The soil beneath the surface. What a second Axial Age means for how we lead.
Otto Scharmer, the MIT researcher behind Theory U and one of the thinkers whose work has most shaped how I approach leadership, published an essay this week in Noema Magazine. He argues that we may be entering a second Axial Age — a period of civilisational rupture comparable to the one that gave rise to Confucius, Socrates, the Buddha, and the Hebrew prophets roughly 2,500 years ago.
I have been sitting with it since I read it. Not because it is abstract philosophy. But because it describes, at a civilisational scale, something I see in every leadership team I work with.
The social soil
Scharmer's father was a farmer who converted his land to regenerative agriculture decades before it was fashionable. What Scharmer learned from watching that: the quality of what grows above the ground depends entirely on the quality of the soil beneath it. You can optimise the visible part forever and still get worse harvests if the soil is depleted.
He has spent his career applying that same logic to organisations and societies. The social soil — the quality of relationships, the capacity for honest conversation, the shared ability to sense and respond to what is actually happening — is what everything else grows from. Strategy, structure, culture, performance. All of it depends on the soil being healthy.
When the soil is depleted, he argues, three things happen. Anomie: the erosion of shared norms and ethical behaviour. Atomie: the breakdown of social bonds into isolation and polarisation. Atrophy: the gradual loss of the human capacities needed to create, converse and collaborate.
I would not use those words with a founder in a first session. But I would recognise every one of those symptoms in the teams they describe.
What AI is doing to the soil
The part of Scharmer's essay I keep returning to is his analysis of what artificial intelligence is doing to the epistemic soil — the shared capacity to think and sense together.
He describes AI as the culmination of modernity's extractive logic: intelligence without interiority, pattern without presence, prediction without deep sensing. When AI is used to handle cognitive work passively, the brain weakens. Neural connectivity declines. The quality of thinking goes down.
He calls this cognitive debt. And he pairs it with something called model collapse: AI trained on AI-generated content degrades rapidly. The machine needs a continuously growing supply of human-generated thought to stay functional. But more than 74% of newly published web pages now contain AI-generated text. The machine is eating the soil it depends on.
This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument about attention. About where we invest the human side of the equation. And right now, almost nothing is being invested there.
What this has to do with leadership
The teams I work with are not failing because of bad strategy or wrong structure. They are failing because the social soil has been depleted. Decisions get made but do not land. Conversations happen but the real things are not said. People perform alignment while privately doubting the direction.
The leader who optimises the visible — the metrics, the output, the performance — while the soil beneath depletes is doing exactly what Scharmer describes at the organisational level. Short-term yield. Long-term collapse.
What regenerates the soil in a team is the same thing that regenerated it in the first Axial Age: people turning inward. Asking harder questions. Developing the capacity to be present with uncertainty rather than reflexively producing answers. Learning to sense what is actually happening rather than what the data says should be happening.
That is slow work. It does not show up in the quarterly numbers. And it is the most important thing a leader can do.
The second Axial Age, if Scharmer is right, will not be primarily a technological event. It will be a consciousness event. The question it asks is not what can we build, but who are we becoming in the process of building it.
That question lives below the surface of every leadership team I work with. The metrics are green. The product is shipping. The funding round closed. And something is not right. Something in the soil.
That is where the work begins.
Otto Scharmer's essay "We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age" was published in Noema Magazine on May 12, 2026.
Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com