Words, Worlds, and Who Gets to Lead: Reflections from the Inaugural Eclectic Leadership Co-Design Session

A rich, honest, and occasionally combustible conversation about language, identity, psychology, and what leadership actually means in a fractured world.

What happens when you gather linguists, mental health professionals, architects, educators, technologists, and practitioners from across South Asia, Africa, Europe, and beyond, and ask them to design a better model of leadership together? You get something far more interesting than a slide deck. You get a mirror.

That is precisely what unfolded in our inaugural Eclectic Leadership Co-Design Session — a three-hour online gathering that was equal parts provocation, reflection, and solidarity. This article distils the key themes, standout insights, and honest questions the session surfaced, along with what comes next.

Setting the Scene

The session was structured around three deceptively simple questions, explored through the lens of language first, then psychology, then political science:

• What feels most broken in leadership right now?

• Why do we still struggle to tackle these challenges?

• What would ideal leadership actually look like?

What followed was a conversation that refused to stay tidy.

The First Round: Language as Power

Leadership conversations rarely begin with linguistics. They probably should.

Anupam Das, a trained linguist from South Asia, opened by naming something most DEI frameworks quietly sidestep: the marketplace decides which languages matter. Political leaders and policymakers shape language policy not from sociolinguistic wisdom but from electoral calculation. The result is a system in which people are discriminated against not just for what they say, but for how they sound saying it — their accent, their mother tongue, the weight or weightlessness their language carries in a given room.

Bhaskar Indrakanti, writing from India's extraordinarily diverse linguistic landscape, put it plainly: in contexts where English fluency is the signal of intelligence and ambition, language stops being a tool of communication and becomes a status symbol. Ideas take the back seat. The person with the fancier vocabulary wins the room, regardless of what they are actually saying.

Sahra Ali, splitting her time across continents and working at the intersection of language and social justice, pointed to a quieter but equally serious wound: the slow death of oral and indigenous languages. Somali, she noted, was only written down in 1972. Oratory cultures, poetic traditions, languages that have never needed a written form — these carry entire worldviews that are being silently devalued, not through overt suppression, but through simple omission from the conversation about what counts as sophisticated communication.

And then there is what Vjera Orbanic called the colonisation embedded in technology. AI systems are trained predominantly on English-language data. They do not just reflect the biases of society — they amplify and normalise them, and feed them back to us as neutral, objective, universal. They are none of those things.

Language is not one dimension of diversity among many. It is the infrastructure through which all other dimensions of diversity are either honoured or erased.

Why We Keep Getting Stuck

The second question — why we still struggle — produced the session's most uncomfortable, and most useful, exchanges.

Anthony Willoughby, who has spent decades working with indigenous communities in Mongolia, East Africa, and Papua New Guinea, was blunt. English, he argued, was not designed to bring people together; it was designed as a system of social inadequacy, a mechanism for making people feel they do not belong. The values embedded in it — extraction, superiority, hierarchical status — are not neutral. They are a choice. And they are the default setting of most leadership development programmes in the world.

Sobia Kapadia, an architect and planner working across conflict spaces and climate geographies, made a point that cut even deeper. The language of inclusion — 'diversity,' 'decolonisation,' 'DEI' — has itself been domesticated. Institutions tick the box, move on, and return to business as usual. What looks like progress is often just rebranding. Real change, she argued, requires resistance, not just reconciliation. Leadership sometimes needs to confront rather than integrate.

Shehzaad Shams put his finger on something more subtle still: the Hollywood effect. Growing up in Bangladesh in the nineties, watching American films, he absorbed an unconscious grammar about who the good guys are and what they sound like. That grammar is still running in the background of boardrooms, classrooms, and hiring panels everywhere. The moment someone speaks with an American or British accent, a door opens slightly. The moment someone speaks in Arabic, it edges closed.

Chris de Boer, reflecting from two decades in Thailand, offered the vivid example of failing a Dutch citizenship test — a test designed for Thai spouses of Dutch nationals. After twenty years of living outside the Netherlands, he was, by the logic of that exam, no longer Dutch enough. The words we use to define belonging — values, identity, culture — are not fixed truths. They are political constructs that shift over time and serve those who benefit from the current arrangement.

