Abstract Senior leaders today hold the credentials, use the vocabulary, and perform the posture of leadership convincingly — and yet the capacities leadership actually requires have become scarce in precisely the cohort the system is designed to produce. This practitioner-scholar essay argues that the gap is not incidental. The system does not merely fail to develop the capacities leadership requires; it actively trains them out of the people it credentials. The piece examines this at three depths: the behavioral appeasing posture that substitutes for integrity and courage; the institutional complacency of a development industry that has removed the conditions formation requires; and the somatic-developmental floor at which leadership capacity is actually built, which lives in the nervous system rather than in cognition. Drawing on adaptive leadership, sensemaking, moral injury, and adult development, the essay positions the recovery of leadership integrity as formation work, not curricular work. A gateway essay to a broader canon on leadership formation. Keywords: leadership formation, appeasing posture, sensing gap, systemic fragility, formation gap, institutional complacency, practitioner-scholar, adaptive leadership, moral injury in leadership, adult development, skilled incompetence, threshold leadership, leadership development critique
David S Morgan (Thu,) studied this question.