Part of a Series on the Philosophy of Radical Change
“What do we all think, today? What do I think when I’m not monitoring myself? Or rather, what is our (my) natural belief? ‘Natural’, of course, in keeping with the rule of an inculcated nature. A belief is all the more natural to the extent that its imposition or inculcation is freely sought out, and serves our immediate designs.”
Badiou, Alain. (2006) Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, p. 1.
Alain Badiou prompts a vital question: what happens when what once felt natural begins to unravel? When instincts that once guided us begin to falter? When a mission starts to drift, not because of malice, but perhaps because of something quieter, more ordinary?
I. Introduction: Leadership and Moral Risk-Taking
The centrepiece of Leadership as Masterpiece Creation is moral risk-taking. This was the part of the book closest to Matt’s heart during writing and remains the one he loves most. At its core, it explores the courage to speak up when something true is being neglected—especially when that truth doesn’t count in today’s dominant regime of monetisable, unserious differences. We want to say more about this in our context of indifference i.e., not merely apathy, but in Badiou’s sense: a suspension of the prevailing hierarchy of differences that determine what is seen and said. And to do so, we must talk about water.
II. Indifference and Drift: The Quiet Fall of a Sector
When an organisation or sector falls out of step with the moral norms of the wider world, it risks more than lost reputation; it risks losing public trust, legitimacy, and even the legal permission to operate. It transforms, or it dies. Yet in my experience of sectors where this has happened, leaders rarely choose the shadows. They drift. Slowly, quietly, comfortably.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the UK water sector.
Engineers, consultants, investors—many of whom have helped deliver water projects faster, cheaper, more efficiently—increasingly look away from the rising tide of breakdown: insufficient capacity, floating sanitary products in rivers, dead chalk streams, effluent on coastal walks, and poisoned seas. Bonuses continue. Investments are protected. And many of those helping the sector remained silent throughout, some still do.
Ordinary apathetic indifference plays a role but, much more importantly, the moral failure to speak the politically and culturally unspeakable and name the nameable—the ontologically indifferent—is the crucial failing.
III. The Difference Machine: Promise, Performance, and Pretence
High-performing organisations master the art of harnessing differences for profit. Service breakdowns, unmet needs, and increasingly capricious and whimsical demands are all converted into profit. Executives are skilful engineers of difference. We’ve been calling this the Difference Machine.
And not all differences are equal. There is a growing regime of trivial wows—luxury airport gardens, immersive wellness resorts in deserts, clickstream-tracking commerce—where delight replaces depth. These wow-architectures are spun from the Difference Machine. In water, the same logic holds but is trained on optimisation of capital investment in the water system. Water monitoring and responsive systems are automated. Cybernetics thrives. Projects are optimised. Customer metrics gathered. But the rivers remain poisoned.
Commitment-based management—once a radical idea, “a better candidate for revolution than Marx!” as its founder claimed—has become an accelerated loop of ever-decreasing circles. Its original purpose, to improve the way we invent reality together in the commitments we make in our conversations, has collapsed into spectacles of speed and operational efficiency. Sadly, it has pursued wows in the guise of faster projects, higher capital returns, and gimmicks. It has resolved breakdowns but only up to a point.
IV. Breakdown as Method: What Heidegger Offers
What is a breakdown? For Heidegger, it’s the interruption that discloses the invisible background of our lives. For skilful promise-based managers in the flow of practical activity, equipment, relationships, even what we habitually care about all “withdraw” until a breakdown reveals them. We don’t notice the jug until it leaks. The river until it reeks. We don’t notice our inculcated nature to treat people and nature as resources. We don’t notice the ever-present call to quantify, deconstruct, and deploy these resources as productive options and optimise them ever-faster at efficient frontiers. Without these most anxiety-provoking breakdowns, we remain oblivious to this freely sought out inculcation or what lies beyond its regime—indifference.
Breakdowns are invitations: to see, to say, to act.
As philosopher Katherine Ward brilliantly sets out*, Heidegger uses breakdowns as a methodological approach to avoid observer distortions—the distortion of a phenomenon in the act of observing it. She shows how careful observation of breakdowns in the midst of action enables a shift from tacit, practical interpretation to explicit, assertoric interpretation. First, we notice something is off. Then, if we have the courage, we name it. We assert what is missing, broken, or unjust. We can make new promises to effectuate new truths.
