The Research Behind the Lollipop Model

The TEDx talk compresses twenty years of research and two doctorates into eight minutes and one story. That compression is necessary for the stage, but it leaves the evidence base invisible. This article restores it: what the Lollipop Model of good leadership is built on, and why each of its five elements holds up under scrutiny rather than simply sounding good.

The starting point was a research question, not a story: can leadership be modelled in a way that stakeholders themselves experience as good, and does that model hold across culture and context? Answering it took ten years of qualitative research, collecting close to four hundred accounts of good leadership from participants across Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe, followed by a further ten years testing and refining the resulting framework inside a large international organisation operating on five continents. Across nearly four hundred independently collected accounts, the same five elements recurred: Presence, Relating, Sensemaking, Action and Service. None were imposed in advance; they emerged from the data.

The model also rests on a definitional argument that matters more than it first appears. Leadership research has traditionally conflated three separate things: leadership, an exercise of influence value-neutral enough to include figures history has condemned; effective leadership, which measures results while disregarding how they were achieved or who was affected along the way; and good leadership, defined here as the ability to mobilise people and resources towards a clear, collective goal while inspiring a positive impact for people and context at all levels. The Lollipop Model belongs to the third category specifically, which is why it treats impact and process as inseparable from outcome rather than as a soft addendum to it.

Presence has a basis in Viktor Frankl's account of the gap between stimulus and response, the space in which, he argued, our power to choose resides. Presence is the disciplined occupation of that gap: self-awareness deployed before reaction. Without it, the remaining four elements have no foundation, because a leader who is not consciously in the moment cannot accurately register what is happening around them, only what they expect to find.

Relating draws on neuroscience rather than intuition. David Rock's SCARF model describes how the brain continuously scans social situations for threat or reward across five domains: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. When a relationship is organised around position rather than person, this threat-detection system activates, and psychological safety collapses. Mary Parker Follett's distinction between power over and power with, formulated in the early twentieth century and still underused in organisational practice, explains why: power exercised over someone triggers the same threat response as any other social danger, while power exercised with someone does not. Relating, in the model, is the deliberate construction of conditions under which that threat response stays switched off.

Sensemaking addresses a documented gap in leadership practice: organisations increasingly hold more data than ever without making better or faster decisions. Two complementary frameworks explain why. Ralph Stacey's matrix maps decisions along two axes, degree of agreement and degree of certainty, while Dave Snowden and Mary Boone's Cynefin framework, published in the Harvard Business Review in 2007, categorises decision contexts as simple, complicated, complex or chaotic. Used together, they diagnose a common leadership failure: applying a simple, procedural response to a complex, emergent situation, or overcomplicating a decision that was straightforward all along. Sensemaking is the discipline of correctly locating a decision on that map before acting on it.

Action is where decision-making research becomes directly practical. Rock's SCARF model resurfaces here to explain resistance: every decision a leader makes potentially threatens someone's status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness or sense of fairness, which is why decisions provoke disproportionate anxiety relative to their actual risk. Rick Hanson's research on the brain's negativity bias, a built-in tendency to overestimate threat and underestimate opportunity, compounds this further. Understanding both is what allows a leader to take the next available decision rather than waiting for a certainty that will not arrive.

Service is the element with the least conventional theoretical scaffolding and the most consistent empirical support. Across the interview data, it was the recurring, unprompted theme distinguishing accounts of good leadership from accounts of merely effective leadership: a stated, explicit commitment to making a unique, positive and sustainable difference, radiating outward from self to team to organisation to world. It is defined in contrast to purpose, which can exist without any positive impact at all. Service is what converts the first four elements from a set of interpersonal skills into an ethical practice.

None of this replaces the frontline story that opens the talk. It explains it. A convoy, a checkpoint, a bag of lollipops: one data point among hundreds, illustrating a structure the research shows holds independently of context. The claim is not that lollipops work. It is that Presence, Relating, Sensemaking, Action and Service, practised together, are what good leadership consistently looks like when it is examined closely enough to measure.

V. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning; D. Rock, Your Brain at Work (HarperCollins, 2009); M. P. Follett, Creative Experience (Longmans, Green and Co., 1951); R. Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness (Random House, 2013); D. J. Snowden and M. E. Boone, 'A Leader's Framework for Decision Making', Harvard Business Review, November 2007; F. May, The Power of a Lollipop: A Model for Inspiring Leadership (Girl Friday Productions, 2025); 'The Power of a Lollipop – A story from the frontline', TEDx Hult Ashridge, June 2026.