North90... What 's in a name?
- Thibaut Legendre
- Jun 29
- 11 min read
Somebody recently asked me about the story behind the name North90. I had not had the question before… there is one. Since I started North90 the thinking exposed below has been inhabiting me. I just never bothered to write it down until now.
90° North is the latitude of the North pole. The process of finding a corresponding internet domain led me to finesse the traditional notation of 90° North into North90. It is also a reference to my formative years as an officer in the Navy, and what they bring to my practice in organization development today.
The geographic Pole…
My understanding of organizations has a lot to do with geography.
We represent our planet with a North and South pole. That is not just a practical convention inherited from history, it is dictated by physics and geometry. We know that our planet is a nearly spherical object rotating on a geometric axis, which intersects the Earth shape at specific points that we call poles. The poles thus mark the axis on which our planet revolves. In the Europe-centric worldview, where North is “on top” and South is “down” (Which in the wider universe obviously has no meaning at all), we can look at the position of a leader who sits “on top of” their team or organization, as if they were sitting at the North pole. This comparison reflects both the realities of the role, as well as the myths and fantasies surrounding it.
Many organizations nowadays have a leadership function that attributes the final executive say to a unique person, the chief executive officer, or any equivalent title, perched atop of the organization chart [i].
The word “leadership” has become almost interchangeable with “leader” (Wrongly in my opinion), with the implied meaning that there has to be one and only one. In this restrictive paradigm, leadership is understood both as the function of a person and as a set of unique qualities and skills best exemplified by “great leaders”. Correspondingly, we tend to attribute the successes or failures of organizations to their leaders, no matter how flawed this romanticized view of leadership seems to be (Meindl et al., 1985). Leaders are frequently seen as those around whom everything revolves, and sometimes, the expectation creating the function: those who make everything turn. Either way, be it by through how they practice or how the world sees them, they may end up sitting at the North pole of their organization.
All CEOs I know have an acute understanding of earth physics and geometry. Just because they sit at the pole doesn’t mean they are the one making the earth turn. It is obvious for anyone who has ever led an organization, that change in a group of humans no matter the size, does not happen by the virtue of willing it… and that sometimes, pushing harder for change does not do much, sometimes even the opposite. And the bigger the organization, the more difficult and less drivable change becomes.
The experience of those who fulfil leaders’ roles are thus shaped in equal measures by the reality of what the job entails (Meetings, negotiations, business reviews, client calls, financial planning and so on) and the lofty expectations of everyone around them, shareholders, clients and employees alike. With this expected or projected almightiness comes inescapable pressure. Placed at the tectonic point of contact between teams battling to execute the strategy, a board of directors requiring that shareholders be given a strong return on their investment no matter what, and clients expecting nothing but the best or else, they are constantly invited to save the day: bridging the gap between what is expected and what seems possible is every CEO’s, and by extension every leader’s danaid’s barrel.
“In the end it appears that as observers of and as participants in organizations, we may have developed highly romanticized, heroic views of leadership — what leaders do, what they are able to accomplish and the general effects they have on our lives.”
(Meindl et al., 1985)
The fact is that when considering the problems and limitations affecting any group of humans, the level of complexity instantly becomes so great that ascribing the general success of the organization to a narrow set of parameters, among which their leader, is indeed… simpler, and somewhat more satisfying. We may experience in this way that our habitual causalist mechanistic worldview has its merits: things happen because of other things, and these other things are identifiable, attributable, and if understood well enough, can be corrected. The alternative is indeed much less satisfying: What if causality was in fact a very poor way to understand organizations?
In the end, North90 is a reminder that the earth does not turn because something makes it turn. It turns as a result of how it formed, and what gave it its current shape 4.5 billion years ago. At that time, a mighty celestial push gave it momentum, and since there is nothing in the vacuum of space to counter that spin, it has simply been spinning ever since, by inertia. It turns... because it turns! What we do on earth has no measurable influence on how it turns.
Almightiness or powerlessness... the reality of leadership lies somewhere in between.
Mapping the earth
90° North is a precise location (So is 90° South). Any place else on earth needs both latitude and longitude to be precisely determined. For example, Mount Everest is located at 27.9882° North and 86.9254° East. But the North and South poles only need latitude. Longitude is defined by meridians, meaning circles that intersects both the North and South pole.
