This article is an extended exploration of this Greek myth as sensemaker, first introduced in a previous article.
Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of red thread before he enters the labyrinth at Knossos. The detail worth remembering is what she doesn’t give him. No map. No description of the maze’s layout because she doesn’t have a clue, since she’s never been in it herself. She gives him a spool of thread, to unwind as he goes, so the way back can be found by retracing his own steps. She isn’t a sorceress handing over a magic object. She’s the architect of a very specific method: proceed, and mark what you’ve done as you do it, because nobody, including her, can see the whole shape of the thing from outside it.
Most recounting stops at the labyrinth’s exit, but the fuller story doesn’t. Theseus takes Ariadne with him when he leaves Crete and abandons her on the island of Naxos not long after, whether by cruelty, forgetfulness, or the gods’ design depends on which version you read. She survives it, and the myth eventually gives her a second marriage, to Dionysus, but the abandonment is not incidental to the thread story. It’s the second half of it. The person who helps a team find its way through does not always get to stay. Whoever the founder was, whoever consulted, whoever led at the start, eventually the team is on the island alone with what it learned. The thread only matters once nobody else is holding it for you. That’s as much a description of leadership succession as it is of mythology. And for a team, this is a fairly inventive description of two simultaneous phenomena.
The first is what coherence under genuine complexity actually requires: not a map, because it just doesn’t exist, but the discipline of marking the path as it’s walked, so the story of how a team arrived somewhere stays available even when the path was ugly. A team without a thread has to treat every dead end as failure, because it has no record showing the wrong turn was ever part of the larger process.
The second thing can be unsettling for some. Whatever external thread-giver got the team moving – a founder, a consultant, or someone who knew where the walls were – will not be there indefinitely. A team that never learns to hold its own thread has simply outsourced its coherence, and usually finds this out at the worst possible moment.
That moment has a familiar shape in organisational life. The founder who built the place by instinct finally hands over. The consultant’s engagement ends as planned. The one person who could always explain why a decision had been made a certain way leaves for another role. None of these are betrayals, any more than Theseus sailing on without Ariadne was necessarily one. They’re simply what happens once the thread-giver’s job is done. The test of whether a team was actually holding its own thread, or only ever borrowing someone else’s, arrives precisely at that moment. Every leadership transition, handled well or badly, eventually asks the same question this myth asks: Who was actually holding the thread?
Karl Weick’s account of sensemaking suggests it is retrospective. People understand what’s happening by looking back at what they’ve already done, not by seeing ahead to what’s coming, because ‘the ahead’ usually isn’t available yet.[2] A thread is retrospective sensemaking made into an object. It doesn’t predict the labyrinth, it records the walk through it. To build on this, Maxwell’s research on leadership teams proposed that teams able to tolerate a genuinely complex, uncertain state, rather than resolve the discomfort of it prematurely, made better decisions than teams that didn’t, and the tolerance he studied was something a team built itself, not something supplied from outside it.[6]
One practice worth trying.
Keep a shared, plainly written record of the paths tried and abandoned, not just the ones that worked. A single page is enough. Log the direction taken, what happened, and what was learned, particularly on the calls that didn’t pan out. Revisit it before any meeting where the team feels stuck, not to find the answer sitting in it, but to check whether the team is actually lost or simply mid-way through a path it hasn’t finished walking.
A second, smaller version of the same practice suits a team new to this: at the end of any difficult stretch of work, ask each person to name one thing tried and abandoned, out loud, before naming what’s next. The naming is the thread. It costs a team almost nothing and it’s the part most teams skip.
The point of either version isn’t documentation for its own sake. It’s giving the team a physical answer, in real time, to the question a stalled or reversing team always eventually asks itself: are we lost, or are we still navigating something we’ve genuinely never navigated before? A team holding its own thread can answer that question. A team waiting for someone else to answer it for them is still standing at the entrance of the labyrinth.
And if you’re interested in more curated leadership development insights in the future, join our community here.
Sources
Fry, S. (2019). Heroes: The myths of the Ancient Greek heroes retold. Penguin/Michael Joseph.
Apollodorus. (1997). The Library of Greek Mythology (R. Hard, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.
Maxwell, C. (2022). It’s just not that simple: A complex adaptive systems approach to understanding changing dynamics in leadership teams [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Technology Sydney.
PG