Francis Egbuson

"In the most vital groups I studied, there was a recurring pattern — a kind of communal stillness. People paused. They waited. And in that waiting, something would open. Connection happened not despite the silence, but through it." — Daniel Coyle, Flourish I have sat across from clients in hundreds of coaching conversations and facilitation rooms across East and Central Africa. In every one of them, language has been the currency. We open with a check-in, contract the space, name the challenge, explore perspectives, and close with commitments. Words flow in, words flow out. And in that flow, we sometimes mistake productivity for transformation. But something has been quietly unsettling me. The practitioners whose work I most admire — and the scholars whose ideas have most stretched my own — keep arriving at the same unexpected threshold: silence. Joseph Jaworski, in Synchronicity, describes the moment of his deepest professional reorientation not in a boardroom or a seminar,...

By Francis E. Egbuson  ·  June 5, 2026  ·  Leadership · Purpose · Story I almost missed him. The first time our eyes met, I was standing in a ticket queue at Princeton Junction. A tall, grey-haired African American man — six feet at least — stood nearby, a manpack across one shoulder and what looked at first like a bullhorn, polished into the shape of a vuvuzela, resting casually in his hand. He had a presence that made you look twice without knowing exactly why. The kind of gravity that is earned, not performed. We crossed paths again on the platform, where the train to New York was running seven minutes late. I said hello. He smiled — the kind of smile that holds decades of hard-won grace. His name was Wayne Slappy. What followed was thirty-some minutes on a train that I did not want to end. "You must pursue that which is bigger than yourself." — Wayne Slappy Wayne was born into poverty in...