In practice, commitment-based managers focus on functionality. They fix the equipmental, processual and relational disruptions that stand in the way of fulfilling a promise. They tend not to question the deep background that gives rise to the promise in the first place. The result is faster, more efficient projects. I liken it to turbo-boosting a car but not asking whether the car is heading off a cliff.
For the most profound breakdowns—those that reveal indifference at the edge of meaning—organisations only permit the first phase. They stop at noticing. Too weird to say it. Too difficult. Uncommercial. They quietly collude to suppress or reject assertoric thinking—especially when the assertions challenge shareholder value.
Could we imagine a different path?
V. The Event We Ignore: Badiou, Truth, and the Water Commission
Alain Badiou has gone furthest to elaborate Heidegger’s idea of the deepest breakdowns in his concept of the “event” that helps us reflect on moments when new truth becomes possible, when conditions allow something real to break through. One such moment, arguably, arrived with the Independent Water Commission’s interim report.
The report acknowledged systemic failure. Yet it hesitated to follow that truth to its most transformative conclusions:
- Strategic planning remained tied to old paradigms.
- Legal critiques avoided the deeper questions of moral norms not codified in law.
- Regulatory reform focused on structure over substance.
- Ownership concerns were raised but not reimagined.
- Infrastructure plans prioritized capital without confronting the role of profit.
Environmental groups like Surfers Against Sewage and River Action UK felt the event. The public, too. But the commission resists.
VI. Moral Cowardice and the Anxiety of Being
Anxiety is not mere discomfort. Heidegger saw it as a disclosure of our being: the uncanny sense that something vital is at stake, and we are falling short.
One wonders: was this an opportunity missed not out of bad faith but out of a flight from anxiety? Anxiety in the face of an event that reveals the poverty of a natural belief in commoditisation and optimisation. Fleeing anxiety is common. Most of us run from threats to the stability and relevance of our identity, virtues and skills. Executives who mastered optimisation are no different. But from a Badiouian lens, this flight is a moral betrayal—a failure to seize the truth as it is emerging—and a failure of moral imagination when it is needed most.
We know the truth about the water sector. We see the pollution. We work around the broken systems. In true Difference Machine-style, we turn the activists’ truth back on them by denying their assertions, attacking them as cranks or idealists, and then reversing their calls to attack them for raising their expectations for water purity. Some congratulate those profiting from their mismanagement, “It’s the system”. Gosh, occasionally some even revere those banking executives with personal rags-to-riches stories of overcoming hardship to enrich themselves at the expense of a country’s water.
And we do not speak.
We ignore marginal voices, traditional practices, alternative ontologies of water. We refuse to share our doubt with leaders who might still listen. We monetise more ideas.
And still, we know. We know what else water is than a resource.
VII. Towards Masterpiece: Freedom, Not Fixes
Freedom begins when we negate the negation—that nothing else matters than the familiar differences of commoditising and optimising are the only ones worthy of consideration.
True leadership is not about maintaining momentum. It is about declaring events that make possible new truths and acting on them—even when it breaks the system that sustains you.
Water is not nothing but a resource. Never has been. And our indifference is not technical. It is moral.
Freedom begins when we allow ourselves to suspend current oppositions and imagine alternatives. When we move beyond quick fixes toward deeper truths. When we ask the impossible.
- What if we abandoned optimisation as the sole guiding principle?
- What if we recovered marginalised ways that water matters?
- What if we made moral masterpieces that go beyond cybernetic efficiency?
Water is more than a commodity or a utility. It is sacred, elemental, life-giving. Can we begin to reorient around richer sources of what matters than simply cost? Around truth rather than metrics?
And can we imagine leadership that is less about heroism and more about participation?
VIII. Conclusion: Speak Before the Drift Becomes Collapse
“There are only bodies and languages,” Badiou writes. But he also invites us to consider truths, those rare, demanding insights that ask us to change. Some breakdowns are operational. Some social. Some, though, are ontological, they touch the very foundations of how we live and relate to the world. The UK water sector faces all three.
We can continue to make wow improvements.
We can go faster and faster.
Or we can break the loop.
Speak. Promise differently. Create a new centrepiece.
Let us learn from this sector not only what went wrong, but how, with humility, courage, and shared inquiry, we might begin again.
Let me end with a poem of impossibility, and hope.
“O to break loose, like the chinook
Salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall.”
Robert Lowell, Waking Early Sunday Morning
*Katherine Ward (2021). Breaking down experience—Heidegger’s methodological use of breakdown in Being and Time, European Journal of philosophy. 29(4), pp.712-730.