Radical Pragmatism
A friend, Maya Zuckerman, MBA, recently introduced me to the idea of radical pragmatism.
I’ve been sitting with it since. Not because it’s new. Because it named something I’ve been circling for years.
Radical pragmatism isn’t about being practical. It’s about being honest enough to follow what’s actually true, even when it doesn’t fit the framework you already have. Even when the room hasn’t agreed to look at it yet.
That’s the condition I keep encountering. Across organisations, sectors, levels of seniority. A persistent sense that something is being left out. Not a gap in data. A gap in the kind of intelligence the data can carry.
Here’s what I think is happening.
The word humility comes from humus, the Latin for earth and soil. So does the word human. We are, at root, earth-beings. We built systems that float. That extract without returning. That speak without receiving.
Human. Humility. Humus. The same word, returning to itself across centuries.
The listening crisis began the moment we forgot they were connected.
This is not a technology crisis. It is a listening crisis. And it is happening in the room where your most important work takes place.
I’ve been testing this thinking in real rooms. Earlier this year I gave a keynote at Arts University Plymouth, where the work on ecological and somatic intelligence met an audience genuinely building at those edges. I’ve also been running facilitated conversations with MBA students at LIS: The London Interdisciplinary School on AI and complexity, rooms where the questions aren’t settled and the discomfort is treated as data rather than something to manage.
I’ve concentrated two years of research behind Leadership Legacy into five talks.
The Ancestor Question — One question that changes how you make decisions. About technology, about the environment, about what you’re building and for whom.
The Listening Crisis — There are four kinds of intelligence available to us. Body, soil, DNA, algorithms. Most rooms are only using one. This talk is about what changes when all four are genuinely present.
Eclipse Navigation — When the world is changing faster than your plans can keep up with, this is for that moment. Not a map. A way of moving without one.
Power That Doesn’t Exhaust Itself — The exhaustion many people in leadership are carrying right now is not personal. It is structural. This talk names what performance-based authority costs and what replaces it. Not a wellness conversation. A governance argument.
What Soil Knows — Soil has been solving complex problems for 450 million years. What can that teach us about how we lead, build, and sustain things? More than we’ve been willing to ask.
All five are available as keynotes, extended sessions, workshops, and multi-day immersives.
The talk I gave for the The Portman Estate was the first public outing of this work. Speaking enquiries and bureau bookers: link in bio or DM me directly.
Leadership Legacy is published by Wiley.
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