When Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened, the recriminations started well before most people had seen a single frame: whether the casting honoured the poem, whether modern dialogue in American accents betrayed three thousand years of retelling or simply reinterpreted it. Nolan’s own response to the pre-release noise was that it comes with the territory of adapting a story where so many are deeply invested. But none of it means much until people have actually watched the film.
It’s instructive that a story old enough that nobody can agree on its correct version (nor authorial attribution) still has the power to make millions of people who couldn’t have named Penelope’s husband a year ago argue, in earnest, about who gets to tell it, and how. Ironically, that’s mythology doing exactly what mythology does. It’s also a fair description of what leadership lessons from mythology are actually for – not precision nor ‘exactness’ about a problem or a situation, but a shared story sturdy enough to avoid a fatal battering from the seas of complexity.
None of which makes what follows here immune to the same charge Nolan’s critics are levelling at the filmmaker – that turning inherited story into content for an audience’s present age is a kind of appropriation, or at least a distortion. Fair warning taken, but we’ll continue regardless, inspired by the Homeric hero’s singular determination to return home.
Eight Myths
This article treats eight Greek myths as working material for senior leadership teams searching beyond two-dimensional frameworks such as the four-box grids that tell you which quadrant you occupy, but nothing about how to keep making sense of a situation that keeps refusing to go away. And in referring to “working material” we aren’t suggesting a personality typology dressed in robes, where each leader is sorted into an assigned archetype the way an assessment tool sorts respondents into types, or the way Hogwarts’ sorting hat decides on a house for each student. That approach results in just another static quadrant grid, and it inherits the same problem the psychometric literature has been documenting for thirty years. That is, instruments (or at least, the consultants that often wield them) tend to promise a precision they can’t deliver, particularly once they get pressed into service as leadership development tools rather than the reflective prompts they were designed to be.[1]
The objective here is to explore how we might deploy the narratives to help teams discover the crucial resources required to intentionally navigate an intractable problem or an uncertain path. A myth used in this way gives a team a shared story robust enough to think inside the problem, while the ongoing situation either unfolds or unravels. Precision is optional, not a promise. And ‘sensemaking’ is the operative word here.
A Word on Sensemaking
Sensemaking, in Karl Weick’s account, is what people reach for under conditions of ambiguity, and it runs on narrative rather than calculation. A team facing genuine uncertainty is constructing a plausible story about what’s happening, not computing a correct one. Plausibility, not accuracy, is the test a working story must pass, because accuracy is rarely available in these scenarios.[2]
Based on his work in group analysis, Bion describes how a team under sufficient anxiety falls into shared, often unconscious patterns of defence rather than facing the work in front of it. The group matrix, Foulkes’s term for the web of shared reference a group thinks and feels through, gives that defence somewhere to live.[3] A myth held in common by a team can function as exactly this kind of shared material: something the group can use to metabolise what’s difficult without each person carrying the anxiety alone. It fits, too, with how organisational life is described in the writings of Stacey and Mowles: narrative and interaction aren’t tools a leader deploys to manage an organisation from outside it. Narrative and interaction are, in fact, what the organisation is made of.[4]
But none of this makes myth a scientifically precise mechanism. Complexity theory has borrowed some of its most evocative vocabulary from physics, and the borrowing needs to be acknowledged. For example, Prigogine’s dissipative structures, the far-from-equilibrium states that hold their shape only by continuously spending energy, are real and Nobel-recognised physical chemistry, not a metaphor invented for organisational consultants.[5] But, used carefully as an analogy for why a team’s complex, uncomfortable working state decays back to something flatter the moment nobody tends it, its adoption resonates. Used carelessly, it lets a team mistake having the right vocabulary for having evidence. Maxwell’s doctoral research on leadership teams under uncertainty found something worth taking seriously without overstating it. That is, teams able to tolerate the discomfort of a genuinely complex state, what he labels “emergent social discomfort,” tended to make faster and more considered decisions than teams that dissipated the discomfort through humour, quasi-solutions or premature agreement.[6] A mindful application of language drawn from elsewhere.
With that distinction held clearly, eight classical myths turn out to be unusually good at naming what complexity actually does to a team.
Navigating the Labyrinth
Ariadne’s thread begins with a straightforward plan. Theseus needs to enter the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur and find his way back out again, and Ariadne, who knows the maze only by reputation rather than by having walked it herself, gives him a spool of thread to unwind as he goes rather than a map of the route. She cannot tell him the way out in advance, because nobody can. The value of the thread is that it marks the path actually taken, wrong turns included, so the return trip becomes possible without anyone having had to get it right the first time. For a team, this is a fairly accurate description of what coherence under complexity actually requires: not the ability to plan the correct route from the start, which the labyrinth doesn’t allow for, but the discipline of keeping the thread, tracking decisions, dead ends and reversals as they happen. So the story of how the team got somewhere makes sense even when the route itself was ugly. A team that keeps no thread has to treat every wrong turn as evidence of failure, because it has no record showing the wrong turn was ever part of the larger process.
Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back
Penelope’s weaving works by the opposite logic. With Odysseus (yes, that Odysseus) gone for the best part of two decades and suitors camped in her hall pressing her to remarry, she agrees to choose once she has finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, then unpicks by night what she wove by day, for three years, until a servant gives her away. The trick isn’t evasion for its own sake. It’s a rhythm of production and undoing that buys her time to hold a place she isn’t in a strong enough political position to state outright. Teams recognise this pattern more often than they admit to it: work that gets built up, quietly taken apart, and built again in a slightly different shape, not because anyone is being indecisive but because the situation genuinely isn’t ready to be finished, and finishing it prematurely would cost more than the discomfort of leaving it open. Penelope gives teams under pressure to show progress permission to keep working: an active loom signals engagement, and unpicking is not failure.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Scylla and Charybdis sit on opposite sides of a narrow strait that Odysseus’s ship has no way of avoiding, Scylla a six-headed creature fixed to one cliff, guaranteed to take several of his crew if he sails close to her, and Charybdis a whirlpool on the other side capable of swallowing the entire ship if he drifts too near it. Circe’s advice, which he takes, is to hug Scylla’s side and accept the loss of a few men rather than gamble the whole vessel against the whirlpool. There is no route through the strait that avoids paying something. The myth is useful to a team for exactly that reason: it names a category of decision where every option carries a real cost, and where the search for a compromise that avoids the trade-off altogether is itself the more dangerous choice, since it usually means drifting toward whichever option looks least like a decision. A team facing its own version of this strait, a resourcing call, a client it should probably let go of, a capability it can only build by neglecting another or losing people, is better served naming which loss it is prepared to accept than searching for a middle course the story does not offer, because it does not exist.
I’m talkin’ here!
Cassandra is a Trojan princess granted the gift of true prophecy by Apollo, and cursed by him, once she refuses him, so that nobody will ever believe what she says, however accurate it turns out to be. She foresees the fall of Troy. She warns, specifically, against bringing the wooden horse inside the walls. She is right about both, in great detail, and is ignored on both counts, because the curse was never really about the accuracy of her warnings. It was about people’s willingness to hear them. What can this myth reveal to teams? A contrarian voice usually isn’t dismissed because it’s wrong, it’s dismissed because being right would force the room to admit something uncomfortable and act on it before it’s ready. Teams that treat Cassandra’s curse as a quaint story tend to have their own quieter version running in every meeting – the person whose warnings get noted politely and then filed away – and the myth’s use is as a standing question a team can put to itself: whose warning did the room just brush aside, and what would it cost to act on it?
Don’t Look Now
Orpheus is a musician gifted enough to charm Hades and Persephone themselves into granting him something no mortal is meant to have, a chance to lead his dead wife Eurydice back out of the underworld and into the world of the living – on one condition. And that condition is precise and, on the surface, insignificant. He must walk ahead of her and not turn to check she’s following until they have both reached the surface. He turns before that point, out of love or doubt or simple human impatience, and loses her permanently, the underworld closing over her a second time. The myth is uncomfortable for organisations that treat ‘checking’ as an unambiguous virtue, because the story insists verification carries its own risk, and the risk isn’t evenly distributed across every kind of decision. Some decisions can be checked, revisited and corrected without real cost. Others, and this is Orpheus’s real usefulness to a team, are damaged by the act of checking itself: the premature audit, the trust-building process interrupted to confirm it’s working, the quiet agreement re-litigated one meeting too many. What the myth offers is a discipline of asking, before checking anything, whether a given decision is the reversible kind or the kind where looking back is the one guaranteed way to lose what was being carried.
Every Idea has a Price
Prometheus is a Titan who steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, fully aware of what Zeus will do to him for it. He is chained to a rock, an eagle sent to eat his liver, which regrows overnight so the punishment can begin again the next day, forever. What makes the myth more useful than the usual innovation folklore is that Prometheus never gets to pretend the fire was free. He owned his decision. The cost is his, personally, permanently, and the myth doesn’t flinch from showing it, in a most grisly fashion. Most organisational stories about disruption are edited the other way around: the benefits get named in detail, and the casualties, the role quietly redesigned out from under someone, the team whose expertise stops mattering the moment a new capability emerges, are left out of the account entirely. Prometheus is a corrective. Pretending the fire was free wouldn’t be simply naivety, it would be a disingenuous denial. The myth gives a team permission to say plainly that someone is bearing a real cost for a given change, to name who or what that is, and to stop treating the discomfort of paying it as proof the change was a mistake. It also captures the kind of creative rule-breaking a team needs precisely when a situation doesn’t fit any of its existing playbooks, the moment bare improvisation is the only option left.
Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse…
Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to push a boulder to the top of a hill for eternity, and every time he nears the summit the boulder rolls back to the bottom, so the labour never produces an outcome. Albert Camus’s reading of the myth, which has become almost canonical in its universal acceptance, refuses to treat this as pure punishment: the struggle itself is enough to fill a life, and “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”[7] This interpretation matters for teams stuck in genuinely cyclical work, the same budget argument every year, the same governance review, the same business case remade from scratch regardless of what was learned last time. The instinct in that position is to treat the repetition itself as the problem, evidence that the team’s efforts aren’t landing, but Sisyphus suggests a different diagnosis. What exhausts people in cyclical work usually isn’t the cycle. It’s the misplaced fantasy this time the boulder might finally stay at the top, and the subsequent disappointment every time it doesn’t. A team that stops expecting the cycle to end and instead pays attention to the pace and rhythm it can sustain through each iteration, tends to come out the other side of the year with considerably more left in reserve.
You Expect Us to Do What?!?
Psyche is a mortal woman loved by Cupid on the condition that she never tries to see his face, a condition she breaks one night at her sisters’ urging, lighting a lamp while he sleeps and waking him by accident. He flees, and Aphrodite, his mother and no admirer of Psyche’s, sets her four tasks that look designed to be impossible: sorting an enormous mixed heap of grain before nightfall, gathering wool from dangerous rams, filling a flask from the treacherous River Styx, and finally descending to the underworld itself to retrieve a box from Persephone. She survives every task, and in each case the help that saves her arrives from somewhere she had no reason to expect it, ants that sort the grain unasked, a reed that whispers the safer approach to the rams, an eagle that fills the flask where no human hand could reach. Appreciated through a Jungian lens, the myth describes individuation, the movement toward psychological wholeness through facing, rather than avoiding, what has been split off and pushed into darkness.[8] For a team, its use is twofold. It names work that genuinely feels impossible, the conversation nobody has been willing to have, the failure nobody has been willing to name, as a real developmental threshold rather than a sign of poor planning. And it insists that the help a team actually needs rarely turns up dressed as an expert or a hero. More often it’s the unacknowledged and unexplored capacity already sitting in the room, waiting to be activated.
None of this is diagnostic in the way a personality instrument claims to be. What it offers instead is a way of noticing, and noticing is where the practical use of these eight myths actually sits. A team wanting to check its own health under the pressures of complexity is better served asking what it can currently bear to face than asking which quadrant it occupies.
Eight things worth noticing, and a myth for each to help start teams reflecting deeply:
- Whether the team can tell a coherent story about its own reversals and seemingly messy decision-making journey: Ariadne’s
- Whether it can name what it has chosen to sacrifice, rather than pretending the choice was without cost: Scylla and Charybdis.
- Whether contrarian voices get taken seriously before the room has silenced them: Cassandra’s
- Whether the team notices its own shared rhythm and pacing, not only its content: closest to Sisyphus.
- Whether it can tolerate leaving something genuinely unfinished: Penelope’s permission to unpick.
- Whether seemingly impossible situations are addressed and not avoided: Psyche’s
- Whether the team can tell a reversible decision from an irreversible one and choose accordingly: Orpheus’s
- And whether, faced with the unrelenting pressure to create something new, the team can improvise rather than freeze, always aware innovation extracts a price: the one Prometheus is possibly best placed to answer.
A team that starts anywhere on that list and stays with it honestly will likely end up turning to most of the others before long. Complexity doesn’t resolve. It gets navigated, one myth at a time, for as long as the work requires it.
If you would like your team to work with any of these sensemakers, reach out to us. We’d be delighted to take the journey to Ithaca with you.
And if you’re interested in more curated leadership development insights in the future, join our community here.
References
- Michael, J. (2003). Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a tool for leadership development? Apply with caution. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 10(1), 68-81; Stein, R., & Swan, A. B. (2019). Evaluating the validity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator theory: A teaching tool and window into intuitive psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(3), e12434.
- Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.
- Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock Publications; Foulkes, S. H. (1964). Therapeutic group analysis. George Allen & Unwin.
- Stacey, R. D., & Mowles, C. (2016). Strategic management and organisational dynamics: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations (7th ed.). Pearson Education.
- Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature. Bantam Books.
- 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.
- Camus, A. (1955). The myth of Sisyphus and other essays (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf.
- Jung, C. G. (1991). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Routledge.
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