If we look at earth with North on top, meridians are circles (In blue on the drawing here) that stand vertically, whilst parallels are drawn horizontally. By convention, the Greenwich meridian (Greenwich is part of London), is longitude 0°, and the earth circumference is then divided in 180° degrees in eastern and western directions. Berlin sits East of London at longitude 13.4° E, or meridian East 13.4°, whilst Dublin which sits West of London is at longitude 6.2° W.
All meridians intersect at the poles. If I stand exactly at the North pole, my position includes all the longitudes. When standing “up North”, the only direction I can look is South, and the axis I choose to stand on is a longitude. If I look in the direction of London, I am looking at longitude 0°. If I pivot 25° to my left (25° East), I am looking in the direction of Vilnius in Lithuania. If I pivot 25° to my right (25° West), I am looking in the direction of Asunción Paraguay.
That is the way I visualize organizations led by one person. The leader sits at the North Pole. Functions (HR, Finance, Operations, etc…) are the longitudes, and each level in the hierarchy is a different latitude. A CEO only needs that title to be clearly identified. Their latitude is “on top of the org chart”. Their longitude is not Finance or HR or Operations, they have all the longitudes included in their position. Conversely the more we go down in the organisation chart, the trickier it gets to understand where exactly people are located on the sole base of their job title, we need both latitude and longitude (e.g.: “I am a financial controller, part of the Medical technology division, located in Sweden” that’s longitude, and the company CEO is my N+5: that’s latitude).
This geographic position of responsibility means leaders often have a wealth of information at their disposal (they can see all the longitudes) and they can pivot from one direction to another by just shuffling on the spot. Now for the people “on the ground”, going from Paris to London is well facilitated logistically, thanks to tunnels and high-speed trains, but is not quite as easy as shuffling on the spot.
There lies one intrinsic source of tension in organizations. Leaders see the world from a position where they can pivot strategy easily and comfortably, where changing longitude merely requires thinking about it and limited physical effort. Yet coordinating the move in real life, for example relocating offices or introducing AI technologies in the value chain, proves much more complicated, and often meets resistance or angst in the organization.
Conversely, whilst it seems easy to see everything from the pole, the reality is, if I really stood at the North pole, the chances are I would not see much of the world, other than a lot of white ice and snow and a lot of blue or black sky. Leaders can easily look in all directions, but they are very dependent on information being brought and presented to them. Team members have a wealth of detailed information on what is happening, but they only see their own corner of the organization and are dependent on management for coordination.
The geography of organizations and resulting information asymmetries define how information of all nature needs to travel vertically along meridians (From me to my N+1 to his N+1 and so on), and horizontally along parallels (Collaboration between finance and engineering, working across silos). And how well information travels is a determining factor for organization survival.
Software providers have mastered the art of propagating information in organizations in all directions. Whilst software often comes with its own set of issues, it has undeniably rendered possible the processing of data at a speed and to a depth that was unthinkable just a century ago. What software does not augment however, is how humans relate to one another, exchange relational information and adjust to circumstances for their own individual survival, and that of the organization.
All North90 interventions have to do with the flow of human and relational information in organizations. Innumerable horizontal and vertical information-flows are ferrying sentiment, meaning, experiences, cries for help and celebrations of victory, respect, worthiness, stress, pressure or shame, constantly reshaped by ever changing world circumstances… These are mostly nonverbal, often non-conscious, and computers cannot process them… Facing such overwhelming complexity may explain our temptation to simply assume that “things are as they seem” or that “things will sort themselves out if people act professionally”, or even that “a good leader is what is needed”. Alas this proves, time and again not quite nuanced enough.
The name North90 is a reminder that many questions may find answers, if we simply accept that navigation, for all the science of it, also remains an art. Because we do, in fact possess both the maps, and the tools to navigate organizations.
The magnetic pole.
The North and South poles are not only poles because of the geometric properties of our planet. There is another underlying physical truth: Earth works like a giant magnet. It is surrounded by a magnetic field, which like all magnetic fields has two poles: the North and South magnetic poles. These are not exactly aligned with the geographic poles, but they are not too distant either [ii]. And thanks to these, we can use a compass.