We struggle because the systems that produce inadequate leadership also produce the training programmes meant to fix it. The fox is designing the henhouse.

What Ideal Leadership Might Actually Look Like

The third question opened the session's most generative space. Several threads emerged, weaving together in unexpected ways.

Language awareness as leadership awareness

Shehzaad Shams introduced the framing that anchors the Eclectic Leadership model: language is the first foundation, not because it is more important than other factors, but because it is so consistently absent from leadership development conversations. What we say shapes what we feel. What we feel drives what we do. The link between linguistic framing and human behaviour is not soft or peripheral — it is the mechanism by which reality is constructed, one headline, one policy document, one performance review at a time.

The inner voice matters as much as the outer one

Bhaskar Indrakanti, speaking as an emotional intelligence coach, reminded the group that the most neglected leadership conversation is the one people have with themselves. Overthinking, he observed, is nothing more than unstructured language in the mind. Give it form — through journaling, through therapy, through simply saying out loud what you are going through — and it becomes manageable. The first pillar of emotional intelligence is self-awareness, and self-awareness begins with having the words.

Children already know how to lead

Ozlem Bitlis offered perhaps the session's most disarming observation: watching children play, she sees leadership emerging entirely naturally. They take risks, negotiate rules, disagree, walk away, come back. They lead without a framework, without a model, without a five-day residential course. Something happens as they grow up — the ego takes over, the competitive marketplace installs its values, and the instinct for natural contribution gets buried under the need for status and survival.

Leadership is plural by nature

Monjur Chowdhury challenged the fundamental premise of most leadership models: that there are leaders, and there are followers. The knowledge economy does not work that way. The world's most pressing problems do not work that way. The question is not who leads, but how every individual can lead in their own space — and how those of us with platforms can create the conditions for that.

Principle over performance

Chris de Boer called for what he named 'principle-centred leadership' — not the charismatic saviour model, but the kind of leadership that simply does what it says it will do. When it cannot, it resigns. This is not naive. It is, in a world of leaders who promise peace and wage war, genuinely radical.

Blending, not borrowing

Shami Walid, who had spent a decade working across multiple stakeholder groups in the garment industry, put the whole conversation in a single word: blend. Not cherry-picking the best bits of Western management theory. Not romanticising indigenous wisdom. But developing the fluency to draw from multiple traditions — linguistic, psychological, cultural, political — and apply them with sensitivity to context. Eclectic Leadership, he said, is what he has been doing instinctively throughout his career. Now he has a name for it.

The fourth foundation: political science

Shehzaad Shams closed by naming the third pillar of the Eclectic Leadership framework: politics — not as a dirty word, but as the science of how people organise, persuade, collaborate, and exercise power together. Saying 'I don't do politics' is a luxury most people cannot afford. When your gas prices rise, when your language disappears from the curriculum, when your accent determines whether you get the interview — that is politics. Leaders who cannot read power cannot change it.

Voices from the Chat: What the Room Was Also Saying

Not every insight in the room came through a microphone. The chat stream ran parallel to the spoken conversation — and in many ways, it cut even closer to the bone.

On what's broken

Sobia Kapadia named the structural reality with precision: the real fracture lies in a political economy that ranks languages, with English and a handful of dominant tongues acting as gatekeepers to power, knowledge, and legitimacy. She added what often goes unsaid — that it matters not just which language is spoken, but which skin is speaking it.

Mobasser pointed to something deceptively simple: what is broken in leadership is listening. The observation gathered more reactions than almost anything else in the session. It is worth sitting with. All the linguistic sophistication in the world means nothing if the person in authority has already decided what they are going to hear.

Seda Tekeci offered a frame that deserves its own essay: the gap between language and authenticity. Leadership communication, she observed, too often hides uncertainty, complexity, and vulnerability behind polished certainty. What we actually need is a more human language of leadership — one that invites honesty and reflection rather than performing confidence.

On why we stay stuck

Nikhil Mittal traced the problem inward: the human mind, he argued, is addicted to standardising and simplifying in order to find certainty in an uncertain world. Years of conditioning have made this reflex feel like common sense. It is not. It is a habit — and habits can be broken.

He also raised an uncomfortable question about English specifically: have we begun to treat it as a competitive skill, consciously or not rewarding those who speak it 'better,' regardless of the depth or originality of their thinking? The system, he suggested, is not neutral. It is actively producing winners and losers based on linguistic performance rather than intellectual contribution.

