Asymmetric Demand, the Doubling of the Double Task, and the Cost of Defending Against Anxiety

Emery and Trist (Emery and Trist 1965) named the fourth causal texture turbulent: an environment whose dynamics are no longer reducible to the relations between actors within it, because the field itself has come alive. Baburoglu identified a fifth kind of vortical environment that arose when organisations failed to adapt to turbulence (Baburoglu 1988) . Sixty years later, accelerating demand tempos, platform-enabled multi-sidedness, and the digitalization of contexts-of-use have made turbulence the routine rather than the exception. Demand within turbulent environments is asymmetric (Veryard 2004) : it is singular to each customer’s context-of-use and cannot be fully anticipated at design-time. A work organisation that aims to remain responsive must hold a dynamically adaptive relation to each customer situation — what colleagues and I across two decades have called Type III agility, edge-driven strategy, and East-West dominance.

Holding this relation is structurally demanding. The classical organisation is designed inside-out: strategy flows from the centre through the hierarchy to operations, and the relationship to demand is subordinated to internally defined performance targets. This works while the environment can be assumed symmetric to the centre’s assumptions. It fails when demand has its own dynamics. The asymmetric organisation must instead surrender a degree of sovereignty over how it defines its primary task, accepting a continuous exposure to primary risk (Hirschhorn 1999) — the risk that the primary-task relation to any one client situation has not been defined in a way that satisfies the multi-sided demands within it.

The psychodynamic cost is substantial. Surrendering sovereignty exposes those at the edge to the singular insistence of the customer’s situation, and surfaces a four-way tension — existential, normative, relational, and requisite — that we may call the doubling of the double task (Boxer 2024; Bridger 1990). The organisation’s collective response to this tension is too often to defend itself through basic assumption behaviors (Bion 1962; Lawrence, Bain, and Gould 1996) . The website on which much of this work is gathered carries the resulting theorem as its tagline: defences against anxiety are (also) defences against innovation. The strategy ceiling — the level above which the organization chooses not to question its own assumptions — is held in place by precisely these defences, reproduced as the counter-resistance of a sponsoring system whose immune response kills new forms of value creation before they can challenge what the system holds dear.

This paper synthesises a twenty-year body of work — 106 articles on asymmetricleadership.com (2006–2026) and the draft book Turning Strategy Inside Out — to argue that holding the turbulent world at work requires four interlocking moves: a structural reorganisation that lets demand at the edge configure operational infrastructure (the four agendas of asymmetric leadership); a behavioural composition that holds r-type, c-type, K-closed and K-open value-creating strategies simultaneously (Jaques, Gibson, and Isaac 1978) ; a libidinal economy that sustains the Lacanian four generative discourses in circulation (Lacan 2007[1969–70]) ; and a commonwealth (Karatani 2014[2010]) and relational (MacNeil 1980) governance form that no longer asks the citizen-customer to do the missing work alone.