Reimagining Leadership with Epic the Musical | Chapter 1 | Part V
We spend a great deal of time assessing what leaders can do. Perhaps we should spend more time asking what leadership is doing to them. Through EPIC: The Musical and the journey of Odysseus, I explore leadership not as a destination, but as a process of becoming.
This is Part V of Epic the Musical Leadership, a series exploring leadership through story, power, consequence and the human experience of becoming.
What Does the Journey Ask of Us?
The leadership lessons I find in EPIC: The Musical
I've spent weeks discussing leadership through EPIC: The Musical. About the journey. About power. About sacrifice. About the people who follow.
I've been talking a lot about Odysseus. It’s time for me to talk about those around him. Because EPIC is not really a leadership story in the conventional sense.
It doesn't give us a perfect leader. It gives us people under pressure. People making choices. People exercising power. People following. People resisting. People loving. People losing. People learning. And people becoming. That is what makes the story so useful.
The official framing of EPIC asks a deceptively simple question: When does a man become a monster?
This is a leadership question. Because leadership gives us power, and power creates choices, and eventually, our choices begin creating us.
The journey begins with a purpose
Before Odysseus becomes the complicated character we encounter later, there is something remarkably simple at the heart of his journey. He wants to go home. His wife is waiting. His kingdom is waiting. His people are with him. The goal is not abstract. It is deeply human.
In Full Speed Ahead, the scale of his responsibility is established immediately. Six hundred men under his command, with the goal of making it back alive to their homeland. This is a crucial point because leadership rarely begins with bad intentions. Most leaders are trying to get somewhere they believe matters… Growth, survival, transformation, a better future, a stronger organisation, a safer community, a return to something that has been lost.
The destination matters, but EPIC invites us to look deeper into what happens between here and there?
Athena: Intelligence is not wisdom
Athena is one of the first figures to shape Odysseus.
She recognises his strategic mind, his ability to think, to adapt, to outwit, to solve… yet their relationship ultimately fractures.
That feels significant to me. Because organisations are full of intelligent people. We recruit for intelligence. We promote for capability. We reward strategic thinking. But intelligence alone doesn't tell us what someone will do with power. It doesn't tell us what they will protect. What they will compromise. Or what they will become when the stakes rise.
Perhaps Athena's lesson is being able to outthink the problem is not the same as understanding what the problem is doing to you.
That distinction matters enormously in leadership.
Eurylochus: The follower is not a supporting character
Eurylochus may be one of the most interesting leadership characters in the entire musical, because he is not simply "the follower"; he watches, questions, disagrees, experiences the consequences of Odysseus’ decisions, and eventually his disagreement becomes consequential.
This is the way I think about followership, because a follower is someone living inside the consequences of that decision, not just someone who executes a leader's decision.
Sometimes, the person challenging the leader can show the leader what the leader can no longer see, which bodes the leadership question:
Have I created followers who obey me, or people who can still tell me when I'm wrong?
Circe: There are other ways
This is a central theme for me.
In There Are Other Ways, Circe confronts Odysseus with the possibility that power does not have to operate through a single route. She talks about different forms of persuasion and control. She challenges him to confront the mistakes he has already made. And then Odysseus reveals what sits beneath all of it - he just wants to go home.
Penelope is his anchor, his source of power, his reason to continue. And yet getting home will require another dangerous route, through the Underworld. What I love about this moment is that Circe doesn't simply offer Odysseus an answer. She offers him another way.
The message There Are Other Ways has stayed with me because leaders can become trapped by their first solution. The target becomes sacred, so does the strategy, the original decision becomes something that must be defended, but what if there are other ways?
Other ways to achieve the result, to exercise authority, to have the difficult conversation, to restructure, to grow, or to win. Sometimes the most strategic and human thing a leader can do is not become better at executing the chosen path. It is to question whether it is still the right path.
Another extraordinary lesson in Circe is that after experiencing power as control, she chooses an act of kindness. Her reasoning is essentially that kindness can produce kinder souls downstream.
