William Easterly’s book, The Tyranny of Experts, explains in details with research, observations, and keen insights how the West has helped impose tyranny on “the rest”, the undeveloped or less-developed world through a technocracy of expertise that has clearly failed to produce the promised results. Easterly compares what the West has done, often re-energizing colonial tendencies of exploitation by supporting or installing dictatorial regimes, to what had enabled the West to develop in the first place. And that is through the evolution of rights, especially for individuals. These are rights of speech, of worship, of property ownership, especially for those at the bottom of the social ladder.

In this, my first “mobile meditation”, during a bike ride in October 2023, I begin thinking through the implications of applying this wisdom to individual and organizational coaching. How would we apply the idea of “individual rights” in organizations? What’s more, when we think through our own personal development needs – how often do we outsource our own capacities to experts? How often do we tyrannize ourselves?