Akkadium

20/09/2026

When a human situation becomes difficult, our attention often narrows.

We tend to focus on the disagreement, the behaviour of people involved, or the decision that needs to be made.

In negotiation, we might look for the positions people are taking and the interests underneath them.

All of that can be useful. But there is usually a lot more happening in the room.

Who actually has the authority to decide, and who has the power to influence? What histories are shaping the encounter, and which relationships matter?

What does each person believe is at stake? What pressures and incentives are operating beyond the immediate conversation?

And what might we ourselves be bringing to the situation that affects what we notice? Importantly, what might we miss?

This is what I mean by the ‘Context Problem’.

Complex human situations rarely arrive with neat boundaries around the information that matters. Part of the work of leadership is learning to widen the frame before deciding what something means, or what to do about it.

This Tuesday, 22 September, I’ll be exploring this in our Akkadium Executive Briefing:

‘The Context Problem: Why Leadership Fails When Human Systems Are Misread’

In this free webinar, we’ll draw on insights from applied anthropology to explore how leaders can get better at noticing these wider conditions, and better at questioning the assumptions through which we interpret them.

If you work with people across cultures, organisations, professions or other boundaries, I’d be delighted to have you join the conversation.

Leadership failures are often context failures. Explore how an anthropological lens helps leaders read human systems more effectively.

17/09/2026

We often talk about negotiation in terms of the difference between "positions" and "interests".

That distinction is important, but even interests don’t exist in a vacuum.

They are shaped by context: by relationships, identities, obligations, histories, perceptions of risk. And by power.

So sometimes, instead of asking simply: What does this person really want?

It can be more helpful to ask: What might make this position make sense from where they are standing?

A few thoughts in the video on negotiation, context and what sits beneath the surface.

06/09/2026

Most culture change programmes begin with a diagnosis:

"We have a culture problem."

Trust has broken down.
Innovation has stalled.
People are staying silent.
Departments are protecting their territory.

So leaders refresh the values, define new behaviours and launch an initiative designed to change the culture.

But what if culture is not the mechanism producing these behaviours?

Standing beside a river, we would never criticise the water for flowing in the wrong direction without first examining the landscape shaping its course.

Organisations have landscapes too:

Past restructures.
Broken promises.
Informal hierarchies.
Incentive systems.
Unresolved conflicts.

The memory of what happened to the last person who challenged the status quo.

Humans have agency, but our choices are never made in isolation from context.

Silence may be adaptive where speaking honestly carries risk.

Risk aversion may be adaptive where failed experiments damage careers.

Territoriality may be adaptive where teams compete for resources and survival.

Recognising adaptation does not excuse harmful behaviour.

But if we don't understand why behaviour makes sense within the system that produces it, we are unlikely to change it sustainably.

Maybe the most useful leadership question is not:

"How do we change this culture?"

But:

"What would have to become true for a different culture to emerge?"

The link takes you to an Akkadium Insight article that explores how anthropology can help leaders move from trying to engineer culture to understanding the human landscapes from which it grows.

Culture is not simply something organisations possess or leaders can redesign. It emerges from the realities people repeatedly experience. So what landscape is producing the flow?

05/09/2026

One of the reasons I created the Executive Programme in Intercultural Leadership was a growing realisation that the way we prepare leaders to work across human difference often leaves out the hardest part.

We give people frameworks.

Dimensions. Typologies. Profiles. Models of cultural tendencies.

These can be useful. But they can also create a dangerous illusion: that understanding people across cultural difference is primarily a matter of acquiring better information about them.

I think the harder work begins somewhere else.
It begins when we recognise that the situations we encounter do not arrive already interpreted.

A colleague who seems resistant may be responding perfectly rationally to conditions we haven't understood.

A conversation that appears unusually indirect may make more sense once we understand what is at stake for the people involved.

Something we experience as a communication problem may actually involve hierarchy, history, identity, institutional pressure or power.

