The Call to Wonder

Adrian Xuereb Archer
Nov 1
3 min read

When Control Cracks and Curiosity Leads

One of the saddest moments happened when all the KPIs showed the right markers and forecasts gleamed. Yet I felt dead. We baptise ourselves in KPIs, forecasts, and strategy decks, as if the more we measure, the more reality will obey. The modern management's belief that control creates the reality, has become a religion that is more fictitious than the story of Santa Clause. No wonder everything is falling apart.

The Myth of Control

Control has become our secular religion. We build dashboards as if they were sacred texts, each one promising order in the face of chaos. Yet every leader knows the truth: the world keeps cracking the spell. Markets shift, employees leave, economies tilt. Complexity theory (Stacey, 2011) tells us that in living systems, prediction fails because relationships evolve faster than any plan. The tighter we grip, the more vitality escapes.

Our obsession with control is not power, it’s anxiety. Beneath the spreadsheet lies a hidden plea: Please, let things stay still long enough for me to feel safe. But the world is not still. It is emergent, relational, and wild. And its cracks are not failures but they are invitations to look at things deeper. Many dominant leaders, seeing how much they can get through bullying, have forgotten that having more is a prison.

When the World Cracks

I had two major meltdowns in my life. The first one shattered me in every dimension but it sowed the seeds for who I am today. Every crisis, organisational, ecological, personal, is the sound of an old story breaking. Something larger wants to enter, but the doorway is too narrow for our need to control.

The second time that things broke, I decided that I am going to enjoy it. I still got hurt and felt the punch, but there was a different energy. When things fall apart, what if we didn’t rush to fix them? What if we listened to the fracture? The leader who can tolerate uncertainty, who can stay curious in the face of breakdown, becomes the North Start onto which people can align to. When this happens things move from collapse to initiation.

Reawakening the Inner Child

Here’s the paradox: the intelligence needed for complex times is not more control but play. Play is the mind’s original way of learning complexity without fear. Long before we had business schools, we had games, experiments, improvisations. The inner child, that part of you that still wonders, still delights, still believes, is not naive. It’s the most sophisticated strategist you have.

Modern neuroscience (Keltner, 2023) shows that awe and curiosity literally rewire the brain, expanding perception and creativity. In leadership terms, this is adaptive intelligence, the capacity to navigate uncertainty through presence rather than prediction. To achieve this you can try to:

Be in nature. Systems thinking begins with systems feeling. Nature recalibrates your inner rhythm to the living world’s coherence.
Dialogue with your inner child. Ask: What would make this fun? It’s not frivolous, it’s neural innovation.
Track coincidence. Write down three “meaningful coincidences” each week. Notice what stories begin to connect. Synchronicity is not superstition; it’s your perception noticing patterns faster than your logic can explain.