The Leadership Illusion: The Manufactured Crisis of Problem

Power structures sustain themselves through the illusion of necessity. Leaders are praised for solving crises, yet rarely questioned about why those crises emerged in the first place. Leadership, as it is commonly understood, is not about wisdom but about control, control over perception, over urgency, over narratives that justify endless intervention. The deeper question remains: Are we solving problems, or are we perpetuating them?

The Myth of Reactive Leadership

There is a fundamental dishonesty in how leadership is framed. The persistent issues we encounter, internal conflicts, operational inefficiencies, cycles of failure, are not accidental. They are the direct consequence of how organizations function, or rather, how they are allowed to dysfunction.

What is tolerated is perpetuated. The avoidance of confrontation, the silent acceptance of deception, and the normalization of inefficiency are not incidental. They are, in many cases, systemic. Yet, instead of dismantling the conditions that produce these failures, we glorify those who heroically ‘fix’ them, over and over again.

The Manufactured Urgency of Problem-Solving

Neuroscience tells us that chronic crisis management triggers a stress response, impairing long-term thinking. The brain, overwhelmed by urgency, defaults to immediate solutions, often reinforcing the very structures that led to the crisis. In linguistic terms, viewed through the lens of NLP, leadership discourse itself frames problems as external forces rather than the results of past choices.

Thus, the leader is positioned as a necessary agent, rather than an accountable architect of the conditions that made leadership ‘necessary’ in the first place. This is not leadership; this is a self-perpetuating cycle.

A Different Model: Leadership as Prevention

A paradigm shift is overdue. Leadership must evolve from reactive intervention to systemic prevention. This means:

Dismantling false narratives: Recognizing that many crises exist because they were allowed to develop, not because they were inevitable. 

 Challenging the structures that produce dysfunction: Addressing inefficiencies at the root rather than endlessly firefighting symptoms. 

Refusing to normalize deception: Both in what we accept from others and in how we justify inaction to ourselves. 

Reframing leadership: Not as the act of fixing but as the ability to create conditions where fixing is unnecessary.

The End of the Leadership Illusion

If your leadership is defined by solving problems, step back. Ask: Why does this problem exist? More often than not, the answer lies not in solving it better, but in ensuring it never happens again.

True leadership is not about control. It is about questioning the necessity of control in the first place. Until we shift from intervention to prevention, leadership will remain a theater of crisis rather than a force for meaningful change.

See you soon, 

Ligia Koijen Ramos