This blog explores Graham Linehan and Tanya de Grunwald’s concerns about critical thinkers being pushed out of organisations under charismatic, status-driven leaders. Using Jungian archetypes of Trickster, Cassandra and Midas, it examines corporate backtracks—such as Jaguar’s rebrand and NHS policy reversals—showing how inflated personas and ideological policies collapse when tested in practice. It asks how marketisation has hollowed the sacred purpose of education and work, and suggests Jungian strategies for restoring balance through character, shadow integration, and genuine learning.
There is a familiar mythic scene in modern organisations: a charismatic courtier strides in with a radiant promise, a new language, a rebranding of the moral self, and for a while the palace hums with certainty; then the spell meets payroll, law, safeguarding, and customers, and what began as revelation becomes administration, at which point the Trickster’s gifts are revealed to be double-edged, and those who warned of the edge—usually the quiet, critical thinkers—have already left the room. In their recorded exchange, Graham Linehan and Tanya de Grunwald describe this arc with disarming candour: employers embraced fashionable ideals at speed, often under the aegis of magnetic “heads of DEI,” only to discover that dissent had been pathologised and risk-literate staff had either fallen silent or exited, leaving a brittle culture that now struggles to course-correct without losing face.
De Grunwald’s image of talent shut down feels archetypal: the kingdom hires its best scouts, then punishes them for reporting the weather, until the scouts stop returning; in her phrasing, organisations “lost their critical thinkers,” especially mid-career women, and those who stayed learned to keep their heads down as projects slid off the rails—a Cassandra pattern in corporate clothing. The same conversation notes a subtle retreat in corporate signalling—fewer “Progress” flags, a quiet reversion to safer symbolism—an example of persona deflation once the collective mood turns, the brand equivalent of the court discreetly folding the imperial robe back into the chest.
If myth gives us the language—Trickster, Cassandra, Emperor, Midas—Jung gives us the mechanics: persona inflation (a public face of virtue outgrowing its containing reality), shadow projection (difficult truths exiled onto “troublesome” staff), and the puer–senex tension (youthful vision outrunning elder prudence). De Grunwald’s account of “charismatic and modern” hires who rapidly set agendas others hadn’t voted for reads like a textbook case of the puer taking the wheel while the senex sleeps. When the spell lifts, leaders discover they need the very faculty they exiled: discriminating judgement.
Backtracks and resets provide the public footprints of this inner drama. Consider Jaguar’s rebrand, where a minimalist wordmark and a “Copy Nothing” campaign were meant to signal rebirth yet sparked confusion and culture-war crossfire, forcing leadership to defend the strategy in interviews and op-eds and to restate the brand’s direction with unusual explicitness—an emblematic case of symbolism outrunning substance and then being pulled back towards it.
In another register, BBC and Ofcom withdrew from Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme to manage perceived conflicts with impartiality—an institutional pivot that acknowledged the limits of externalised virtue and the primacy of core mission in the face of competing claims. Sport has moved similarly: British Cycling’s review produced a categorical policy change that split racing into “female” and “open” to safeguard fairness after contested experience on the ground—a clear example of ideals revised by practice and evidence. Healthcare, too, has tightened sails: NHS England halted routine puberty blockers for minors following the Cass process, with subsequent government action to make that ban indefinite, a sober drift from advocacy rhetoric toward evidential caution and legal robustness.
Read psychologically, these reversals are not simply “U-turns” but acts of shadow integration: the system admitting data it previously could not countenance and reincorporating exiled realities—legal risk, safeguarding boundaries, operational friction—into a more tempered stance. The collective unconscious had been constellated around a powerful persona of inclusion and disruption; as outcomes accumulated, the archetype flipped, and the same energy demanded limits, clarity, and function. In myth, this is the moment when the Emperor hears the child, when Cassandra’s warnings are finally recognised as weather reports rather than heresies, when Midas begs to have the golden touch washed off, so his people can eat.
The question, then, is less “who was right” than how we keep our courts from hiring the Trickster as prime minister. From a Jungian perspective, several moves help.
First, name the inflation. Institutions should narrate what happened in plain language: which initiatives outpaced law or capacity, where slogans replaced specifications, how dissent was suppressed. This is not a witch-hunt; it is confession as quality improvement. The Linehan–de Grunwald discussion shows how fast idealism metastasised into culture, then policy, then discipline; writing a short “lessons learned” makes the unconscious conscious, which is Jung’s definition of growth.
Second, restore the senex without shaming the puer. Pilot before you proclaim; stress-test against law, safeguarding, and resourcing; keep a rotating devil’s advocate whose career is protected by design. De Grunwald notes that corporations now advance recalibration by appealing to commercial, legal, and reputational risk rather than ideology, a pragmatic channel for conscience in politicised terrain.
Third, re-centre character over performance of identity. “Bring your professional self to work” beats “bring your whole self,” not because the self is unwelcome, but because role clarity is the vessel that keeps eros from swamping logos; without the vessel, teams drown in unmediated affect and forced assent. In practical terms, promote the people who speak early and specifically about risk and feasibility; if truth-telling leads to advancement, Cassandra stays.
Finally, re-sacralise the craft. In both universities and businesses, treat learning, judgement, and workmanship as ends in themselves again; if marketisation is our era’s Midas touch, the antidote is not anti-market piety but alchemy—transmuting golden optics into durable value by honouring constraints and testing visions against the grain of reality. The best rebrand is a product that works; the best inclusion is a lawful, comprehensible process; the best culture is one where critical thinkers are not mythic exiles but recognised as the hearth-keepers of institutional sanity.
We will keep encountering the Trickster. The task is to give him a seat at the table, not the throne; to let his energy refresh stale forms without allowing glamour to masquerade as cloth; to remember, as Jung insisted, that wholeness is not innocence but the hard won capacity to hold opposites until a third thing appears. When organisations can do that, they neither lurch with fashions nor ossify against change; they learn, which is to say, they stay alive.
Leave a Reply