See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of Chapter 66 of the Tao Te Ching (Unpublished):
Streams and rivers
flow down
to valleys.
Valleys hold
the sea
by staying low.
Those who stay low
stand not above.
So they lead
without standing over.
And in this way
trust flows.
—
Water never tries to convince anyone it should flow downhill.
It just does it.
I learned the cost of standing over instead of standing with through consequences I would not recommend.
There was a period in my career where I became so convinced I could see what teams and organizations needed that I gradually stopped asking what they were actually experiencing. I had the frameworks. I could identify the patterns. I knew how to move systems forward. And somewhere inside all that certainty, I started directing instead of serving. Leading without following. Standing over when I should have been standing with.
The results looked successful for a while.
Teams complied.
Projects moved.
Recommendations got implemented.
Though something far more important was deteriorating underneath the surface.
People stopped bringing me concerns early. They stopped challenging weak assumptions. They stopped contributing the kind of candid perspective healthy systems require in order to remain adaptive over time. The work continued, though trust had already started thinning out underneath the appearance of progress.
At the time, I mistook compliance for alignment.
I understand the difference much more clearly now.
One of the most revealing symptoms of trust breakdown inside organizations is something many people have experienced directly:
malicious compliance.
People follow instructions exactly as given while withdrawing judgment, creativity, care, and initiative. Everything appears orderly on the surface. Beneath the surface, the system is weakening because people no longer trust that their voice matters enough to risk contributing honestly.
That pattern shows up in organizations constantly.
And increasingly, it feels like we are watching versions of it unfold at societal scale as well.
The older leadership models become more anxious, performative, controlling, and loyalty-driven, the more systems begin optimizing for obedience instead of participation. People learn how to survive inside the system rather than how to help the system become wiser.
That distinction matters enormously.
Because healthy systems require participation — not merely compliance.
My mentor, Barry Johnson, once told me about one of his mentors, Jack Gibb, who spent much of his life studying trust and eventually reached a conclusion that sounded almost unrealistic to me when I first heard it:
if there is enough trust in a system, people do not even need leaders. The system simply flows. People see what needs doing and step in. Responsibility moves where it is needed. Leadership appears and disappears naturally depending on the moment.
Years later, I started recognizing exactly what he meant.
Teams with high trust feel fundamentally different. Leadership circulates. People step forward when their expertise is needed and step back when someone else is better positioned to contribute. Responsibility moves. Initiative emerges. The system becomes more adaptive because people trust one another enough to participate honestly.
Teams with low trust feel heavy by comparison. Everything requires direction. People wait to be told what to do. Energy shifts toward political protection, visibility management, signaling loyalty, and minimizing risk. The system may still function for a while, though it gradually loses the very capacities required for resilience:
candor,
adaptability,
initiative,
creativity,
and shared ownership.
The Tao Te Ching understood this dynamic long before organizational theory gave us fancy modern language for it.
The text describes rivers and seas becoming rulers of the valleys precisely because they stay low. By not placing themselves above others, they become the place where everything gathers.
That image lands differently for me now than it once did.
Especially in a world increasingly organized around performance, branding, self-promotion, visibility, outrage, and dominance displays.
One of the deepest distortions in modern leadership culture is the assumption that leadership requires remaining at the center of attention indefinitely. Visibility becomes confused with value. Presence becomes performance. Leaders start appearing everywhere, all the time, making certain nobody forgets who is in charge.
Whenever I see that pattern, flags start flying in my mind.
Because leaders who require constant visibility are often trying to stabilize something internally through external attention. Ego and insecurity begin feeding one another. And once those dynamics combine with power, trust usually starts eroding underneath the performance.
That erosion becomes especially dangerous in democracies.
Healthy democracies require leaders capable of serving the system without treating themselves as identical to the system. They also require citizens capable of both Leading AND Following depending on what the moment requires.
That reciprocity matters.
Democracy only works when power can circulate without the system collapsing every time leadership changes. Loyal opposition matters precisely because healthy systems require dissent, adaptation, accountability, and peaceful transfer of responsibility over time. The system must trust itself enough to allow authority to move without interpreting every disagreement as existential threat.