That is a profound truth about leadership… our choices propagate.
What we do to people doesn't necessarily end with them, it stays with them and travels through them.
Tiresias: At some point, leadership must face consequence
The Underworld changes the story. Odysseus encounters people and truths that he cannot simply strategise his way around. The journey becomes less about overcoming the next obstacle and more about confronting what has already happened. That is something leaders often avoid.
We are trained to look forward, to next quarter, next strategy, next transformation, next opportunity. But leadership maturity requires looking inwards. It requires reflection.
What did my decisions cost? What did I fail to see? Who was affected? What did I become? What would I do differently now?
Growth-led reflection is not self-indulgence nor navel-gazing. Deep reflection does not stop at self-pity nor illusory scaffolding of martyrdom and choice-lessness.
Growth-led reflection is fuel to taking power and responsibility, to power up courage for responsible actions. Without it, experience simply becomes repetition and stagnation.
Zeus: When leadership becomes an impossible choice
The Thunder Saga takes the question of sacrifice to another level.
Odysseus is eventually confronted with a choice in which the survival of his people comes into conflict with the survival of himself and his mission. This is where the story does not give us a comfortable leadership answer, because sometimes there really isn't one.
There are decisions where someone will pay. The question is not whether the cost exists, but who bears it and what does the person making the decision do with that knowledge.
This is where leadership becomes profoundly human. The leader doesn't get to pretend there was no cost simply because the decision was necessary.
Necessity does not erase consequence.
Athena and Telemachus: What do we leave behind?
Something shifts and the story isn't just about Odysseus anymore, as the Wisdom Saga brings Athena and Telemachus into much sharper focus. Suddenly, the leadership question changes from how I lead to what happens to the people who inherit what I leave behind.
This matters deeply to me, because I have worked with so many leaders, and I know that leaders don't only leave strategies. They leave assumptions, behaviours, expectations, stories about leadership… and someone in the system, especially someone new entering it, inherits all of this.
They learn, this is how decisions are made here, this is what gets rewarded, this is what happens when you speak up, this is what you have to become if you want to succeed.
That is leadership legacy. It is not what people say about you after you leave, more than it is what people believe they must become because you were there.
Penelope: What are you really trying to get home to?
And then there is Penelope. For me, she brings a veil of complexity to the entire idea of the heroic journey. Odysseus is travelling. Penelope is waiting.
But waiting isn't the same as doing nothing. Penelope has her own intelligence. Her own agency. Her own decisions. Her own endurance. And this matters because leadership stories can become dangerously enamoured with the person who is travelling towards the goal.
We celebrate the person pursuing the mission. But someone else may be holding the world together while they do it. So, the other important question to ask is, what are you leaving behind while you pursue the thing you're trying to achieve?
Businesses can grow, careers can accelerate, leaders can become extraordinarily successful, and each can still arrive somewhere they no longer recognise.
Poseidon: What happens when the cost becomes personal?
Poseidon is perhaps the most obvious representation of consequence.
A decision made early in the journey doesn't simply disappear, it follows Odysseus, and eventually, the consequences become personal.
This feels very familiar because companies are very good at treating decisions as discrete events… decisions made, projects completed, quarters closed, problems solved.
But human systems don't work that way, because of memory. People remember. Trust remembers. Culture remembers. Relationships remember. A decision today can change what people are willing to do tomorrow. Meaning leaders don't simply make decisions, they create conditions. And those conditions have memory.
So, what does EPIC actually teach us about leadership?
Not what one might expect.
EPIC doesn't teach us to be more strategic, courageous or decisive. Of course those are useful lessons, but they are not the deeper, more transformational and impactful lesson. The deeper lesson is about choice.
Every Saga puts its characters somewhere between competing truths.
Strategy vs humanity. Power vs restraint. Loyalty vs dissent. Survival vs sacrifice. Purpose vs consequence. Love vs ambition.
