Sarah Tucker: The Ego Trap: Why Power Makes People Thick (and How to Think Around It)

Finito World

Considering what has unfolded globally over the past few years, politically, economically, culturally, it feels like the right moment to talk about the ego. Not as a moral flaw or a personality quirk, but as a structural problem in thinking. One that narrows perception, hardens positions, and quietly sabotages decision-making at scale, particularly in entrepreneurial, corporate, and investment environments where the cost of bad thinking compounds fast.

Ego doesn’t announce itself. It arrives disguised as certainty, experience, seniority, success. It says: I’ve built this before. It says: I know how this market works. It says: Rules are for people who haven’t earned discretion.

And once it takes hold, thinking stops moving, even as markets, technologies, and customers do.

Long before it became fashionable to critique power, this pattern had already been observed. One of the clearest early insights came from Edward de Bono, who noticed something curious not in formal strategy sessions but over dinners, the Albany dinners of the “good and the great.” The more influential the people in the room, the less flexible their thinking became. Status didn’t sharpen intelligence; it fossilised it.

This wasn’t incompetence. It was something more interesting and more dangerous.

When the Mind Becomes a Fortress

The ego’s primary function is defensive. Carl Jung understood this well. He saw the ego as necessary, a centre of identity, but deeply limited. When it becomes over-identified with power, track record, or perceived expertise, it turns the psyche into a fortress. Everything unfamiliar is treated as a threat. Everything challenging is reframed as naivety, insubordination, or “lack of commercial understanding.”

Nietzsche, in his more surgical moments, noticed the same thing. Those who believe themselves superior often become brittle, not strong. They mistake dominance for depth, control for understanding. They stop listening not because they are malicious, but because listening would require them to risk rearranging the furniture of their own self-image.

This is where thinking becomes thick.

Thick thinking is not slow thinking. It’s heavy thinking. Laden with reputation. Laden with past wins. Laden with the need to justify sunk costs and defend identity.

And it is extraordinarily common at the top of organisations.

The Boys’ Club Isn’t Strategic — It’s Predictable

Much has been written about elite networks, boys’ clubs, and closed power circles in business and finance. What’s less often discussed is how boringly repetitive their thinking is.

Same assumptions. Same benchmarks. Same playbooks. Same blind spots.

This is why ego is such an efficient trap. It creates the illusion of mastery while producing intellectual laziness. Once you believe you are above the rules, you stop examining them. Once you believe you are the system, you stop improving it.

And crucially, this isn’t confined to men. Women who attach themselves too closely to existing power structures often inherit the same rigidity, mistaking proximity for independence, influence for insight. Status is contagious. So is its blindness.

The result is a culture where performance replaces curiosity, where optics matter more than
outcomes, and where being seen to decide decisively outweighs deciding well.

Why This Isn’t Machiavellian Thinking

At this point, someone usually raises Machiavelli.

Isn’t this all just power? Isn’t managing perception, exploiting leverage, and outmanoeuvring competitors simply strategic intelligence?

No. And this distinction matters.

Machiavellian thinking is linear. It optimises within a fixed value system: control, advantage, survival. It doesn’t question the frame; it sharpens execution inside it. It assumes scarcity. It assumes opposition. It assumes people are pieces to be moved, not systems to be redesigned.

What emerged from lateral thinking traditions was something fundamentally different and far more relevant to founders, operators, and investors navigating complexity.

He wasn’t interested in winning within the game. He was interested in changing the game, not ideologically, but structurally. His work focused on breaking patterning systems: the grooves into which thought naturally falls. Ego thrives on grooves. It likes precedent. It likes authority. It likes being reinforced.

True creative thinking does the opposite. It destabilises the self just enough to allow new configurations, new business models, incentives, and structures to emerge.

Which is precisely why ego resists it.

Why Big Egos Are Easy to Outsmart (But Hard to Confront)

Here’s the paradox: people with inflated egos are not formidable thinkers. They are predictable thinkers. Their fear of losing face makes them conservative. Their attachment to image makes them risk averse. Their need to appear competent prevents them from exploring uncertainty, even when uncertainty is where the upside lives.

This is why direct confrontation rarely works in organisations. It triggers defence. Committees form. Titles get invoked. Lawyers appear.

The smarter approach is oblique.

Lateral thinkers have long argued for moving “sideways” not attacking a belief head-on but creating conditions where it becomes unnecessary. You don’t burst the balloon; you change the environment, so the balloon deflates on its own.

For example:

• Introduce a pilot or skunkworks project that bypasses hierarchy rather than challenging it.

• Reframe a strategic problem so that preserving status requires adaptation, not resistance.

• Shift metrics and incentives so that old displays of dominance no longer deliver reward.

Ego doesn’t respond to argument. It responds to environment.

Values Are Harder — But Not Impossible

It has long been acknowledged that altering values is far more difficult than altering thinking patterns. People cling to moral identities even more fiercely than intellectual ones. ESG, innovation, and sustainability are often treated as badges rather than systems, signals to broadcast rather than architectures to build.

As explored elsewhere, values without structural imagination quickly become theatre. The same applies in business and entrepreneurship. Declaring the “right” position is not the same as building the conditions that make it commercially viable.

This is where flexible thinking becomes essential. Not to persuade, but to reconfigure incentives. Not to shame, but to make outdated behaviours uncompetitive.

Why the Biggest Bullies Are the Most Afraid

There’s an uncomfortable truth here. The most aggressive displays of confidence often mask the deepest fear. Fear of irrelevance. Fear of exposure. Fear of being disrupted by someone younger, faster, or less invested in legacy.

This is why bullying, gatekeeping, and performative toughness are so common at the top. Not because power corrupts, but because power amplifies unresolved insecurity. The higher the perch, the further the fall, and the more frantic the grip.

Understanding this doesn’t excuse behaviour. But it does make it navigable.

You don’t defeat fear with force. You dissolve it by removing the conditions that sustain it.

Thinking Beyond the Ego Era

We are entering a period where old dominance models are visibly failing. Not simply because they are unethical (though often they are), but because they are inefficient. They don’t scale with complexity. They can’t adapt fast enough. They collapse under their own certainty.

The future belongs not to the loudest voices or the most impressive titles, but to those capable of re-seeing problems repeatedly without needing to protect their self-image.

That requires a particular entrepreneurial discipline: the willingness to unsettle oneself.

Or as Jung might put it, the courage to let the ego loosen its grip without dissolving entirely.

That, ultimately, is the quiet power of lateral approaches. They don’t overthrow. They outgrow. They don’t shame. They reframe.

And in doing so, they expose the central weakness of ego-driven systems:

They only work if everyone agrees to pretend.

And fewer people, in markets, in organisations, and in culture, are pretending now.

For readers interested in exploring lateral thinking beyond its business applications, Love Laterally (Aurora Metro) by Sarah Tucker offers a strikingly human portrait of Edward de Bono, not as a guru, but as a restless thinker. It’s a reminder that lateral thinking was never meant to be a technique alone, but a way of loosening the grip of certainty.