Who tells you the truth? Lear's Fool and the trickster's age

I heard something on The Ezra Klein Show recently – one of my favourite podcasts – that I haven’t been able to shake.

Klein reckons we’re living in “an era of the trickster spirit.” His point: attention is the currency now, and the loudest, most emotionally charged voices win it – whether or not their ideas are any good.

That landed, because I’ve been teaching a version of it for years. The Trickster is one of the Shadow archetypes in my work: the presenter who gets everywhere they need to go on confidence alone, with nothing much underneath. What Klein’s describing is that pattern gone system-wide. It’s a trickster’s age now.

You’ve seen it. The confident or ‘loudest’ voice gets the airtime, the budget, the promotion. Meanwhile the best ideas in the room get lost – not because they’re wrong, but because the people carrying them won’t shout. In a room sorted by volume, quality goes quiet.

So what’s the answer? I’ve been sitting with that question for a while now. Not more earnestness, surely – earnest voices are exactly the ones being drowned out. And you can’t out-trickster a trickster.

Perhaps the answer is a much older character: the wise fool. In King Lear, the king makes a disastrous decision and everyone around him tells him what he wants to hear – because they all want something from him. Only his Fool tells him the truth.

And here’s why the Fool gets away with it: he wants nothing. No land, no title, no favour. There’s no angle to defend against, so the truth actually gets through. That might be the wise fool’s superpower – a voice the trickster can’t talk over.

But there’s a sting. The Fool’s wisdom doesn’t save Lear – by the time he’s heard, the kingdom’s already gone. And the people who spoke up beforehand? Kent said “See better, Lear” at the moment of decision and was banished on the spot. Lear didn’t lack honest voices. He just made honesty unwelcome until it was useless.

Sound familiar? Some leadership tables work the same way. Everyone’s got a budget to protect or a boss to manage – that’s not a character flaw, it’s just how organisations are built. But it means the truth often shows up as a post-mortem instead of a warning.

“Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

That’s actually one of the last lines of the play. And if there’s something practical in all this pondering, perhaps it’s two things:

• Make room for a wise fool – someone with genuine licence to say the uncomfortable thing before the decision, not after. Every leadership table could use one.

• And build the skill. Speaking what you feel – clearly, persuasively, in rooms where the volume’s turned up – is learnable. We can help you with that.

So, a question worth taking to your next leadership meeting: who tells you the truth – and have you made it safe for them to say it before the crown gets given away?

The Trickster is one of the ten Archetypes of Organisational Speakers. Learning to be heard without out-shouting anyone is what we teach. The Spotlight is where it starts – in-house, for teams, anywhere in New Zealand. Tell us about your team.

Russell Pickering – founder of The Pickering Group, author of Step into the Spotlight.