Absolutely nobody gets to stand outside the tension. Everybody must choose.
And this is where Odysseus fascinates
Because I don't think his central problem is that he doesn't know where he wants to go. He knows. He wants to go home. His problem is what happens when every route home demands something different from him.
At first, perhaps it was how do I get home, but eventually it becomes what am I willing to do to get home, what am I willing to sacrifice, who pays for my decisions, and ultimately, who am I becoming?
That to me, that progression, that unfolding, is the leadership journey, is the becoming of a new leader.
There Are Other Ways
Perhaps this is why this particular song resonates so strongly with me.
Not because Circe is offering a neat leadership lesson, but because the song contains a possibility that leaders easily forget, there is more than one way.
More than one way to persuade. More than one way to exercise power. More than one way to solve the problem. More than one way to reach the destination. And sometimes another way is harder.
Sometimes it is more dangerous. Sometimes it requires us to admit that our first choice was wrong. Sometimes it requires us to change ourselves. But sometimes the alternative path allows us to arrive without having destroyed everything we were trying to return to.
That is a leadership lesson worth sitting with.
Perhaps the destination is not enough
This is where I think my weeks of thinking about #ETMLeadership have taken me.
Leadership is not simply the Journey. It is not power, sacrifice or even the people who follow. It is the relationship between all four. Because every leader has somewhere they want to go.
Every leader has power to exercise. Every leader will face things they cannot have without giving something else up. And every leader is shaping other people along the way.
Which means the real leadership question is, can you get to where you want to go, without becoming someone you would not want to follow?
This is where Depth Strategy begins
This is also where my work sits. I've become less interested in leadership as a collection of competencies. I'm interested in what sits underneath competencies, what powers them up.
Why is this person making this decision? What are they protecting? What are they afraid of losing? What does the system reward them for? What are people around them learning? What is becoming normal? Where is the contradiction? What is the cost that isn't appearing on the P&L? And what kind of future is being created by today's choices?
That is depth strategy... looking beneath the visible decision to understand the human architecture producing it. Because the strategic problem is less about people not knowing what to do, but more about the system that has made certain choices easier, safer or more profitable than others.
And this is where leadership becomes more than individual performance. It becomes a question of what kind of system we are creating.
The master lesson
Perhaps this is what I take from EPIC. We all have an Ithaca. A destination. A version of the future we want to reach. But the journey between here and there is not neutral. It is shaping us. It is shaping the people travelling with us. And it is shaping the system we will eventually arrive in.
So perhaps the leadership questions are not did we win, or did we get home, but how did we get there, who paid the price, who became more capable along the way, who became smaller, what did we learn to tolerate, what did we make possible for others, and ultimately, who did we become trying to get there.
The greatest danger isn’t failing to reach Ithaca, but it is arriving there and discovering that we lost the very thing we were trying to come home to… love, peace and joyfulfilment.
I've had moments in my own domestic life where I realised the very structure I was protecting really needed to collapse, and times in my own working life where I was getting very good delivering results that were not what I believed in and could not stand behind. My vision of Ithaca had to change. I needed a whole different architecture, other ways, to arrive at Ithaca 2.0.
And this is where I will leave Chapter 1. EPIC begins with a man trying to get home. But along the way, it becomes a story about power, choice, consequence, love, leadership and ultimately, what happens to human beings when the systems and circumstances around them keep asking, what are you willing to give up, to survive?
That is a question I will carry forward. Because if leadership shapes people, and systems shape leaders, then we need to look more closely at the systems in which people work.
What do they reward? What do they demand? What do they normalise? What do they make people tolerate? And, perhaps most importantly, how much freedom does a person really have when the price of speaking, refusing or leaving is too high?
That is where my next chapter begins.
Because the next leadership question, really isn’t how do we make people follow, but, what would it take to build systems in which people don't have to surrender their agency, in order to belong.
And I believe, there really are other ways.
Next: #Unslavery
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