Lead or Follow was not born from a reflection on leadership. Nor from a critical observation of experts. It was born from a much older and more precise question — posed from the terrain of law.
The initial question was simple: what actually happens between the moment an organisation decides and the moment that decision reaches its destination? The four corpus that compose LOF follow this progression.
What happens when a creditor decides to do nothing in the face of the risk of non-payment — and that risk ends up materialising?
This question already leads to observing how organisations build protection mechanisms around economic action: guarantees, securities, procedures, coverage, exposure thresholds, surveillance and risk-reduction devices.
But behind the question of the immobile creditor, another question was taking shape: who in the organisation had actually decided not to act? Was it the pilot? The board? The legal function? Or no one in particular — the system itself?
This is where something interesting appeared. Classical governance categories did not answer this question well. They looked at results, formal responsibilities, conflicts of interest. They rarely looked at the actual trajectory of the decision inside the organisation.
What happens when an organisation progressively internalises all the functions charged with addressing the risks surrounding action?
Legal. Compliance. Risk management. ESG. Internal control. DPO. Security. Procurement. Regulated finance.
Every function acts rationally. Each protects something. Each reduces a real exposure. But the accumulation sometimes ends up producing a particular organisational phenomenon: the decision progressively becomes too heavy for its own trajectory.
Some organisations still have the financial power to take off despite this prudential gravity. Others remain on the tarmac. And even when flight begins, the trajectory is often slowed, escorted, suspended, requalified or grounded before reaching its initial operational destination.
No one said no. Yet the decision no longer moves straight.
The legal example does not exhaust the question of normative expertise. It is simply its most visible manifestation — because legal borrows the authority of law.
This is not a case of bad faith. It is not a case of dysfunctional functions. It is a case of structurally displaced rationality: perfectly competent actors, evaluated on metrics that do not coincide with the organisation's trajectory, mechanically produce a weight that the trajectory eventually can no longer carry.
This observation applies to legal. It applies equally to compliance, risk management, ESG, DPO, procurement, internal control — and tomorrow to the automated systems that progressively absorb standardised prudential production.
The phenomenon is not legal. It is organisational. Legal was simply where it was most readily observable.
Lead or Follow was born from this question: how does an organisation govern a decision in a dense normative environment without losing its trajectory along the way?
The four corpus that compose LOF follow this progression: from the displacement of the decision to the question of its government. They propose:
Not a universal method. Not a cultural transformation programme. An operable doctrine — that can be installed, tested, corrected, and that withstands its own objections.
This reflection is no longer purely theoretical. It now produces operational fields of action — four distinct interventions, arising directly from the doctrine.
The reflection originated in doctoral research on creditors, the risk of non-payment and organisational protection mechanisms. This thesis constitutes the documentary origin of the LOF doctrine.
Consult the thesis — HAL Thèses →