Welcome to the Cirque du Sommeil

The leadership circus is in town. Most of us are still asleep in the audience. And the ringmasters would like to keep it that way.

There is an old fable, told across cultures from ancient India to the Persian Sufi poets, about six blind men and an elephant.

Each man touches a different part of the animal. The one who finds the trunk declares it a snake. The one gripping the leg insists it is a tree. The one feeling the belly says it is a wall. The tail becomes a rope. The tusk becomes a spear. The ear, a great fan. Each man is absolutely certain. Each man is completely wrong. And because none of them can see the whole animal, and none of them will listen to the others, they argue forever.

The moral is straightforward: partial knowledge, held with total confidence, is one of the more reliable routes to collective stupidity.

You might think we would have sorted this out by now. We have not. If anything, we have built institutions around it.

From Soleil to Sommeil

You will have heard of Cirque du Soleil. The Canadian performance company that turned circus arts into a global cultural phenomenon. Acrobats defying gravity. Extraordinary human beings doing things the rest of us cannot. A spectacle that makes you feel, for a couple of hours, that the world is full of wonder and possibility.

Soleil is French for sun. Light. Brilliance. Awareness.

Sommeil is French for sleep.

Change one word, and you have a completely different circus. One that looks just as spectacular from the outside. One where the lights are equally bright, the ringmasters equally confident, the performance equally polished. But the audience is not watching in wonder. The audience is asleep. And here is the part that matters: nobody in charge is particularly interested in waking them up.

The Cirque du Sommeil is not an accident. It is a business model.

Same elephant. Bigger tent.

Now picture the full scene. The ringmasters sit on top of the elephant, fully sighted, binoculars in hand, dangling carrots and gold in front of the crowd. Their colours are bold and familiar. Their authority is unquestioned. They decide what direction the elephant moves. They decide who gets to ride.

Below them, in the darker corners of the tent, the blind men and women from the fable are still at work. Touching their small portion of reality. Convinced it is the whole truth. Some have their mouths taped, so they cannot even compare notes with the person standing next to them. Around the edges, there are crates being quietly loaded. African minerals. Middle Eastern oil. Asian labour. The circus runs because these things fuel it, and the fuel comes cheap when the people providing it cannot see the full picture of what is being taken.

And meanwhile the clowns run around. Colourful and loud and utterly distracting. Everyone can see the chaos. Everyone senses something is absurd. But the show continues, because no one has told them they are allowed to take off the blindfold. No one has told them it is even a blindfold.

This is not just about leadership. It never was.

Let us be honest about the scale of what we are describing, because it would be too comfortable to frame this purely as a critique of the leadership development industry. It is that, but it is also something larger.

The same dynamic that keeps leadership frameworks partial and Western-dominated is the same dynamic that shapes international institutions, trade agreements, development finance, and the rules of the global economy. There are ringmasters in boardrooms and ringmasters in parliaments and ringmasters in the bodies that were supposedly set up to give everyone a fair hearing. And in almost every case, the continued comfort of the ringmaster depends on the continued blindness of everyone else.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It does not require malevolence, though that sometimes features. It requires something much more ordinary: self-interest, compounded over decades, institutionalised into structures that present themselves as neutral while serving particular ends. The ringmaster does not think of himself as a ringmaster. He thinks of himself as the reasonable man pointing at the obvious truth. Everyone else is simply failing to see it.

And here is what makes the circus so effective as a system: the blindfolded people are not kept apart by force. They are kept apart by design. Different languages. Different institutions. Different frameworks that were never built to translate across them. If the man touching the trunk and the woman touching the leg could actually talk to each other, freely and without the tape on their mouths, they would start to piece together a picture that is considerably more threatening to the people on top of the elephant.

This is why the waking up matters. Not just for personal development. Not just for better organisations. But because a world full of leaders who can see the whole animal is a fundamentally different world from the one the circus was designed to produce.

What Eclectic Leadership actually means

The Eclectic Leadership Movement starts from a simple premise: leadership wisdom exists across the full breadth of human experience, not just the last seventy years of Western management theory. Linguistics, anthropology, indigenous knowledge systems, theology, psychology, economics, art, ecology. The people who built civilisations before anyone had heard of a Harvard Business Review.

Eclectic Leadership is the deliberate act of drawing on that full depth, rather than staying obediently within the lines of whatever framework you were handed at your last training day.

In practice, this means three things.

Clarity. Understanding yourself fully, not just the parts that fit neatly on a competency framework. Your values, your biases, your history, your blindspots. The whole elephant, from the inside out.

Connections. Building genuine relationships across cultures, disciplines, and lived experiences. Not the transactional kind that fills conference rooms with people hoping something sticks. Real connection. The kind that requires you to listen to perspectives that do not mirror your own, and to take the tape off other people's mouths so they can tell you what they have been touching.

Confluence. Finding shared direction without erasing difference. The hardest of the three, and the most important. Creating alignment precisely when people do not think the same way, and without appointing a ringmaster to do it by decree.

Taking off the blindfold

Removing a blindfold sounds simple. In practice, it is mildly terrifying. Because once you can see the whole elephant, you cannot unsee it. You become aware of how much the existing frameworks leave out. You start noticing whose voices shaped the books on your shelf and whose did not. You begin asking uncomfortable questions about why certain ideas are called universal and others are called niche, who benefits from that distinction, and whether you have been applauding a circus without realising you were in one.

You also start finding resources you did not know you had. Leadership traditions from communities that have been navigating complexity, uncertainty, and radical change for centuries, long before VUCA became a buzzword on a slide deck. Ways of understanding power and community that the standard org chart was never designed to accommodate.

The ringmaster with the binoculars might genuinely be pointing at something worth seeing. The argument is simply that he should not be the only one with a view, and the rest of us should not need his permission to look.

The circus is not the destination

The Cirque du Sommeil keeps running because sleep is comfortable. Because the performance is dazzling enough to mistake for enlightenment. Because the ringmasters are very good at their jobs, and their job, fundamentally, is to keep the show going.

The Eclectic Leadership Movement is the alarm clock. It is a growing community of practitioners, thinkers, and leaders who believe we deserve better than a partial view of a very large animal. People who are willing to take off the blindfold, remove the tape, compare notes, and piece together a picture of leadership that draws on the full depth of human wisdom, not just the part that happens to be convenient for the people on top.

The blind men in the fable never did agree on what the elephant was. They were too busy being certain, and no one ever told them they could take the blindfolds off.

Consider this your invitation.

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Start by learning the alphabets of Eclectic Leadership first.

Shehzaad Shams

Founder, Eclectic Leadership Movement.