Day 8: The Truth Is a System

Fifteen years ago, I was a university lecturer, and department all-hands meetings were rough. The conversation between leadership and the room felt thin. People showed up, listened politely, then went right back to doing their work the way they thought was right.

At first, I tried to engage. I spoke up. I offered ideas. I tried to connect people. Leadership listened for a while. Then I got into trouble. I stepped on too many toes. Rocked too many boats.

So I changed my strategy. I went to meetings, nodded, stayed quiet, and walked back to my classroom to teach the way I wanted. I built my own pocket of reality. Other people stayed on message, moved up, and got the stability the system was offering.

Now that I’m an executive coach and facilitator working with companies throughout Silicon Valley, I see the same pattern across industries. People bring something true into the room. Then the system decides what happens next.

AI and Leadership Are Learning Systems

AI and leadership are both information systems. They “learn” when they can look at what they produce and use feedback to change what they do next. That’s what I mean by self-referential. The system doesn’t just output. It notices what happened, and it updates.

In AI, the loop is obvious. You generate output, you check it, you score it, you adjust the next version. The feedback might come from humans, tests, customers, metrics, or reality itself. The point is the same: the system improves because it can be corrected.

In leadership, the loop is supposed to look like this: people share their perspectives, the organization makes decisions, reality responds, and the system updates its beliefs and behavior. That’s what all-hands meetings are supposed to do. Not broadcast. Update the shared reality.

But like most meetings, they don’t do that. They produced talk, not updating. The system teaches everyone what it valued: coherence and stability, not the kind of truth that forces the model to change.

Slop Is a Symptom

When an AI system is trained on good data and held inside strong feedback loops, it tends to stay grounded. The outputs are more accurate and easier for people to coordinate around.

When the loop gets weak, you get AI slop: fluent output that drifts away from reality. The harm is simple. People start making decisions off it.

Bad leadership is the human version of the same thing. A leader can be polished and decisive and still be wrong in a way the system can’t correct. People stop bringing truth into the room. Meetings become performances. Feedback becomes risky. The organization keeps moving, but it stops learning. You get performative alignment.

So when you see slop, treat it like a warning light. It’s telling you reality isn’t in the loop.

The Mindset Shift

This is the mindset shift you need to make to become one of the greats: stop thinking of leadership as having the right answers. Start thinking of leadership as building an information system that can keep getting closer to reality.

Make this your mental model.

• Walk into meetings thinking about loops.

• Walk into decisions thinking about feedback.

• Keep reality in the loop.

• This pattern is fractal.

Today’s Practice

That’s what I mean by interconnection. It’s a self-referential system that stays close to reality because the wiring lets feedback flow.

That might be the most theoretical thing I’ve ever said. But it’s the meta-pattern, and it’s a core belief of InStride Leadership.