A colleague shared a newsletter with me titled The Shape of Leadership by Mike Fisher, here is an excerpt:
The V-formation is the one most of us are familiar with in organizations. It maps cleanly to how we think about leadership: someone sets direction, others align behind them, and progress is made through coordination and efficiency. Everyone knows where they’re going. Roles are clear. Responsibility is explicit. When it works, it’s a beautiful thing.
There’s a reason migrating birds use it. Flying long distances is expensive. Energy matters. Small inefficiencies compound over thousands of miles. The V-formation minimizes wasted effort by design. Each bird benefits from the work of the bird ahead of it, and the group as a whole goes farther than any individual could alone. In leadership terms, this is what strong alignment looks like. A clear vision reduces wasted motion. When people understand the destination and their role in getting there, they don’t have to guess. They don’t have to hedge. They can put their energy into execution instead of interpretation...
Murmurations, on the other hand, feel almost like the opposite extreme. There’s no visible plan. No clear leader. No stable shape. And yet, they are remarkably resilient. When a predator strikes, the flock doesn’t panic. It doesn’t wait for instructions. It responds instantly, each bird adjusting based on the movement of the birds nearest to it.
What’s fascinating is that murmurations aren’t chaotic at all. They operate on a small set of simple rules: maintain distance from your neighbors, match their velocity, and pay attention to sudden changes. That’s it. No bird has a global view of the flock, but the flock as a whole behaves intelligently.
This is what strong cultures look like.
Most corporate leaders do not choose the shape of their environments or their teams. They inherited them. They absorb the patterns that were in place long before they arrived, especially when those patterns have a history of success. The quiet assumption is that whatever worked in the past must be correct, so the inherited shape might go unchallenged. The problem though is that the conditions shift. The work shifts. Teams shift. Yet the shape of leadership often stays the same.
Systems, including the ways we lead, carry their own inertia, and they intuitively preserve whatever state produced success in the past. This is not a conspiracy or a character flaw. Success creates momentum, and momentum takes deliberate effort to redirect, especially when it is in service of finding and securing unrealized opportunities. It requires planning, patience, execution and a willingness to recognize when the moment has changed.
It comes back to culture
A team’s culture becomes most evident in what people do when no one is asking and no one is watching. It shows up in the choices made in unobserved moments, in the habits that persist without direction, and in the behaviors that surface when pressure is low (or indeed, high). What emerges in those moments is the real system, not the one written in documents or described in meetings. And if a team consistently falls back into a familiar V‑formation, even when unwarranted, it is usually because the culture has rewarded and reinforced that pattern over time.
Culture sets the boundaries of what feels acceptable, what feels risky, and what feels necessary. So when a team reverts to old patterns, when the intended formation collapses under pressure, or when outcomes fail to match stated values, it is the culture doing exactly what it was historically shaped to do.
Transforming culture is by no means easy. It is not a matter of slogans or revised instruction sets. It happens when teams practice different behaviors long enough for those behaviors to become the instinct. Meeting the moment requires leaders who can create the conditions where those new patterns can take root.