Sobia returned with a structural observation: hierarchies of language are not just cultural attitudes. They are baked into institutions, into hiring processes, into the aspirations we absorb before we are old enough to question them.

Anupam Das added the economic dimension: capitalist markets do not merely reflect language power — they actively produce it. By tying linguistic value to economic exchange, they elevate some languages into global currencies while relegating others to local or symbolic roles.

On what ideal leadership looks like

Chris de Boer made a point that sounds obvious and is quietly radical: respect for different languages means accepting that some words simply cannot be translated. The concept does not cross the border. The emotion has no equivalent. A leader who cannot hold that ambiguity will always flatten the people they are trying to lead.

Nikhil pushed further: ideal leadership should build systems and spaces that work through non-verbal communication too. Language is not only spoken or written. It is gestured, silenced, performed, and withheld.

One of the most quoted lines of the session came from the chat. Hafiza Nilofar Khan reframed the entire premise of the gathering in a single sentence:

Eclectic leadership doesn't mean one leader having multiple qualities or experiences — it means many minds coming together to provide a comprehensive, holistic approach.

Sahra Ali added the political dimension: the singular saviour leader is outdated and must be revised to fit the reality of our systemic inheritance. Leadership is not a solo performance. It never was.

And Nikhil, closing the chat's arc with characteristic precision: it is a person's intention followed by conviction to their beliefs and actions that makes them a leader. Not their title.

Not their accent. Not the language they were schooled in. Their intention, and what they do with it.

The chat stayed open for the full three hours. It was its own conversation — sharper in places, more hesitant in others, occasionally more honest than the microphone allowed. That, too, is worth noting.

The Deeper Questions We Took Home

The session raised questions that do not have easy answers — and that is precisely the point.

• Who benefits when leadership development stays confined to corporate settings?

• What gets lost when we ask someone to express themselves in their second or third language — and then evaluate them on the quality of that expression?

• If technology amplifies existing biases, who is responsible for feeding it different data?

• What does solidarity actually look like when it moves beyond words?

• And perhaps most urgently: if children already possess the instincts for good leadership, what exactly are we doing to them in the intervening years?

Key Takeaways

Language is the infrastructure of culture.

Before psychology, before strategy, before culture surveys and engagement scores, there is language. It shapes what we can think, who we include, whose ideas get heard, and whose get silenced.

Awareness is not enough.

Box-ticking DEI exercises and one-day workshops are not leadership development. They are its simulacrum. Real change requires sustained discomfort, structural resistance, and the willingness to name what is actually happening.

Technology is not neutral.

AI reflects and amplifies the biases of its training data. Leaders who pretend otherwise are delegating their ethical responsibility to an algorithm.

Eclectic Leadership is not one more model.

It is a framework for synthesis — drawing from linguistics, psychology, political science, and pan-cultural wisdom to develop leaders who can blend, adapt, and remain anchored in something more durable than the latest management trend.

Relevance is a human instinct.

Anthony Willoughby's question — what are you hunting, protecting, and growing? — is not a metaphor. It is the oldest and most precise diagnosis of what leadership is actually for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw7_8nsrcFs

What Comes Next

This session was the beginning of a co-design process, not a conclusion. Here is what is planned:

• Monthly drop-in sessions — half an hour to forty minutes, open to all, focused on a specific theme. Dates and links will be shared via email and LinkedIn.

• A resource pack — including presentations from session advisors and references to the work discussed, including Sahra Ali's language solidarity framework.

• An in-person or hybrid conference — being explored for later in the year. Your input on location and format is welcome.

• An open invitation to co-design — if you have expertise, lived experience, or simply a perspective that belongs in this conversation, the door is open.

The Eclectic Leadership movement is built on the conviction that the problems of leadership are universal, even when their expressions are local. Language, psychology, political awareness, and pan-cultural wisdom are not niche concerns. They are the foundations.

Thank you to every voice that contributed to this inaugural session. The conversation continues.

Want to stay involved?

Connect on LinkedIn, reach out to any of the advisors, and watch for the monthly session invitations. There is no hierarchy here — only a shared commitment to figuring this out together. Join the movement www.rononiti.org.