Leading through the tumbler: how to build containers for difficult ideas

This is article 5 of 6 in The Rock Tumbler series. Here is article 4.

The first four parts of this series walked through the practical barriers to building teams that think differently. The political resistance, the cultural antibodies, and the financial pressure that kills long-timeline work. This piece stays in that territory, but shifts the lens.

Because the barriers are real, and knowing them matters. But the question I get asked most often isn't "what are the barriers?" It's "what does the leader actually do?"

In recent conversations with two different leadership thinkers, I found two ideas that clarify this better than anything I've worked out on my own. I want to offer them here together because they point to the same thing from different angles.

The container is the operating system

Simon Mont uses a frame I've found genuinely clarifying. Organisations run on an operating system. Not the products they make or the strategies they pursue, but the deeper structure of how decisions get made, whose voices count, what gets rewarded, and what gets punished. That operating system shapes everything that happens inside the organisation and more powerfully than any policy, initiative, or values statement.

Here is the insight that matters for this series. You can change all the tactics you want, the hiring practices, the innovation labs, even the diversity training, and if the underlying operating system remains unchanged, you will get the same outcomes. The operating system selects for what it was built to select for. It will route around any surface-level change that doesn't touch its core logic.

This reframes what building a rock tumbler actually requires. It is not a hiring initiative or a team-building exercise. It is an operating system change. It requires redesigning what gets rewarded, how power flows, whose challenges get taken seriously, and what the real consequences are for saying something uncomfortable. Until those things change, fresh thinking is decorative.

In my experience, this is exactly right. The most common failure mode I've watched across decades of transformation work is leaders who want the rock tumbler results without the rock tumbler operating systems. They add different voices to a room where the power structure, and therefore the operating system, remains entirely unchanged. The new voices learn quickly what actually happens to people who challenge the dominant thinking. And they stop.

The question that changes everything

Rashmir Balasubramaniam draws a distinction that has stayed with me since I first encountered it. She describes two modes of leadership: force and flow.

Force-based leadership starts from a goal and drives toward it. Here is the outcome we need. My job is to make it happen. There is a time and a place for this. She is very clear about that, and so am I. When the problem is well-defined and the solution space is understood, force is efficient and appropriate.

But when the problem is a systems problem, when the challenge requires seeing connections, questioning assumptions, and finding solutions that nobody in the current room has thought to ask, force becomes the enemy of the answer. You cannot force your way to a question you haven't thought to ask.

Flow-based leadership starts from a different question. What wants to happen here? Not what do I want to happen, or what has leadership decided should happen, but what does this system, this team, this challenge actually need? It is, as Rashmir describes it, more receptive. More attuned to what's emerging rather than what's being imposed.

For leaders trying to build rock tumblers, I've found this distinction practically useful. The leader's job is not to direct the friction toward a predetermined answer. It is to create the conditions in which the friction can produce answers nobody anticipated. That requires holding the goal loosely, staying genuinely curious about what emerges, and resisting the impulse to resolve the discomfort prematurely by reaching for the familiar conclusion.

What the church in Holland actually demonstrated

When I think about what Helen and Newton Harrison actually did in that church in the Netherlands, what they built in those six months, it was neither pure force nor absence of direction.

They held a clear commitment. The system needs to thrive. The Green Heart needs to be preserved. The housing needs to be built. Those were non-negotiable parameters. But within those parameters, they created a genuinely open process. Mayors came in and shaped the outcome. Residents contributed knowledge about their place that external experts didn't have. The solution emerged from the friction between different kinds of knowing, artistic, technical, local and political, rather than being imposed from outside.

That is what a container looks like in practice. It is not the absence of direction. It is direction held at the level of purpose, with genuine openness at the level of solution. The leader defines what we're committed to. The team, the improvisational, situationally assembled team of people who think differently, figures out how.

Most leaders I have worked with get this backwards. They define how with great precision and leave what we're committed to vague. The result is that fresh perspectives have no real purpose. They generate friction but no direction. The container doesn't hold.

