Why all leaders should re-read “Lord of the Flies”

When in a leadership position, we all like to think of ourselves and our teams from a heliocentric perspective. We think we are the centre of the solar system, and everything revolving around us is somehow about us. Good news: it’s not. Most of the time, we give ourselves far too much credit, or far too much blame, for what happens within our teams, when the simpler and more honest truth is that group dynamics exist independently of us. They play out with us, around us, and, quite comfortably, without us.

This is exactly why Lord of the Flies is not a children’s story. It is a precise portrait of what groups do when the scaffolding of structure gets removed. And if you read it alongside Wilfred Bion’s theories on group behaviour, it stops being about boys on an island and becomes something far more uncomfortable: a reflection of our everyday dynamics. It stops being about boys on a beach, and it becomes the image of every standup, every retrospective, every sprint planning that ever quietly went off the rails.

Bion spent years observing groups (in therapy, in the military, in organisations) and arrived at a conclusion that is just as unsettling as it is simple. Groups, handed the autonomy they say they want, don’t naturally work. They most often simply fall apart. The ideal state of a group Bion called Work Group. This is a healthy group dynamic where people are cooperative, reality-oriented and focused on the actual task. What he found is that groups rarely stay in this state for long. Instead they slip into what he named Basic Assumptions. These are states that feel like collective purpose but are, in reality, just collective avoidance. He identified three of them. Golding, whether intentionally or not, wrote all three into that island with precision. And if you have ever sat in a sprint review that felt strangely tribal, you will recognise all three immediately.

The first is Dependency. The group behaves as if it only exists to be protected, directed, and saved by one person. The leader is attributed omnipotence, and he holds the answers to everything. The group does not seek to develop, create or independently deliver anything, they are only hanging around, waiting to be saved. Ralph gets handed the conch almost as soon as the group gathers, not because he is the most capable, but because the group needs the idea of a leader more than an actual one. The boys don’t choose him for what he can do. They choose him for what he represents: the reassurance that that there is a person on the island, entrusted to take care of all of their problems. In a scrum team, this looks like a team that cannot make a single decision without the product owner in the room. It looks like engineers who stop working the moment the tech lead is on holiday, or a retrospective where nobody speaks until the scrum master offers the first opinion. Bion would have recognised this instantly. The safety the group feels is borrowed. It lasts exactly as long as the leader appears to have all the answers. The moment he doesn’t, the security collapses into resentment. This isn’t loyalty. This is psychological outsourcing. The group packs all its anxiety into one figure, and then waits to be rescued from having to think for itself. When Ralph inevitably falls off the pedestal, the boys don’t reflect. They look for a new object of dependence, shifting focus from a person to an ideal. While a human leader can disappoint, the company rules, rituals and processes cannot. This is exactly why teams cling to frameworks long after they stop working, and why every new VP arrives as a potential new saviour that nobody will admit they are waiting for.

The second is Fight-Flight. The group behaves as if its survival depends entirely on either attacking an enemy or fleeing from one. Action replaces thought. Bion noticed something quite accurate about this state: the group stops believing that understanding the problem will help. Only action counts. Everything else is delay. The leader of this state is whoever gives the group permission to act. Charge or retreat. Hunt or hide. It does not matter which, as long as something is happening. Enter Jack. What makes Jack so effective isn’t his cruelty, it’s that he gives the group’s fear a name and a direction. The beast becomes the enemy, the hunt becomes the mission, and suddenly the group has a cohesion that Ralph’s signal fire never managed to produce. In a corporate setting, this is the team that bonds most powerfully not around a shared goal but around a shared enemy: another department, a difficult stakeholder, a looming deadline that everyone can panic about together. It is the endless fire-fighting that feels like productivity. It is the sprint that gets hijacked by an urgent bug, not because the bug is truly more important than the roadmap, but because urgency feels like purpose and purpose is what the group is craving. The group rewards those who act and questions those who stop to think. Bion described this state as incredibly seductive, because it feels like action. It feels like leadership. But it is the group abandoning its real task in favour of the emotional relief of a shared enemy. The boys aren’t protecting themselves by hunting. They are protecting themselves from the discomfort of building something together. Sharing an enemy is always easier than sharing a goal.

The third is Pairing and it is the subtlest of the three. Bion observed that groups sometimes fixate on two of their members, or a member and an idea, and wait for something to emerge from it that will save them. As if two forces coming together will somehow produce a saviour. An unborn leader. A new idea. An unborn leader who will arrive and make everything right. The thing is, that nobody actually wants this to arrive. The hope itself is the point. The waiting becomes the function. In a team, this sounds like: “once we finish the migration, everything will be smoother.” Or: “when we finally hire that senior architect, the whole system will make sense.” Or the quiet collective fantasy that the new agile coach, not yet onboarded, will somehow resolve the tension that three retros failed to mention. The moment someone actually speaks the truth, the group turns on them. The migration won’t fix the culture. The senior hire won’t fix the architecture decisions already made. Nobody wants to hear this. The fantasy is more comfortable than the reality, and the person who bursts the bubble pays the price. In the novel, this would be Simon. Simon is the one who actually faces the beast. He goes alone to the mountain and discovers that the darkness is not out there. It is inside each of them. He comes back with the truth. The group eliminates him for it. Bion would not have been surprised. The pairing assumption does not actually want the saviour to arrive. The moment the truth lands, it threatens the fantasy the group has been living in. So the group destroys it. You will have met Simon in your team. He is the one who says the uncomfortable thing in the retros, only to never be trusted again.

What Golding understood, and what Bion mapped out methodically, is that the island doesn’t fall apart because the boys are bad. It falls apart because no one manages the group’s inner life. Ralph keeps trying to run a Work Group. Conch, assembly, fire rotation, shelters. He does everything a reasonable leader would do. But he has no framework for what is actually happening beneath the surface. He sees the behaviour. He doesn’t see the mechanism. And that gap is exactly what costs him control, one small compromise at a time. Every leader who has ever walked out of a sprint planning thinking “how did we end up here again” knows exactly what that gap feels like.

This is why the book is mandatory for leaders. Not because your team will paint their faces and sharpen sticks. Though, to be honest, the metaphor holds more often than we’d like to admit. It is because the three assumptions Bion described are not exceptional states. They are the default. Every group, under enough pressure, enough uncertainty, enough absence of clear goals, will slide toward one of them. And the leader who cannot recognise which one is operating at any given moment is standing on the beach watching the smoke signal die out, genuinely puzzled about why no one is keeping the fire going.

The book is a warning about what happens when a leader confuses being present with being aware. And perhaps the most unsettling part of all this is that Golding and Bion never collaborated. They never compared notes. Golding wrote the novel in 1954, before Bion’s book even existed. Two British men, both shaped by the wreckage of World War II, arriving independently at the same conclusion. One through fiction, the other through clinical observation. This kind of convergence doesn’t happen by accident. These patterns are not exceptional. They are wired in, running underneath every group that has ever formed, and the only thing standing between awareness and chaos is a leader who knows what to look for.

Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in groups and other papers. Tavistock Publications.

Golding, W. (1954). Lord of the flies. Faber and Faber.