I hate to say this, because I don’t want it to be true.

I want a world where we are all diverse and multifaceted and interesting and bouncing off each other, muddling our way through whatever this crazy thing called life is.

I hate how the world seems to be emerging as two-sided; left, right - trad, prog - red, blue - whatever…

But as I am solving a problem we have at XP - leadership development - I am seeing it much more clearly now. And although it is still a spectrum, it is a very one dimensional slide rule, and I desperately don’t want it to be so.

Anyone who asks me, what have you got wrong at XP, I don’t have to think too hard… “leadership development” I say without skipping a beat. Not that I see it being done well in many other schools, or any other organisations. Like my 17 year old boy observed the other day, “Dad, we don’t teach each other very well, do we?”, “No son, we don’t”, “Why do you think that is?”, “Money, Power…”

Like, we teach our kids a load of crap at school that is totally irrelevant to the rest of their lives, then it’s every man for himself. WTF?? - How much do we love each other? Not very fucking much, is what I see.

As is my propensity, when I see a problem, I want to solve it. At XP, we need a certain kind of leader, like we need a certain kind of teacher. What we do at XP is hard, it’s complex and it’s scary because it is not the convention. I have been unpacking it; what does leadership look like at XP? What do I do? More to the point, why do I do it that way? My journey has gone from simple tips on productivity, to inventing a new word, ‘Impactivity’, to a comprehensive systematic leadership development programme.

My conclusion is that leading adults is the same as teaching kids, and unfortunately, there are pretty much two ways to do it.

There are those who are ‘in charge’ and want the power and status and are powered by fear and ego, their fuel is hubris. And there are those who are ‘in service to’, who strive to be redundant, developing others, creating safety to learn, where humility and vulnerability is a virtue.

Where others may chin stroke and talk about many styles of leadership, I see only two. And what I hate is that they lie across this same division of conformity versus creativity. Control versus freedom of expression. And while it is a spectrum, it is one dimensional.

There are those who want power, and there are those who empower.

I have absolutely no choice over the type of leader I must be. I strive to understand the other side of the argument. Am I the bad guy? But every time I feel I am sliding that way, I try the way I seem to be born into, and it works spectacularly. Whenever I get stuck, I give more and magical things happen.

So I am going to go for it big time.

Over the next few years, I am going to give everything.

The design of our schools and our Trust will be freely available. Our curriculum will be freely available. Our Impactivity, or systematic leadership development programme will be freely available.

Knowledge is not power, knowledge is freedom. Ideas are not owned by anyone, they either exist or they don’t. To shift to a more caring society, all we have to do is set things free. We need to smash down the paywalls.

So, we will continue to capture our stories and share them with everyone. They will be about our children’s beautiful work and how our teachers are enabling them to do it. They will be about how our teachers develop themselves and how our leaders are enabling them to do it. They will show anyone who is interested, how they can do it too.

As our children who went through our school are returning to teach at our school, XP will exist outside any one of us and it will become a reflection of what it means to be human, a society that we want to belong to.

And I have no doubt that there will be other reflections of society that others want to belong to; those that have power, who need those that do not.

But our battle is not with them. Fighting and arguing with them diminishes our mission to set our ideas free. They are distraction and noise. They want us to look at them because while we are doing that, we are not setting our ideas free.

Be the sun, not the wind.