Power opens the second act of SHIFT, marking the transition from what has changed in work to why leaders struggle to respond — showing how power distorts not through force but presence, leaving leaders navigating with a partial map and no idea it’s incomplete.

It felt like flying in a different reality. The seats were narrow, the aisle tight, the windows small enough to frame only a slice of sky — but that didn't matter. Concorde wasn't built for comfort. It was built for speed, altitude, and access. Four seats across, leather stitched with precision, glassware that caught the light, menus heavy in the hand. The sound was a constant thrum.

On board, the atmosphere was closer to a private club than a commercial flight. Politicians, pop stars, chief executives — just over a hundred people in a white dart moving at twice the speed of sound. You could leave Heathrow mid‑morning, watch the blue above deepen to indigo, drink champagne over the Atlantic, and arrive in New York before the clock at home had caught up. For regulars, it became almost ordinary: breakfast in London, and lunch in Manhattan.

One flight chased something else entirely. In June 1973, Concorde prototype F‑WTSS took off from Gran Canaria carrying a team of scientists attempting something no one had done before: to stay inside a total solar eclipse. At nearly 60,000 feet and Mach 2, Concorde kept pace with the Moon's shadow as it passed over the Sahara.

On the ground, the eclipse lasted seven minutes. On board, it lasted seventy‑four.

A perfect darkness, suspended in motion, held longer than nature intended. That was Concorde's magic. It didn't just go fast — it bent time. It made physics feel like privilege, giving a small group of people access to a version of the world the rest could only imagine.

The Meeting That Changed the Record

It's easy, from that altitude, to believe it was inevitable — that a machine this extraordinary existed because it had to. But in truth, its future was hanging in the balance. The engineering was complex, the costs high, the market uncertain. Any of those could have ended it. What kept it alive wasn't a sudden breakthrough in the numbers, but possibly the way those risks were framed in a single meeting behind closed doors — a conversation where the facts stayed the same, but their shape changed.

The engineers had been clear. The aircraft was beautiful, but the numbers didn't add up. Fuel consumption was too high. Noise restrictions were closing off major markets. The airlines were polite but lukewarm. Concorde, they said, would fly — but it wouldn't make money.

This wasn't pessimism. It was pragmatism — the kind that comes from people who know the margins and can see when they're disappearing. In the early part of the meeting, they laid out the risks to civil servants and advisers with the calm precision of people who had run the numbers more than once. The project was impressive. It was also, in their view, probably unviable.

Then the ministers arrived, and the air changed. Jackets were straightened. Notebooks shifted to the edge of the table. Sentences grew longer, softer. What had been "unviable" became "challenging." Doubt was reframed as opportunity. Market signals became "premature to interpret." The conversation wasn't silenced, but it was bent — unconsciously, almost politely — by the presence of power.

The official record of the meeting captured this new tone. A version of the truth survived — but not the whole thing. Concorde continued. It was never commercially viable. But it was technically flawless, culturally iconic, and, even after its retirement in 2003, remains the fastest passenger plane ever built.

The Distortion We Don't See

That meeting didn't distort the data. It distorted the frame. And that's what power does, not through force, or fear, or suppression — but through presence. Most leaders don't walk into rooms demanding loyalty or silence. They walk in believing they're creating openness. They leave thinking they've heard the truth. But their presence reshapes what's said, and how, and by whom — long before the first word is spoken.

And that matters. Because the most important question in any complex system isn't "What should we do?" It's: Where are we, right now? The answer is rarely obvious. It has to be pieced together from fragments — partial, often distorted signals. Get it wrong, and even the most brilliant plan will misfire, because it's aimed at the wrong target. And if power is distorting the answer, everything that follows is at risk.

What happened in that Concorde meeting isn't a quirk of politics or personality. It's a pattern you can see in almost any hierarchy, in nearly every culture, once you know what to look for. Researchers have been watching it for decades, often in settings far removed from ministerial conference rooms, and the same thing shows up every time.

Deborah Gruenfeld at Stanford has found that power changes both sides of an exchange. The person with authority speaks more, interrupts more, and appears more certain — often without noticing they're doing it. The people without authority adjust in response, speaking less, qualifying their language, and quietly aligning with the powerful person's view.

Megan Reitz and John Higgins have shown that when we do speak up to someone powerful, we rarely say it the same way we would to a peer. We edit for tone, for acceptability, for the reaction we imagine we'll get. Even the facts we choose to present are shaped by that calculation.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard has documented that this isn't erased by a generally "safe" climate. Even in teams known for openness, the presence of a senior figure can narrow what people are willing to say. The perceived risk in that moment — of looking foolish, disloyal, or negative — can outweigh the baseline level of trust.

And it's not just an Anglo‑American quirk. Studies of "power distance" — the degree to which people accept and expect gaps in status — show that every culture has this adaptation to authority. In high power‑distance cultures, it's obvious: formal greetings, ritual deference, visible deference to rank. In low power‑distance cultures, it's more camouflaged, wrapped in informality or humour, but the adaptation is still there. However it's dressed, the adjustment to authority always appears to be there.

