CAMERA OBSCURA
MAROUN, N. (2026) · DOCTOR OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES · MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY, FACULTY OF BUSINESS AND LAW
Context, Paradox, and Practice
Chapter 1 situates the work that follows within the conditions in which it was forged. It does not seek to resolve paradox, advance theory, or explain methodology. Its purpose is to establish context: the social, organisational, and personal climates that shaped the practice from which these public works emerged.
INTRODUCTION
The chapter is structured across three interrelated contexts: macro, meso, and micro. At the macro level, it traces the broader conditions shaping contemporary organisational life, including global patterns of progress, pressure, and fragmentation (Collier, 2010; Klein, 2014). At the meso level, it examines the professional and organisational environments in which performance is pursued and managed, and where leadership is enacted as practice rather than ideal, drawing on the Service-Profit Chain[1] as a systemic performance logic (Heskett et al., 1994). At the micro level, it turns inward, locating these forces within lived experience (Schön, 1983), and tracing how judgement, orientation, and capability were formed over time.
This layered framing reflects the central assumption of this thesis: that leadership practice does not arise in abstraction, but is co-produced through the interaction of systemic forces, organisational structures, and embodied experience. To understand how the work unfolded requires attention to what was done and to the conditions that made it possible (Senge, 1990).
Leadership practice in this inquiry is examined within a socio-economic environment marked by deep structural inequality, persistently high unemployment, and uneven economic participation.
South Africa remains one of the most unequal economies globally, conditions that continue to shape organisational life and labour markets across sectors (World Bank, 2024).
Within this context, leadership is rarely a neutral or purely technical practice. Decisions taken in organisational settings routinely carry ethical, relational, and material consequences, particularly in environments where inequality is structurally produced and risk is unevenly distributed across institutions and individuals (Valodia, 2023). Questions of dignity, accountability, inclusion, and consequence are therefore not abstract leadership concerns, but lived realities that surface repeatedly in practice.
The contexts described in this chapter function as formative terrain rather than background: the pressures, constraints, and contradictions that shaped how leadership was encountered, enacted, and tested in practice. The micro narratives that follow are presented not as autobiography, but as formative encounters through which capacities were shaped, limits revealed, and patterns of judgement took hold, recognising the ontological importance of transparency in the being and doing of the practitioner as both agent and subject of inquiry.
[1] The Service-Profit Chain articulates a longitudinal relationship between leadership, employee experience, service quality, and organisational performance, and is widely used as a meso-level framework for understanding performance systems (Heskett et al., 1994).
Check with Natalie. This image showing unequal economies. The Papwa Sewgolum Golf Course in Durban sits alongside tin shacks on the Umgeni River.
The Binary Trap
The Binary Trap
of Performance Logic
In my professional practice, I came to question a belief I once held instinctively: that progress moves forward in a neat, linear upward trajectory. Twenty-six years of practice, along with the real-world complexity and pain that accompanied it, have revealed a more uncomfortable truth. Organisational life is not linear. It is paradoxical. The systems we build in pursuit of efficiency and scale often erode the human foundations required for people to be well and stay well. I have watched organisations expand their capacity to produce results while quietly diminishing the inner conditions that make those results sustainable.
This contradiction recurs everywhere I work. There is no geography, culture, or operating model that is immune to it. Across global systems, within multinational organisations, and in my own leadership practice, the same tension appears with striking consistency. In executive forums where decisions have carried real financial and human consequence, I have seen this tension surface most clearly when performance metrics are discussed as if they are neutral facts rather than expressions of deeper conditions. This chapter traces that tension at three levels: the global patterns that shape institutional behaviour, the professional field in which I consult, and the lived experiences that shaped how I see, interpret and lead in complex environments.
Across much of my career, organisational success was framed through a dominant performance logic that privileged measurement, predictability, and control. Influential leadership thinking reinforced the belief that what could be quantified could be managed, and that what could be managed could be stabilised and scaled. The phrase commonly attributed to Peter Drucker (1954), “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it,”[1] came to be treated not as a heuristic, but as an unquestioned doctrine shaping how performance was pursued and judged.
In a world fixated on “more”, this logic made sense. What could be measured could be managed. What could be managed could be controlled. And what could be controlled, it was assumed, could be scaled. Even as performance frameworks evolved, tools such as the Balanced Scorecard widened what was measured (Kaplan & Norton, 1992; 1996), metrics remained the primary organising principle of organisational life. This logic carried obvious appeal. It offered a sense of order and reliability in environments that often felt unpredictable and exposed. Yet the promise was never without cost. Read through the organising metaphor of camera obscura, this is how illumination distorts: without disciplined attention to conditions, what appears visible through metrics can invert, and indicators are mistaken for causes. In rooms where headcount reduction was treated as a proxy for performance improvement, I have witnessed how easily the measurable displaces the meaningful.
