Lyrebirds

hear them most days in the hills around our house.

First, you think it is a kookaburra. Then a magpie. A black cockatoo. But none of them is quite right.

What I am hearing is the lyrebird, an extraordinary mimic.

It has its own song, but it also reproduces what it hears around it: other birds, a chainsaw, even a squeaking door.

In organisations, mimicry is everywhere.

It happens around the leader. The people who repeat, an hour later, what the leader said that morning, without ever testing it against what they think. Who stop using their own voice, or stop trusting that they have one.

It rarely looks like a problem. It looks like alignment.

A leader who sees it and lets it stand ends up surrounded by their own voice.