Your Signal
Dan Duckworth
Editor
A memo went out across campus. At a critical moment for the department, the chair was stepping down.
In the weeks that followed, faculty meetings grew tense. Emails got more careful.
Everyone had ideas—but no one moved. They postured. They positioned.
Junior professors hesitated—they had vision, but not tenure. Senior faculty whispered in private, but stood erect in public. Everyone angled toward the dean. Everyone waited to be chosen—or curried favor with whoever might be.
And while the decision stalled, while the department held its breath, nothing changed.
Students slipped through the cracks. Adjuncts carried unsustainable loads. The curriculum stagnated. The culture calcified.
This isn’t just a story about one university. It’s a pattern. A quiet, invisible formation that plays out in workplaces, churches, nonprofits, even families.
Whenever a power seat opens up—whenever formal authority is up for grabs—aspiring leaders begin to drift.
Not toward the work, but toward the throne.
But here’s what no one tells you while you wait to be chosen, promoted, endorsed:
You’re not preparing to lead. You’re preparing to rule.
You’re learning the logic of the system that doles out authority: how to perform legitimacy, how to speak without saying too much, how to defer to hierarchy, how to read the room before you act.
You may tell yourself it’s strategy. But the system sees what it really is: obedience.
And the longer you wait, the more fluent you become in a language that doesn’t serve changemakers.
By the time you get the role, you’ve been shaped to preserve the system—not to disrupt it.
This is Wisdom
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
— Audre Lord
The system will offer you tools—credentials, titles, frameworks—but they’re built to preserve the very order you’re trying to disrupt.
You can’t fight systemic oppression—in your workplace, congregation, family, or school—using the same tools, values, and frameworks that uphold it.
Real change demands new ways of seeing, being, and leading. It requires different tools—rooted in love, truth, creativity, and lived experience outside the dominant logic.
What tools have you been handed—and what will it cost you to lay them down?
Is This Leadership?
YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD
Scenario:
An executive team is presented with early data that suggests a flagship initiative is failing. The COO instructs the team not to share the findings until they have a “more optimistic angle.”
Analysis:
No, this is not leadership.
Delaying the truth to protect morale or manage perception may look strategic—but it’s retreat, not responsibility. When things go wrong, the moment demands presence, not spin. The COO’s direction softens truth to preserve comfort or control.
Leadership names what is. It steps into discomfort—not to provoke panic, but to raise awareness. Because choice begins with awareness.
Yes, fear is human. But leadership doesn’t yield to fear. It uses it to face reality. Until that happens, no matter how polished the message, it isn’t leadership.
It’s delay.
This analysis is performed by an A.I. coach with 800 pages of Crucible Theory loaded in its brain. In other words, it thinks like a master changemaker.
[Discuss your scenario with the leadership coach →]
Writer’s Block
ME—PICK A LANE?
I keep getting asked to define the audience. Is the book for executives? Managers? Coaches?
I know what they want—an avatar. A persona. A neatly bounded profile. But I can’t give them one.
Because I’m not writing for the top, the middle, or the bottom. I’m not writing for the hierarchy at all.
I’m speaking to changemakers. And changemakers live in a different dimension entirely. They’re not a role or a function or a band on the org chart.
They’re an identity group. Like saying, “I speak to the women.” Or “I speak to the Christians.” Or “I speak to the immigrants,” or “the artists,” or “the misfits,” or “the Chiefs fans.”
So—No, I won’t pick a lane.
Because we, the changemakers, live between the lines.
— Dan
[Learn about the book →]
