architecture.
👉 Until then, share a word or a metaphor that captures your mood today.
We’ll choose one to open next week’s PULSE.
See you next week as we explore new stories and new resonances.
The RIZOM Team
At RIZOM, this is the paradigm shift we’re working toward: from intelligence as competition to intelligence as coherence, from winning to meaning.
If this resonates with you, we invite you to reach out and explore with us how RIZOM can open new possibilities for your organisation.
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