Riding the Dragon
Leading a large organisation is often described as riding a horse. That’s flattering. It’s also wrong.
It is much closer to riding a dragon.
From a distance, it looks impressive: scale, power, the promise that with the right command you can clear obstacles in a single, decisive move. Up close, it’s something else entirely—unpredictable, occasionally uncooperative, and never fully under control.
The dragon, of course, is the organisation itself.
It has a mind of its own. It carries history, habit and emotion. Sometimes it refuses to move despite clear direction—strategy agreed, priorities set, nothing happening. At other times it surges forward unexpectedly, driven by local pressures or internal momentum. And then there are the moments every HR leader recognises: the sudden, ill-judged burst of flame, presented as “decisive action,” leaving a trail of damage that takes months to repair.
There are no reins. No saddle. Leaders hold on, offer direction, and hope.
Around them, the court assembles.
Functions behave like Houses—finance, operations, strategy—each with their own interests, alliances and long memories. Collaboration is real, but so is competition. Resources are finite. Status matters. Succession is rarely discussed openly, but it shapes behaviour all the same.
Head offices stand like castles: designed to project authority, reinforce hierarchy and, at times, keep challenge at a distance. There is pageantry—leadership events, strategy launches, carefully managed narratives of alignment. And there are casualties. Some visible, others quietly managed out of sight.
Beyond the walls, external pressures gather. Regulation, public scrutiny, financial constraint. These are the slow-moving, existential threats—less dramatic than internal politics, but far more dangerous if ignored.
And then there is the court jester.
In more enlightened courts, the jester alone had licence to speak truth to power. To say what others could not. To puncture ego and expose uncomfortable reality.
In modern organisations, that role often falls to HR.
Not HR as process guardian or policy enforcer, but HR at its best: informed, independent, and close enough to the organisation to understand how the dragon is really behaving. HR sees the mood shifts, the unspoken tensions, the unintended consequences of leadership decisions.
This is not a comfortable position. The jester who speaks too bluntly risks exclusion. The one who stays silent becomes part of the pageantry.
But when HR uses that licence well—grounded in evidence, judgement and organisational insight—it becomes one of the few stabilising forces in a volatile system. The voice that asks the question others avoid: Are we in control, or are we about to be carried somewhere we didn’t intend to go?
Because here is the truth: no leader fully controls the dragon.
The best leaders know this. The wisest make sure someone is willing to tell them when it is about to turn.
Ignore that voice at your peril.
