Last week in Vassivière, I stepped into Zac Langdon-Pole’s installation Threadsuns.
Inside the lighthouse, skeins of fine wire stretched out like a spider’s web. Glass prisms dangled from them, refracting the light into hundreds of tiny rainbows which scattered arcs of colour into the darkness. It felt both intricate and infinite. A web of threads shifting our view from the microscopic to the infinite.
As I stood there, I couldn’t help but think about the threads that shape us. In The Through Line, I describe how our lives are made up of such filaments. Moments of joy, failure, connection, and courage that weave together to form the fabric of our character. Like Langdon-Pole’s web, they may look delicate, but they hold us together, giving structure and meaning to the spaces we inhabit.
Admiral Nelson once insisted that a red thread be woven into every one of the British Navy’s ropes. No matter how short the length or how frayed the edges, you could always identify it as belonging to the fleet. That’s what our through lines do for us. They mark us out as uniquely ourselves, unmistakable and indivisible, even when circumstances fray the edges.
In the workplace, these threads matter more than we sometimes admit. We spend so much time looking outward at performance targets, market shifts, competitor dynamics, that we can forget to ask: what is the thread I am weaving through this work? When we don’t know, our leadership feels heavy, borrowed, performative. But when we do, when we can see the prismed arcs of our experiences, we lead with authenticity. We lead from the inside out. We cast light outward.
Standing in that lighthouse, it felt essential to notice the threads that were already there. Our stories, our values, our paradoxes. They are the threads. When we know them, we can cast them outward like Nelson’s red cords, unmistakably ours. And from that place, we can connect, create, and lead.
Leadership is not about weaving a perfect web. It’s about owning the threads that make us who we are and daring to let them shine.
