S02E05 Why sociotechnical systems demand a new kind of leadership
Electrons with feelings, from machines to mycelium, skill trees and a dual track career framework
We’re all busy exploring what LLMs and agents can do. And yes, they’re fast becoming collaborators, copilots, even decision-makers in their own right. But for the foreseeable future, they’ll still be embedded in teams with human rhythms. Which means the hard part hasn’t gone away: we still have to figure out how to lead people working in increasingly complex, increasingly technical systems.
“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” —Richard Feynman
Feynman meant it as a joke. But anyone who's led a team in a complex environment knows: electrons with feelings is the job description.
And yet, so much of “leadership” still assumes the opposite. We treat organizations as machines, people as inputs, and strategy as a cascading waterfall of instructions. These tactics don’t work, yet they persist.
Modern companies are sociotechnical systems: entangled networks of humans, technologies, habits, incentives, blind spots, egos and whispered Slack threads. People don’t run on logic alone. They lie, resist, adapt, and surprise. Managing people requires a different lens.
I call this sociotechnical leadership. Let’s unlearn a few things, first.
From Machines to Mycelium
The heroic leader myth dies hard. I am the first to applaud decisive moves from the top, but there is more to it. In complex systems, leadership is about shaping the conditions where emergence can happen. That’s a fancy way of saying: less commanding, more gardening.
Telling people to “be innovative” does not result in innovation. Nor does an innovation department. You get it by creating the space where unlikely collisions and informal alliances spark new ideas. You foster shared language, modular tools, and just enough slack to allow the system to rewire itself under pressure.
Think less CEO-as-commanding-officer and more CEO-as-mycologist: observing patterns, nourishing spores, letting the underground network do its thing.
The One-Track Career Lie
Here’s a quiet tragedy playing out in your company right now: your best technical talent is being slowly nudged out of the work they love because management is the only path up.
The assumption is baked into most org charts. Up means people. Down means detail. Most companies have been optimizing for the wrong kind of leverage entirely.
Not everyone who writes great code, designs elegant systems, or spots failure modes early should be herding humans in 1:1s. And not everyone who does herd humans should have to pretend they’re still “in the weeds” to stay relevant.
We need more than one ladder. Or better yet, a skill tree.
Climb Trees, Not Ladders
If you’ve ever played Skyrim or some other RPG, you know the deal. You don’t climb one ladder. You explore. You make trade-offs. You level up in different directions. Your wizard doesn’t need sword skills. Your battle knight doesn’t need to pick locks. But you need all of them on the raid.
Before you start building a career framework around this kind of map, consider this: careers never start at leadership and influence.
Agile coaches often promote the idea of becoming T-shaped —going deep in one domain while developing breadth. Some go further and talk about key-shaped profiles, with multiple verticals in parallel. Either way, mastery requires a combination of technical depth and situational awareness.
So let’s abstract that early-career exploration - whether it’s software dev, QA, design, or ops - and call it Technical Excellence. It’s the realm of focus, craft, and domain fluency.
Leadership, then, becomes a distinct progression. It’s a fork, not a level-up. Career hunters look for seniority and rewards, but the best leaders create leverage and responsibility for themselves.
This distinction matters. It solves the demoralizing issue in many orgs: the only way to “move up” is to start managing people. When you separate the paths, you make space for both kinds of excellence to thrive.
This is the idea behind the dual track career framework—a structure that lets people specialize without disappearing:
Technical Excellence: depth, craft, autonomy, and disproportionate problem-solving.
Leadership: coordination, influence, emotional labor, and systems choreography.
Each has progression. Each has prestige. Neither is subordinate to the other. The best orgs let people dabble, test branches and pivot. One important nuance: leadership cannot exist without a foundation of technical excellence. Leaders that become too removed from the work, stop being good leaders.
The dual track isn’t a new idea. But it’s rarely done well because it threatens the old status hierarchy. Luckily, threatening hierarchy is why this author gets up in the morning.
What Happens Next
Of course, it’s one thing to sketch a metaphor for growth. It’s another to operationalize it.
How do you actually map real people, with real aspirations and quirks, across this multidimensional terrain?
In my next essay, I’ll tackle that question.
Stay tuned.