Between the Visible Order and the Invisible Current
another perspective on leadership: four interwoven layers
A reflection on leadership, power, culture, and the depth of time
Between the Visible Order and the Invisible Current
A reflection on leadership, power, culture, and the depth of time
When I look back on my work with leaders, teams, and organizations, one image returns again and again.
A quiet river, deep beneath the surface, untamed by structures or plans.
Above this river we build meeting tables, strategies, dashboards.
Yet it is the current beneath – the psychodynamic underflow of projections, power, culture, and time – that ultimately shapes the course.
Leadership truly begins only when we learn to look at what moves there.
In this essay, I want to descend into that depth.
Not with methods or frameworks, but as a journey through four layers that mirror one another: the psychodynamics of human relationships, the power that inevitably plays its part, culture as the collective riverbed, and time as the often-forgotten dimension that slows, grinds, and sustains.
This is not a story of techniques but of transformation from within.
A reflection I have had to live through myself – in organizations, in the mirror of my own role, and in working with leaders who, often only at the edge of their own limitations, dared to step into the depth.
1. Psychodynamics – the mirrors we do not want to see
Leadership is rarely a neutral position.
The moment one takes a role, one becomes a screen for projections.
Employees see in their leader a parent figure, a rescuer, or at times an adversary.
And the leader? They project just as much in return.
I remember a director who repeatedly clashed with his team.
He saw them as passive; they experienced him as controlling.
Only when we explored together what was truly happening did it become visible that he – without realizing it – was constantly trying to compensate for an old fear: the fear of letting go.
The team was not responding to his words……they were responding to the unspoken tension beneath them.
When he recognized this, something shifted.
Not because he adopted a new management tool, but because he dared to look into that mirror.
In that recognition, a door opened: for dialogue, for trust, and for a different kind of leadership – one rooted not in control, but in presence.
Psychodynamics are uncomfortable precisely because they reveal what we would rather hide.
Yet it is in that hidden terrain that the real levers for transformation reside.
A leader who learns to work with these mirrors – rather than resist them – begins to lead not just through words, but through the quiet clarity of inner work.
2. Power – the undercurrent that shapes the room
Power is the silent architecture of every organization.
It is not only formal authority – the lines on an org chart – but the subtle dynamics of influence, loyalty, and dependency.
Too often, leaders underestimate its weight.
They act as if good intentions alone can dissolve hierarchy, while in reality power seeps into every conversation like groundwater.
I once worked with an executive team that prided itself on being egalitarian.
Decisions were made “together,” but no one dared to challenge the CEO.
The result was a culture of polite avoidance – collaboration on the surface, quiet resignation underneath.
Only when we named the hidden power dynamic did the real work begin.
Not by stripping power away, but by making it visible, and by inviting the leader to carry it consciously, rather than disown it.
Power that is denied becomes manipulation.
Power that is acknowledged can become stewardship.
3. Culture – the collective riverbed
If psychodynamics are personal and power relational, culture is the collective riverbed in which both flow.
Culture holds the unspoken agreements: what is allowed, what is rewarded, what is quietly punished.
It is not merely “values on the wall” but the living memory of the organization.
I recall a merger between two firms that looked seamless on paper.
The structures aligned, the strategy was clear, and yet nothing moved.
Why?
Because beneath the surface, the two cultures collided – one prized bold initiative, the other careful consensus.
Only when we created space to surface these tacit patterns did the teams begin to trust each other enough to work as one.
Culture is not changed by decree.
It shifts when leaders learn to sense it, speak it aloud, and slowly, with patience, reshape the riverbed.
4. Time – the quiet depth
And then there is time.
Not the clock-time of deadlines and quarterly results, but the deep time of transformation.
Every organization lives in both.
Leaders often try to force the deep time of change into the fast time of execution – and end up exhausted when nothing truly sticks.
Real transformation moves at the pace of trust.
It requires slowness in the right places: the pause before a decision, the silence that allows discomfort to be heard, the seasons of gestation before something genuinely new can take root.
Time is not an enemy of change.
It is its most faithful companion.
Stepping into the current
To lead between visible order and invisible current is to live in paradox.
To hold the structures that give clarity, while daring to stand in the underflow that resists control.
This is not easy work.
It calls for leaders who are willing to be both architects and navigators – builders of order, and listeners to the river beneath.
And perhaps this is the deepest invitation of leadership:
to stop fighting the current and to begin walking with it,
trusting that what moves beneath the surface will, if we dare to see it,
carry us further than any plan ever could.
