Becoming a Leader... (Part 1)

This week’s newsletter brings episode 27 of the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast, featuring Ebenezer Ikonne, the author of the book, Becoming a Leader in Product Development.

In this episode, Ebenezer (Eb) shares insights from his 30-year journey in tech, emphasizing the importance of systems thinking, complexity, and personal growth in leadership. The discussion covers how traditional management practices impede real human development and why it's critical to challenge prevailing paradigms.

Along the way, Eb reflects on his own leadership challenges, academic pursuits, and the profound impact of philosophical inquiry on becoming an effective leader. Tune in for a deep dive into multidisciplinary wisdom aimed at empowering tech executives, entrepreneurs, and practitioners.

Members of the Cyb3rSyn Community can watch/discuss the podcast episode on the www.cyb3rsynlabs.com portal or the mobile app (iOS and Android).

This week, I had the immense pleasure of hosting Eb, an author and thinker I deeply respect. Eb is a ‘pracademic’ - someone who takes his practice seriously by deeply deliberating about the underpinning philosophies and theory rather than merely copying “best” practices.

In a career spanning nearly 30 years in technology, Eb has moved from hardware and software engineering into management. His journey gives him a unique lens through which to critique the broken paradigms of modern organizational life, blending rigorous academic inquiry with the scar tissue of real-world practice.

Here are the key insights and my reflections from our conversation…

Eb’s appreciation for rigor and theory comes honestly; he grew up on a university campus, in a household where his parents constantly challenged him and his siblings to test their ideas and not just accept something because somebody said so.

Eb says that everyone operates with a worldview and a set of ideas, and you simply cannot escape them. It is easy to believe we are in control. We like to think we own or hold these concepts, but, as EB soberly noted, "really they own and hold us". These foundational ideas shape and inform what we do and how we act.

For a technologist, once you truly embrace concepts from complexity science and systems thinking, it is like being given a new pair of glasses, or taking the red pill from The Matrix; you cannot see things the same way anymore. If you try, you will experience "significant cognitive dissonance all the time".

One of the most powerful mindset shifts Eb discussed is changing where we locate the problem when things go wrong.

In the workplace, when people do things that "don't make sense", the default reaction is to locate the problem immediately in the individual - "something's wrong with Eb and this is why he did this".

We discussed the saying in child services circles that "all behavior makes sense with enough information". This is often illustrated by looking at abusive children who are bullying others; you realize their behavior makes sense when you see the challenging circumstances they face at home.

His default approach when things seem strange is to "start from the outside and work in as opposed to starting from the inside and working out". This means beginning by asking questions about the conditions in place that might compel a person to act in a certain way. It is often safer to start with the assumption that most people are trying to do the best they can do every single day.

Crucially, Eb clarifies that to understand behavior is not to justify it; one can still determine the behavior is unacceptable while understanding the environmental factors influencing it. We then discussed the importance of embracing pluralism and multi-perspective viewpoints.

We pondered why organizations, particularly in bleeding-edge fields like Silicon Valley, rely on organizing principles that feel profoundly 19th-century.

Eb points back to the days of scientific management. While effective, it helped us figure out how to "execute at scale" and organize large numbers of people toward a single goal. This legacy has been institutionalized and reproduced through MBA programs and leadership material. The operating model of an organization is ultimately shaped by the paradigms of the leaders at the top.

For most companies, the primary barometer is financial success—how the company is performing on Wall Street and what shareholders think.

What Eb finds fundamentally broken, however, is that this system allows a company to be financially successful, yet the people in that company are merely existing and "not thriving, flourishing, or developing as human beings". This outcome, where people spend so much time at work without truly developing, is a tragic "waste of human potential".

Eb’s deep dive into management philosophy and leadership was catalyzed by his own challenging transition. After years as a successful software/hardware engineer, he moved into a management role, and he admits he didn't go into it "in the best way".

He quickly realized the profound difference between the dynamic of giving commands to a computer — the ultimate solo software engineer — and leading human beings. This struggle and dissatisfaction became the "crack" that compelled him to pay closer attention to management and leadership and ultimately led him to seek a terminal degree in strategic leadership.

The resulting journey led him to synthesize his learnings and give back to the community via his book, Becoming a Leader in Product Development.

For premium-tier members, here is a handy table with link to the books mentioned in the conversation: