Orwell's Teachings for Modern Leaders
Inspired by the documentary "Orwell: 2+2=5."
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Last night I watched a documentary inspired by George Orwell’s “1984”. It’s called “Orwell: 2+2=5“. It follows his life and the ideas behind the novel, showing how his observations about power and control still echo in contemporary forms of authoritarianism.
The film moves through the rise of Nazism and other twentieth-century regimes. Reports were filed, institutions functioned, careers continued. The point was never to make citizens believe absurdities immediately. It was to make contradiction livable.
By the time 2 + 2 = 5 appears, it circulates calmly.
That is what makes it frightening.
Power Doesn’t Begin With Force
We tend to imagine authoritarianism as dramatic — uniforms, propaganda, visible terror. But historically, it stabilizes through routine. People adapt their speech slightly before they adapt their beliefs.
A colleague omits a detail.
A report emphasizes direction over outcome.
A newspaper aligns tone with expectation.
No individual act is decisive. The system becomes durable because reality is no longer confronted directly. People do not wake up convinced. They wake up coordinated.
Totalitarian regimes perfected this: they not only punished dissent, but also made an accurate description socially disruptive.
The arithmetic changes last.
Companies Drift the Same Way
A first-time CEO eventually encounters a quieter version of the same mechanism. Not ideology — atmosphere.
Inside a growing company, the leader becomes the gravitational center of interpretation. The team does not lie to you; they learn what version of events allows work to continue smoothly. Information arrives already adapted to emotional sustainability.
You begin hearing:
“The market needs education” instead of “users don’t stay.”
“Early signal” instead of “weak demand.”
“Strategic delay” instead of “missed deadline.”
Nothing here is false enough to protest. But taken together, the organization stops describing the present and starts protecting momentum.
The leader rarely orders this. The structure produces it. And this is where leadership becomes moral rather than strategic.
The First Leadership Test: Can Reality Reach You?
Your job is not optimism or pessimism. Your job is permeability.
When people unconsciously filter what reaches you, the company becomes a narrative engine rather than an adaptive system. You will still make decisions — just not about the real environment.
Early symptoms tend to look harmless:
Surprises arrive late.
Problems appear suddenly “out of nowhere.”
Meetings feel reassuring, but decisions age badly.
By then, the arithmetic has already drifted. Not to 2+2=5 yet — but far enough that correction hurts.
The paradox: morale improves right before a company becomes blind.
Saying 4 When Everyone Needs 5
In authoritarian systems, stability depends on shared agreement about what can be calmly said. In organizations, the same dynamic appears as cultural alignment.
People want confidence from a leader. But they trust a leader who remains in contact with reality.
To lead in unstable times, you have to separate two functions that most founders merge:
Provide hope about the future.
Provide accuracy about the present.
When these collapse into one sentence, teams lose orientation.
Practical habits matter more than charisma:
Name the uncomfortable metric before interpreting it.
Let silence follow bad news instead of reframing immediately.
Reward the person who contradicts the meeting’s emotional direction.
Admit uncertainty without outsourcing responsibility.
You are not protecting morale by smoothing facts. You are delaying contact with the environment — and the environment always wins.
Leadership as a Public Position
Orwell feared systems where truth required courage. In companies, truth often requires social permission.
Your role creates that permission.
People watch less what you decide than what you tolerate. If disagreement feels career-limiting, reality will be negotiated long before strategy is discussed. The organization becomes efficient at coherence and ineffective at survival.
The leader is not the enforcer of falsehood — only the reference point around which it organizes.
So the question is not whether you are honest.
It is whether honesty is structurally safe around you.
Surviving Times Like These
Periods of uncertainty — economic, technological, political — amplify the temptation to coordinate perception. Humans prefer stability over accuracy when the stakes rise. Leaders feel it first because others borrow their certainty.
Survival requires a discipline that feels counterintuitive: resisting the urge to resolve tension too early. You hold the tension long enough for reality to fully appear.
Not comfortable. Not efficient. Adaptive. Because once everyone agrees too quickly, you may gain unity and lose orientation — and orientation is the only thing a young company truly owns.
Orwell wrote about regimes where arithmetic became political. Most founders will never run a country, but every leader eventually governs a shared reality.
The moment people adjust what they say so the system keeps moving, leadership begins.
Examples in a startup:
You don’t mention users are confused because the sprint is ending.
You soften bad feedback so morale stays high.
You delay raising a risk because the founder is fundraising.
You present a metric optimistically because everyone is tired.
Nothing dramatic. Just small frictions removed.
Your task is simple and exhausting: keep in contact with what is true before it becomes convenient.
The “2 + 2 = 4” Leadership Playbook
If this piece resonated, I turned the ideas into something practical: a playbook on how to tell the truth inside a team without becoming the problem. It’s a guide to timing, language, and positioning — the difference between raising reality and triggering defensiveness.
Grab The “2 + 2 = 4” Leadership Playbook below!
#GoldenFindings
My #GoldenFindings this time orbit a single theme: systems rarely collapse because people lie — they collapse because incentives quietly redefine what counts as reality.
The KPI Trap: How Misaligned Metrics Sabotage Performance
How teams can all hit their targets and still collectively fail because each optimizes a local metric instead of the shared outcome.Incentive Alignment in a Misaligned World
Why complex systems naturally optimize proxies instead of goals — and why intelligent actors produce irrational outcomes when rewards drift from purpose.Execution Drift in Fast-Growing Teams
How organizations slowly lose contact with reality not through strategy failure but through daily micro-misalignments.
#CEOCheck
This week’s question for you is:
Where in your company are people optimizing what is measurable — instead of what is true?
Let’s Connect!
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