Compasses use a magnetized iron needle which is set free to rotate on a solid axis. The needle orients itself along the lines of the earth’s magnetic field, exactly like a flag in the breeze, and points from all locations on earth to the magnetic North pole. We cannot see the earth’s magnetic field with the naked eye, but a compass can.
Wikipedia suggests that the first use of magnetic compasses for navigational purposes happened around the 11th century in China and was later adopted by other great seafaring nations, in the following centuries.
If the notion of latitude and longitude already existed at the time, there was, before the invention of the compass, no safe way to maintain direction without relying on external observations of either the coast, or the stars. Setting sails in winter was a bad idea… The compass was a revolution because it created a source of directional truth contained within itself, any weather, any season any time of day or night.
Compasses work very well at moderate latitudes that is in location not too far from the equator. But the higher the latitude goes, the less reliable a compass becomes. It behaves erratically when standing at the north pole itself. In other terms, if we think about the capacity for a person to orient themselves in the world, compasses are very useful and reliable for most everyone, except precisely for the person sitting at the North Pole, who happens to be in most organizations, in charge of setting directions. Ô irony...
Many other factors affect the reliability of compasses such as the presence of large metallic masses in their immediate vicinity, or a high speed of travel…
And really everything about compasses is comparable to leadership and decision making. Leaders are often confronted to critical or stressful situations, in which they receive diverging opinions or recommendations. They may feel themselves like a compass spinning at the North Pole. They will face competing priorities and nothing, not even the finest trained AI, can change the fact that following one path or another relies to a large extend on their internal sense of direction, like a compass feeling the earth’s magnetic field. Sometimes, that internal compass pushes people to make decisions that seem counter-intuitive, or self-damaging. They make such decisions because they either see what nobody else does, because they see several moves ahead, or out of faith. And if history proves them right... sometimes, their choice proved not to work. Either way it will all be rationalized after the facts… In the moment they had to just decide.
Just like a compass our ability to make choices can be corrupted as we get closer to a centre of power, a “metallic mass”, or by simply moving too fast…
A place that is hard to reach.
As a symbol, the poles North and South have an aura of unreachability. It is not just by chance that trips to the poles are called explorations or adventures, not just trips. They are both distant, hostile and hard to reach destinations, the South Pole much more than the North… Yet humans do regularly go, and sometimes, pay a heavy price for it. Not just in the interest of science, but also because doing things that are hard to do, keeps drawing a crowd of challenge enthusiasts.
One of my personal heroes is Jean-Baptiste Charcot. A French doctor, polar explorer and Navy officer, he spent most of his adult life exploring polar regions. He never reached either of the poles but did his part in a wave of expeditions that helped humanity better understand and map both arctic and Antarctic regions.
North90 is a tribute to human’s quests and endeavours. Not all quests are alike, and not all quests are of equal worth. But in one way or another we are all invited to find our quest. As Victor Frankel best put it
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Frankl, V, 2006
And that is mine: We live in uncertain times, and the resilience of organizations gets tested everyday. How do we work with our fellow humans to Stay the Course, and make ourselves collectively resilient ? If you need support in working out the geography of your organization, the way latitudes and longitudes should be organized, the way human intelligence flows in your corridors, factory floors, meeting rooms, logistics teams, etc... you know where to find me.
Thibaut
Works cited:
Meindl, R.; Ehrlich, B.; Dukerich, M. The Romance of Leadership, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1985, Vol 30, Issue 1, p78
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Notes:
[i] This is not at all the only possible leadership model, and many organizations work differently with two, three or even a college of directors at the top, sometimes differentiating a primus inter pares (One who speaks first among peers). Evolving in other directions, some organizations have a distributed governance with either an embryonic leadership team with a very restricted remit, and self-directed teams, when others have a wholly distributed leadership model, for example via holacratic circles. Some take the shape of leaderless movements. Some organizations still have the appearance of a top-down hierarchy with a CEO at the top, but practice the advice process, where decision making is devolved to the people most affected by its outcomes.
[ii] For many different reasons, linked mostly to the earth’s crust irregularities and earth core movements, the magnetic and geographic poles are not identical and the distance between the two varies constantly between a few hundred kilometres to more than a thousand…
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