What we are watching increasingly across the world now is what happens when that trust weakens.
Authoritarian systems overfocus on Leading. Power centralizes. Dissent becomes threatening. Expertise becomes inconvenient when it contradicts the preferred narrative. Loyalty slowly replaces competence as the organizing principle of the system.
And once loyalty tests begin, systems start blinding themselves.
People stop bringing difficult truths forward.
Bad news travels more slowly.
Fear expands.
Candor contracts.
Initiative weakens.
Eventually the system loses its capacity for self-correction because nobody feels sufficiently safe to challenge power honestly anymore.
That is not strength.
It is fragility wearing the costume of certainty.
Barry Oshry’s work on systems adds another important layer to this understanding. He observed that every human system expresses two fundamental energies:
Power AND Love.
Power differentiates. It creates movement, agency, initiative, direction, and action.
Love integrates. It creates connection, coordination, belonging, and shared purpose.
Healthy systems require both.
Power without Love eventually becomes domination.
Love without Power eventually loses effectiveness.
Trust erodes in both directions.
That is one of the reasons I increasingly see Chapter 66 as much deeper than a simple leadership chapter.
It is really a chapter about stewardship.
About whether human beings can participate in systems without becoming overidentified with power, visibility, certainty, or control.
About whether leadership can circulate instead of calcify.
About whether trust can remain strong enough that people continue bringing their judgment, creativity, courage, and care into the larger whole instead of slowly withdrawing those capacities in self-protection.
This also feels increasingly important as artificial intelligence becomes integrated into more leadership and organizational systems.
AI already excels at many aspects of Leading:
optimizing workflows,
directing processes,
monitoring performance,
executing at scale,
accelerating decisions,
and coordinating information faster than human beings ever could.
What AI cannot genuinely steward is trust.
It cannot fully sense when fear is rising in a room.
It cannot discern when stepping back creates better conditions than stepping in.
It cannot meaningfully participate in the circulation of responsibility healthy human systems require.
Those remain profoundly relational capacities.
And honestly, I think that may become one of the defining leadership questions of the next decade:
whether human systems preserve enough trust, humility, discernment, and relational intelligence to remain adaptive while increasingly powerful technologies optimize for efficiency, speed, prediction, and control.
Because systems built primarily on force eventually become brittle.
Systems built on trust bend.
Adapt.
Self-correct.
Recover.
Learn.
The systems that function best usually feel very different from systems organized primarily around dominance. Leadership is present, though it does not dominate the stage. Responsibility moves throughout the group. People step forward when the moment calls for it and step back when someone else is better positioned to contribute.
That movement requires maturity.
It requires enough humility to lead without becoming inflated by leadership.
Enough confidence to follow without experiencing following as diminishment.
Enough trust to allow responsibility to circulate.
I am still learning all of this.
Still catching myself standing over when I should be standing with.
Still noticing moments when following feels safer than stepping forward clearly.
Still discovering how easily leadership drifts toward performance when insecurity starts driving the system underneath the surface.
The ancient image of water still captures the pattern best.
Rivers do not argue about where they should flow. They follow the shape of the land. Over time they carve mountains, nourish valleys, and sustain life along their banks. The lowest place becomes the gathering place.
Leadership, viewed through that lens, has less to do with standing above others than with creating conditions where trust gathers strongly enough that people begin participating more fully in the shared work itself.
And when that happens, something remarkable becomes possible.
The system trusted itself enough to act.
Ancient wisdom captured this pattern centuries ago:
The best leaders are those whom people barely notice. When the work is done, the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
That line feels different to me now than it once did.
Less like leadership disappearing.
More like leadership succeeding deeply enough that collective capability becomes stronger than dependence on any single person.
The rivers still flow downhill.
The valleys still gather the water.
And systems built on trust still tend to outlast systems built primarily on force.
Here’s a Polarity Map to help see the pattern:
INVITATIONS
Use an AI-trained “Chat w/Cliff” for Step 1, Seeing, CLICK HERE.
Take a quick self-assessment for Lead And Follow CLICK HERE
NOTE: the results include Leveraging Action Steps and Early Warnings (to support maximizing upside benefits and minimizing downside limitations).
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