In the anodyne catechism of modern leadership development, the chrysalis-to-butterfly “metamorphosis” parades as a polished icon of benign transcendence. It decorates everything from rebranding brochures to transformation programmes. Wrapped in the language of “becoming,” it functions as a liturgy of self-optimisation—a secular eschatology of personal growth, stripped of the terror of truth. But when metamorphosis is reduced to increase in complexity, adaptability, or personal congruence, it collapses into performance. It is not transformation, but mimicry.

For what is metamorphosis, really, if it does not disclose a new relation to value? To transform is not to shift behaviours, but to be re-formed in being. Our new form is not simply self-authored, but received, surrendered to—emergent from rupture. Transformation, if it is to deserve the name, must be tethered to a truth that precedes the self and demands its reconstitution. That tether is metanoia.

Metanoia is not just reflection, regret, or healing. It is the shattering of epistemic certainty—the collapse of one’s world under the weight of its exclusions, when the moral horizon breaks in and demands to be witnessed. It is not merely a conversion of belief, but of attention and allegiance. Without it, metamorphosis degenerates into theatre: the chameleon logic of capitalist adaptability, not a transfiguration of the soul.

So the question presses: can there be metamorphosis without metanoia? Can a leader embody something new without first being undone?

Popular development theories insist yes. They chart stages of growth as progression of cognitive complexity, perspective-taking, systemic integration. But complexity is not virtue. Resilience is not goodness. A clearer view of causality in an interdependent world does not imply deeper participation in what is good. Without the violence of moral rupture, “development” becomes nothing but a relentless arms race of adaptivity—leaders adapt to better serve the system, rather than becoming the kind of people through whom the system might be transformed.

True development is not ascent but descent: kenosis—an emptying, an undoing, confrontation of negation. It begins in the shock of complicity: the realisation that one’s very success is scaffolded by structures of injustice, that one’s vision has been morally blinkered, that selfhood has been shaped in the image of the very systems one now seeks to transcend. Only through moral disintegration—through exposure and surrender—can something new arise.

Metanoia is the wound through which metamorphosis becomes possible. Without it, transformation remains managerial, cosmetic, aligned with power. With it, metamorphosis becomes re-birth: a dying to one’s old complicities, so the world might be re-imagined and redeemed.

So perhaps the real question for #leadership is not: What will you become?
But: What are you willing to be broken by?