Weekly Reflections: A Photograph, A Child, A Responsibility
This week’s reflections, inspired by a Don McCullin photograph, explore leadership, stewardship, and the responsibility we hold for the world we shape.
Quite the week.
Coaching a strategy consultant, agreeing a 360 process with a senior leader for one of their directors, running interview preparation with a policy director, then travelling to London to scope leadership development work and coach a marketing director before a trip to Bradford on Avon and Bath.
Why bath? A catch up with the fabulous Andrew Eberlin.
Andrew built my beautiful website and we are planning a few tweaks including a new offerings page and a better way to house testimonials.
Whenever we meet we try to include an exhibition or architectural walk. It gives us space to talk properly.
Andrew is also an outstanding photographer and documenter of brutalist architecture, so these walks often turn into conversations about how people design, build and shape the world around us.
This time we spent time with the work of Don McCullin at the Holburne Museum
Bath is a city of beautiful proportions and thoughtful design, the kind of place where architecture reminds you that people once built with a sense of legacy.
Which made standing in front of McCullin’s photographs even more powerful.
Andrew knows me well. Within minutes he started riffing on how I might use this photo from McCullin as a metaphor for leadership and life.
My reflection, a couple of days on, is that what it really symbolises to me is something simpler.
A friendship, our connection, built on a shared appreciation of life, beauty and function.
I met Andrew at a time when Twitter was still glorious, when people shared who they were, not just what they did.
I hope I still try to bring a little of that spirit here.
Because ultimately, who we are illuminates what we do.
And the image itself?
For me it is about knowledge and what we choose to do with it.
Don McCullin spent a lifetime documenting the consequences of human decisions. His photographs are often brutal, but they are also deeply compassionate.
In that sense he has always been a kind of steward, showing the world what happens when power, industry and conflict forget the human being at the centre.
Industry can build or damage our oceans and our communities.
Today the smokestacks look different.
They are service sectors, digital systems and increasingly artificial intelligence, forms of industry with an even greater ability to shape how people live, work and see the world.
Which means we have a duty and a responsibility to protect the most important thing in that photograph.
The child in the pram.
Someone who has come into a world not of their choosing. And the mother beside them, like so many women, stewarding the world at its largest scale and its tiniest.
A child in a pram will inherit whatever we decide to build. And that image, to me, is a quiet reminder of the stewardship this world needs.
And that is why I’ve made it my purpose to coach good people leading great things.
Thank you for reading.
Executive Coach and writer on leadership, stewardship and the responsibilities that come with influence.
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