Francis Egbuson

My Uber driver who picked me up from Hyatt Figueroa to The Catch on Melrose Avenue has a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ex-military paratrooper said, "We (Israelis) are going nowhere, the Arabs are going nowhere. So we need to sit down and create a space where we can live and let live." According to the idea, the Arab countries in the Middle East, together with the "rich" countries of the West, with maybe "Australia," should sponsor this initiative. Now, I am not a Middle East expert. However, the idea that everyone should realize we cannot "bomb civilizations away" as a means to sustainable peace is, historically speaking, well supported. We have learned from history that military force can win wars, but it rarely wins peace. This isn't theoretical. As I write this, the headline is the 2026 Iran war — a conflict that began on February 28 when US and Israeli strikes killed Iran's senior leadership, and that has since d...

  At the recommendation of my classmate Andrew—a music teacher, bass player, and fellow scholar-practitioner in adult learning at Columbia Teachers College—I recently experienced something that has lingered with me far beyond the concert hall. We attended a performance by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Semyon Bychkov, featuring Symphony No. 8 in C minor by Anton Bruckner. For nearly 90 minutes, without intermission, I sat in a kind of quiet awe—almost a trance—as the symphony unfolded. What struck me most was not only the music, but the leadership. Bychkov did not “command” the orchestra in any overtly forceful way. Instead, he seemed to invite the music into being. With a subtle interplay of baton and bare hands, he summoned sound from every corner of the ensemble—the violins, violas, cellos, basses, flutes, piccolo, oboes, English horn, clarinets, and beyond. Each section entered not as an isolated unit, but as part of an intricate, living whole. As I watched, I found m...

"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...