And our own interpretation isn't neutral either.
We enter every encounter carrying assumptions, experiences, professional roles, expectations and ways of making sense of the world.

So intercultural leadership cannot simply be about becoming better at reading other people.
It also requires becoming better at noticing how we are reading them.

That distinction sits at the heart of the programme I've been developing at Akkadium.

EPIL isn't designed to give leaders a catalogue of answers about different cultures. It is designed to develop a more questioning, reflexive and contextually sensitive way of navigating situations in which different meanings, assumptions, identities and interests meet.

Over six weeks, we'll explore culture and context, reflexivity, disorientation and transition, power and authority, communication and influence, before bringing those strands together into a practical approach to navigating human complexity.

The first cohort begins on 6 October.

Over the next few weeks, I'll share some of the ideas, questions and learning experiences I've been building into the programme.

Not because leaders need another collection of answers.

But because sometimes the most important capability is learning to see what our first answer has missed.

19/08/2026

Deep into preparations for the forthcoming Akkadium Executive Programme in Intercultural Leadership. Launching 6 October!

https://akkadium.com/executive-programme-in-intercultural-leadership/

13/08/2026

What if better decision-making begins long before the decision itself?

I recently came across a fascinating Harvard Business Review article about how elite sports coaches make decisions under pressure.

One thing particularly struck me. The best coaches invest enormous amounts of time learning to observe their people.

They notice subtle changes, pay attention to behaviour and build a richer understanding of the human landscape they operate in, long before critical moments arise.

There’s something quite anthropological about that.

But anthropology also encourages us to go further, because behaviour rarely explains itself. What we can observe is only part of the landscape.

Context, culture, history, relationships and the wider worlds people inhabit can radically change what that behaviour means.

That's what I explore in this short video.

And it's also at the heart of my next Akkadium Executive Briefing: 'The Context Problem', on 25 August, where we'll explore how leaders can get better at reading human systems before deciding how to act.

If you'd like to join me, I'll put the registration details in the comments, along with the full Insight that inspired this video.

07/08/2026

A few years ago, I led a piece of work I was genuinely proud of. It succeeded by every measure I was tracking at the time.

What I didn't know until weeks later was that someone I respected had been quietly hurt by it.

Not because the outcome was wrong. Because I'd missed something about what the work meant to them, and to a history I knew nothing about.

I'd been so focused on getting it right that I never thought to ask what "right" might look like from where they were standing.

That experience has stayed with me. Not as a failure exactly — more as a gap I didn't know was there until it was too late to close it gently.

I've been writing about this lately: the idea that before we can make good judgements, we first have to develop the perception to see what's actually in front of us.

Behaviour rarely explains itself.

It usually just invites us to look more carefully.

I wrote about this — including that story — in my latest piece.

What if better leadership decisions begin not with better judgement, but with learning to see more? An anthropological perspective on attention, context and the hidden maps that shape how leaders navigate complexity.

31/07/2026

One of the most common mistakes I see in leadership is assuming that behaviour explains itself.

It doesn't.

Behaviour is what we can observe, but context is what gives it meaning. Understanding that context helps us recognise the conditions from which behaviour emerges, giving us a better chance of nurturing meaningful, sustained culture change.

This short clip is taken from this week's inaugural Akkadium Executive Briefing on The Context Problem, where I explore why so many well-intentioned leadership decisions fail when the human system underneath is misread.

23/07/2026

Artificial intelligence is changing more than technology.

It's changing the way human value is constructed.

History suggests this happens every time a previously scarce resource becomes abundant.

The question is whether we're paying attention to what comes next.

This short video explores one assumption I think leadership needs to challenge before we rush to define the "human advantage" in the age of AI.

If this raises questions for you, I'll be exploring these ideas in more depth during my free Executive Briefing webinar next week. I'd love you to join!

Registration link in the comments.

12/07/2026