The Ideas
This is the public archive of writing from Rebel 75. Many of these pieces first appear in The Frequency, our monthly newsletter exploring culture, leadership, and the systems that shape how work actually happens.
In this collection, you’ll find stories from the field, ideas that challenge the status quo, and reflections on building more human, values-led workplaces.
Subscribers to The Frequency receive new essays first, along with occasional subscriber-only pieces.
We don’t promise perfect answers. Just a commitment to keep asking better questions.
Stop Weaponizing Resilience, Start examining your culture
This article challenges the way leaders use “resilience” as a shield against accountability, arguing that the term is often deployed to shift blame onto individuals instead of confronting unhealthy systems. Drawing on the author’s experience leading a culture and leadership review in 2022, it recounts how senior executives rejected root-cause findings about cultural harm and instead sought to identify dissenters, explicitly refusing to address toxic conditions. Resilience was reframed as a personal shortcoming rather than a systemic failure. The piece contrasts this with Jurie Rossouw’s PR6 model from Driven, which identifies six domains that enable resilience, and reframes them as leadership responsibilities rather than individual deficits. Ultimately, the article argues that organizations must choose: build systems that make resilience possible, or continue demanding that employees endure dysfunction longer.
Read the Room, Not the Brief. It's how I found the real culture culprits
This article explores how organizational breakdowns that look like tooling, scaling, or delivery problems are often rooted in leadership misalignment. Using firsthand experience inside a travel technology company during early COVID, it shows how official narratives and role transitions can obscure the reality of how work actually happens. Fragmented systems—like seven disconnected Jira instances—serve as visible symptoms of deeper fractures in trust, accountability, and executive cohesion. Through close observation of cross-functional dynamics, silence, avoidance, and power signals, the piece argues that culture cannot be repaired through process changes alone. Real transformation requires leadership alignment and shared accountability; without it, teams default to self-protection rather than collaboration.
Vision or Vice grip? When to choose clarity over certainty.
January’s Rebel 75 newsletter explores the difference between clarity and certainty in leadership and teamwork. Using a personal reflection on planning a multi-generation trip to Europe, the article argues that leaders don’t need perfect plans—they need a clear vision, shared priorities, and the flexibility to adapt. The issue also features an Art Corner reflection on bravery, a monthly Signal Check for team alignment, and a Tiny Rebellion prompt encouraging teams to clarify their most important commitments for the year.