This narrowing of perception has been widely noted in professional and scholarly literature. Bohm’s (1980) notion of fragmentation offers a useful metaphor for this cognitive narrowing: organisations come to mistake partial abstractions for the whole, managing away ambiguity rather than engaging it as a source of insight. In practice, this often manifests not as overt harm, but as a gradual thinning of candour, energy, and dissent, signals that rarely appear on dashboards until performance volatility makes them impossible to ignore.
[1] Variations of this sentiment appear in Drucker’s writing on management and performance measurement, particularly in The Practice of Management (1954) and later works.
Across these cycles, one pattern became increasingly clear to me: modern organisational life is shaped by tensions that cannot be resolved through linear or binary reasoning. Binary thinking cannot hold the realities leaders face today, including heightened complexity, post-pandemic volatility, systemic inequality, and cultural fragmentation. These conditions require leaders who can work with opposing truths without collapsing them, and who can create coherence in the midst of contradiction (Smith and Lewis, 2011).
Arendt’s (1963) notion of the banality of evil offers a useful ethical caution here, highlighting how harm can become normalised in bureaucratic contexts when role-based compliance replaces judgement and individuals participate in damaging outcomes without interrogating their meaning or consequence. I have come to recognise how easily such normalisation can occur not through malice, but through routinised decision-making under pressure, where speed and defensibility crowd out reflection.
Across my work with executive teams, I have seen how deeply this mindset settles into organisational life, shaping decisions long after the conditions that created it have shifted. Leaders often default to models that minimise contradiction and reward simplicity. What feels fixed and familiar holds their attention, while anything that introduces tension or disrupts the illusion of order is quickly avoided. Ambiguity is treated as a threat rather than a source of insight. Paradox is framed as a problem to be eliminated rather than a reality to be engaged. I participated in this logic for years before I recognised its limits. Its appeal lies in the promise of control; its cost lies in the gradual erosion of the very human conditions that make performance durable.
These dynamics do not remain at the level of global abstraction. They materialise in boardrooms, performance reviews, restructuring discussions, and strategic planning cycles, where the pressure to simplify complexity becomes immediate and consequential. What appears as macro volatility becomes meso-level managerial logic, shaping how leaders prioritise, decide, and justify their actions.
By the early 2010s, a counter-movement began to take shape. Thinkers such as Brené Brown (2010) and Simon Sinek (2009) surfaced renewed attention to purpose, belonging and psychological safety. Yet this shift produced its own imbalance. In foregrounding empathy and relational leadership, many organisations under-attended the discipline and rigour required to sustain performance.
A new binary emerged. Humanness[1] was positioned on one side, accountability and execution on the other. Leaders were once again asked to choose between poles they had not yet learned to hold together. This raises a critical question that recurs throughout this thesis: how can accountability be meaningfully claimed if it cannot be enacted, enforced, or carried through consequence?
[1] In this thesis, I use the term humanness to refer to the recognition of persons as meaning-making, embodied, relational agents rather than as role-holders or performance instruments. It signals attention to dignity, emotional reality, psychological safety, belonging, and moral worth within organisational life. Humanness, as used here, does not imply softness, sentimentality, or the suspension of standards. Rather, it names the ontological fact that performance unfolds through human subjects whose perceptions, identities, and relational experiences shape conditions and outcomes. The term therefore marks one pole of the Spirit-Accountability paradox: the lived, affective, and relational dimension of organisational life that cannot be reduced to metrics, yet without which metrics lose coherence.
What is at stake here is not philosophical elegance but practical consequence. When organisations collapse paradox into binaries, they do not merely simplify decision-making. They distort reality, erode judgement, and generate unintended harm that accumulates over time. The distortion is rarely dramatic at first. It appears in small trade-offs that seem reasonable in isolation, yet compound into cultures where compliance replaces commitment and short-term performance quietly undermines long-term sustainability.
This is the context in which my concept of Paradox Literacy™ emerges.[1] I do not present it as a universal solution, but as an authored way of understanding leadership that does not rely on certainty or singularity. It names the capacity to recognise, hold, and work productively with opposing forces rather than prematurely collapsing them into simplistic answers. The sections that follow trace how this paradox manifests in daily organisational practice, and how it took shape in me long before I had language for it.
[1] Paradox Literacy™ is an original concept developed through this doctoral inquiry and functions as both the interpretive lens and the primary contribution of the thesis. It is introduced here at the point in the narrative where its experiential origins in the author’s practice first become visible. For a full definition, see the Glossary. (Trademark registration pending.)