Photo by charlesdeluvio  on Unsplash It’s a simple truth: when someone is authentic, people trust them. Yet the fallacy is that authenticity is not a trait, or a leadership style, or even a value, it’s a relationship.  As a valued characteristic of business models, we love to promote authentic leadership, employee wellbeing and organisational ‘values in action’, but what happens to these values in times of crisis? Under strain, the unfiltered and sometimes painfully honest tr

Photo by The Cheeserom  on Unsplash How do we understand the concept of ‘sharing’? Is it that humans are naturally generous? Or perhaps it’s a value inherited from family that allows collaboration to blossom? Or is it a fictional story allowing us to mistake comfort for care and exchange for generosity? It may be the case that most of what is defined as sharing isn’t actually sharing at all, but a soft moral language to smooth around contracts, expectations and power dynamics

Photo by Jon Tyson  on Unsplash When an organisation says, ‘we believe in cooperation — your voice matters,’ should we believe them? It sounds progressive, considerate and fair. Mutuality, as an example, is a valuable tool to understand others, gain perspective and influence new creative directions. Great, right? But what if this perceived enlightenment is simply disguising a tool for power? What happens when the ambiguity is more powerful than the practice itself, when the

Photo by Andrew Moca  on Unsplash We tend to gravitate toward authority, the experts who tell us what to know, but sometimes the voice we’re taught to trust disguises a power imbalance. In global mental-health, it has been the same for decades, institutions in the global north set an agenda, design interventions and deliver to the global south, but whose knowledge really counts? Who has the authority to shape what counts as evidence? In order to challenge the power dynamics,