Put together, the research makes one thing clear. You can walk into a room believing you've parked your authority at the door. You can say you want openness. You can mean it. But the people in the room are still weighing your role, your influence, and the stakes attached to what they say next. And they are adjusting accordingly.

That adjustment doesn't just soften the edges of what you hear — it leaves a gap. The things most worth knowing are often the things least likely to reach you. What you're left with is a partial picture, and the rest has to be guessed at. Leaders start reading between the lines, filling in the blanks with assumptions. People lower down see what's noticed and what's ignored, and over time, they stop raising certain points at all. That's how distortion becomes distance: leaders working from an incomplete map, employees seeing key issues going unaddressed— and both being right.

When Power Disappears

So, what would happen if you removed the power completely?

Without conducting a formal experiment, we came close.

Harkn worked entirely anonymously. It was designed to help people speak more freely, so leadership could hear more of what was really going on. In theory, it reduced personal risk; in practice, it revealed just how much power influences what normally gets said.

In open, anonymous dialogue, people could say anything. And they did — not in the worst ways we might imagine, but in ways that showed the quiet editing that happens when power is present. In the case of the Concorde engineers, there's a good chance someone might have said: "This is a big call. There's no market, no orders, we're wildly over budget. Can't see how anyone could back this project." A comment like that would likely have sparked a broad, unvarnished discussion.

But for leadership, anonymity created a problem they hadn't anticipated: unpredictability. They were stepping into conversations with no hierarchy cues at all. No titles. No roles. No way of knowing who was speaking. For leaders used to "reading the room," those cues are part of how they make sense of what's being said — they give context, signal intent, and help judge the weight of a comment. Without them, leaders couldn't calibrate in the same way.

Some reverted to hierarchy, revealing their identity as part of their engagement: "Hey, it's David. Interesting perspective, I'd like to understand more. Come and talk to me, my door is always open." There's nothing inherently wrong with that — it signals presence and attention — but it also raises the stakes for the original commenter, and nothing we could do would convince them their identity was still protected. Others avoided engaging altogether, leaving it to someone else.

When I asked senior leaders about their reluctance to join these conversations anonymously, the answer was often the same: "I get nervous. I don't know how people might respond, what they might say". The truth about power is that we like to believe we don't need it, and that we can work without it — but once we have it, it's wildly disorienting to be without it.

I think of it like this. If you're an executive and you walk into a room of more junior colleagues and ask for their honest feedback about what's holding performance back, the one thing you can be pretty sure you won't hear is: "It's you. You're the problem." But what if they didn't know you were the one asking? Perhaps they might say the thing you least want to hear. They never did, but fear is a powerful thing.

In the Concorde meeting, the presence of power bent the message. Here, its absence bent it too, just in a different direction. Power doesn't only shape the behaviour of those without it; it shapes the behaviour of those who hold it. Take it away, and they lose one of the main ways they navigate, interpret, and act on what they hear.

Which leads to the harder truth for leadership: the challenge isn't to eliminate power, but to understand how it distorts in both directions — and to find ways of getting to the truth despite it.

The Paradox of Power

What makes the Concorde story so compelling isn't that it's an obvious mistake. It's that it isn't. Most judgements about whether a decision was good or bad come after the fact, with the benefit of knowing how it all turned out. In 1968, choosing to keep Concorde alive might have been reckless. Or it might have been visionary. Even now, you can make a case for either.

What's certain is that the ministers in that meeting weren't making their choice with the full picture. The engineers in the first half of the meeting gave one version; the engineers in the second half gave another. The facts didn't change. The framing did. And that framing was shaped by people who understood, consciously or not, that a softer, more optimistic account was safer to give to those with the power to decide the project's fate.

That's the paradox of power in hierarchical systems. We reserve the big decisions for those at the top, but the material those decisions are built on is shaped, filtered, and interpreted by countless smaller decisions made by people lower down. Moment by moment, they decide what to share, what to hold back, and how to share it. Most aren't trying to mislead. They're managing risk — to their work, their reputation, their standing.

Concorde might be proof that softened truth can sometimes allow something extraordinary to happen. It's also proof that you can't lead well without understanding how that softening works, because it's happening every day, in every room you walk into.

You can't switch off perceived power. You can't carry it into some rooms and leave it behind in others. The more senior you are, the more it travels with you, bending the air before you speak. That doesn't make you the villain in the story — it makes you part of the system you're trying to lead.

The leadership challenge isn't to pretend the distortion isn't there, or to believe it can be trained away with enough "openness." It's to recognise it, to understand how it works, and to design ways of getting to the truth despite it. That might mean creating spaces you don't walk into. It might mean building channels that protect the messenger. It will undoubtedly mean becoming comfortable with things you'd rather not hear.

In the chapters ahead, we'll look at what it takes to build organisations that can see themselves clearly — not just through the lens of those at the top, but through the eyes and experiences of the people living in them every day. Because in a world moving as fast as this one, the most dangerous thing isn't making a wrong decision. It's making one on the strength of a story you didn't realise was already bent

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