The leader as host, not hero

Rashmir describes five roles for the leaders she believes the current moment requires. I don't want to reduce her full thinking here, because all of it, quite frankly, deserves its own exploration. Let me lay out one of her roles.

Leader as host. Not the person with the vision who drives everyone toward it. The person who creates the conditions for the right people to come together, builds relationships across difference, and cultivates the cross-connections that allow collective intelligence to emerge.

This resonates with everything I've watched work in practice. The leaders who successfully built teams that think differently in the organisations I worked with were not the ones who had the best ideas. They were the ones who were most genuinely interested in other people's ideas. Who asked the most questions. Who created the most space. Who protected the people who said uncomfortable things rather than letting them be quietly marginalised.

It is a different kind of leadership. It requires, as Rashmir puts it, humility. Genuine humility, not performed humility. The willingness to not be the smartest person in the room, and to be visibly comfortable with that.

The Daoist measure of success

Rashmir referenced something from the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu describes the greatest leaders as those the people barely know exist. And of the work those leaders accomplish, the people say, "We did it ourselves."

I've heard this kind of thing before and usually found it somewhat abstract. But in the context of this series, it is entirely concrete.

The Holland housing plan was resurrected five years after its political death without Helen and Newton Harrison's names attached. It had become community property. The people said, "This is just how we think about urban planning here." Not, "Look what those artists did." That disappearance of attribution was, to the Harrisons, the definition of success.

The operating system had changed. The thinking had been internalised. The work could continue without its originators because it had become part of how people operated, not an external imposition they tolerated. That is what a changed operating system looks like. And that is what genuine leadership of a rock tumbler produces. Not credit, but capability that outlasts your presence in the room.

What this costs the leader personally

I want to be honest about what this kind of leadership actually demands, because I think it is harder than the heroic alternative and harder in ways that don't get named.

It costs ego. Genuinely. The leader who builds a rock tumbler container is often invisible in the outcome. The team did it. The process worked. The ideas emerged from the friction. Your name is not on the breakthrough. This is not comfortable for most people who have reached leadership positions, because most of those positions were achieved precisely by getting credit for results.

It costs certainty. Holding direction at the level of purpose while staying genuinely open at the level of solution means living with sustained uncertainty about how things will turn out. Force-based leadership reduces that uncertainty by deciding in advance. Flow-based leadership tolerates it in service of better answers. That tolerance is harder than it sounds, especially under organisational pressure to show results.

And it costs time. Building the relationships, creating the container, and letting the friction work. None of this is fast. As Rashmir observes, you have to go slower in the beginning to go faster in the long run. Most organisational cultures will not naturally support this. The leader has to protect it.

What to actually do on Monday morning

Let me close with something practical, because I think this territory can become abstract quickly and abstraction is the enemy of change.

Here is one question worth sitting with, and borrowed from Simon Mont. If an outside observer watched how decisions actually get made in your organisation, not how the values statement describes them, but how they actually happen, what would they conclude you are really optimising for? Speed? Comfort? The preferences of the most senior person in the room? That honest answer is your current operating system. It is what you are actually building for.

And one practice worth building, drawn from Rashmir. Before your next significant decision, ask what wants to happen here before you ask what you want to happen. Notice the difference. Notice what you hear when you hold the question open a moment longer than is comfortable.

And one structural shift worth attempting. For your next complex problem, change who is in the room before you change anything else. Not demographically. In terms of how they think. Who sees this problem from a genuinely different angle? Who asks questions this team has never thought to ask? Who has knowledge of this landscape that nobody currently around the table possesses? That is your improvisational team. Assemble it for this problem, even if only for this problem.

The rock tumbler doesn't build itself. But the leader who builds it doesn't have to be heroic. They do have to be, in Rashmir's word, humble. And in the Harrisons' practice, willing to let the work succeed without their names on it.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy Thought Leaders, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

Track the real-world impact behind the sustainability headlines. illuminem's Data Hub™ offers transparent performance data and climate targets of companies driving the transition.