Most constitutions are written by lawyers in marble halls to ensure order. The one I grew up with was written by regular people in pubs to survive chaos.
It is called the Kölsche Grundgesetz (The Cologne Constitution).
To an outsider, it looks like a joke. It is a list of eleven phrases in a thick, incomprehensible local dialect, usually found printed on the back of beer coasters or painted on the walls of pubs. It looks like folklore. But when you live with it, you realize it is actually a highly sophisticated operating system for handling uncertainty. It is a stoic framework playing hide-and-seek in the form of drinking songs.
For me, growing up, it wasn’t deep philosophy. It was more like a… wallpaper. Part of the background blur of childhood. You don’t sit down to “study” it… you just absorb it.
Then, you leave.
I left. I spent years working in other cities, flying to other countries. I started using Croatian fjaka to explain the necessity of recovery. I used sailing metaphors to explain uncertainty. I adopted Gulf perspectives to explain ambition. I built a global library of sophisticated concepts to talk about leadership.
I had effectively traded the beer mat for the slide deck.
And then, recently, I landed back at Cologne Airport.
I had just come from a major HR conference. For days, I had been on stage and in workshops talking about “people-centric transformation,” “resilient ecosystems,” and “the future of work.” The air was thick with smart frameworks and careful language. But if we are honest, there was a massive, silent distance between what we were saying on stage and how people in those organizations actually felt.
Anyway, back to the airport. I walked through the glass corridor from the plane to the terminal, and there it was. Printed in giant letters on the windows, the First Article of that pub constitution, staring right at me:
Et es wie et es. (It is what it is.)
In that moment, it didn’t feel like a slogan. It felt like a slap.
The bruise hit immediately: I have spent years helping leaders navigate uncertainty, borrowing wisdom from every corner of the globe, yet I had completely ignored the law from the city where I grew up. A city where, if nothing else, people are impressively direct about the obvious.
A city where, if nothing else, people are impressively direct about the obvious.
We live in an era of corporate euphemism. We rename problems. We cushion numbers. We reframe exhaustion as “change fatigue.” We talk about “psychological safety” while ignoring the fact that the team is drowning. We admire the “Big Picture” because it allows us to ignore the messy details of the present.
“Et es wie et es” is the antidote to this.
It is the basic discipline of looking at reality first, without flinching, before you talk about vision. In psychology, this is close to what Marsha Linehan calls Radical Acceptance. Radical Acceptance describes the understanding that you cannot change a situation until you stop fighting the fact that it exists.
Here is how you can turn Article 1 from a carnival saying into a leadership discipline.
The Smoker’s Corner Knows More Than the Boardroom
In Cologne, nobody needs a dashboard to know if the football team played badly. You look at the pitch, you look at the table, you look at the faces in the pub. That’s the data. Someone may insist that “next week will be better,” but nobody pretends the score is different than it is.
In organizations, we are masters at constructing “PowerPoint Realities.”
By the time a problem reaches the leadership team, it has been rotated, color-coded, contextualized, and softened. Trend lines are smoothed. “Crisis” becomes “Headwind.” A broken process becomes a “localized challenge.”
This is a structural manifestation of the Mum Effect. A bias identified by sociologists Rosen and Tesser, where bad news vanishes as it moves up the chain of command because nobody wants to be the bearer of it.
If you lead from a curated version of reality, your decisions will be beautifully aligned with a world that doesn’t exist. You need to flip the switch.
In Cologne, we value Tacheles aka. straight talk. It is a linguistic audit of your own leadership. To practice Article 1, you must learn to translate your corporate voice back into reality.
The Corporate Euphemism: We are exploring synergetic realignments.
The Kölsch Reality (Tacheles): We hired too many people and don’t know what they do.The Corporate Euphemism: We are facing some headwinds in adoption.
The Kölsch Reality (Tacheles): The product is too complicated and nobody likes it.The Corporate Euphemism: We need to do more with less.
The Kölsch Reality (Tacheles): We are out of money, but the targets remain the same.Make radical reality checks a habit. Once per cycle (budget, strategy, or review) insist on the “Tacheles.” Ask for the data before it has been “made presentable.” Read the verbatim customer complaints, not the sentiment word cloud. Lean into the discomfort of plain text.
Acceptance as an Act of Launch
As a child, I experienced “Et es wie et es” sometimes as the end of a conversation. You complained, an adult shrugged, said the line, and that was it.
This is the lazy version. It treats the law as a full stop.
The mature version treats the law as a starting block. It acknowledges the friction so that action can begin. “The budget is cut. Et es wie et es. So, what do we build with what remains?”
In many companies, leaders stare at the problem and freeze. They waste weeks arguing with the reality. “It shouldn’t be this hard.” “The market shouldn’t be this volatile.” These are arguments you cannot win.
Naming reality without moving into action is just sophisticated complaining.
Subtracting the Drama to Find the Decision
Cologne is not a city without emotion. It’s loud here. We are direct. But there is a tipping point. After a mess, someone states the obvious, someone else quotes the law, and the conversation pivots from theatrical outrage to practical next steps.
Teams often get stuck in the drama phase. Meetings turn into elaborate rituals of blame and “if only.” This is an Emotional Tax, energy spent on wishing the past were different. It feels like work, but it is actually waste of time and energy.
“Et es wie et es” isn’t a cold shutdown of feelings, but it separates the pain (which is unavoidable) from the suffering (which is optional and sustained by complaining).
When a meeting starts circling the drain of “who is to blame,” intervene with the Kölsch pivot. Acknowledge the frustration, then ask: “Okay. All true. But what do we actually decide today?” Do not let the meeting end in commentary. Force it into decision.
Cruelty Is Hidden in Ambiguity
There is a strange talent in Cologne for laughing while admitting that things are a disaster. “The train is late again.” “The city is broke again.” There is a relaxed honesty about limitations.
In corporate leadership, we assume people are too fragile for this. We hold back bad news. We wait for the “right messaging.” We try to protect the team from the harsh truth.
But this triggers the Paradox of Fragility: By trying to protect people from the truth, we actually increase their anxiety. People can sense the gap between what they see and what you say. That gap breeds distrust.
People cope far better with hard reality than with carefully managed half-truths.
Locating Your Fingerprints
Finally, the “it” in “It is what it is” includes you.
When we look at a flawed reality in our organizations, we tend to externalize. We blame “The System,” “Headquarters,” or “The Culture.” These are convenient abstractions. They allow us to be victims of the weather rather than architects of the house.
But the mature application of the law requires looking at your own contribution to the mess.
Whenever you feel the urge to blame “Them” (They don’t listen, they don’t change), ask: “What have I done (or failed to do) that keeps us stuck here?”Did you stay silent when you should have spoken? Did you tolerate a toxic behavior because it was easier?
Radical reality includes your own performance.
The Beer Mat Challenge
In a crowded Cologne pub you have a “Undersetzer” (a coaster) in front of you. It is a small, finite space. But still sophisticated enough to manage the full accounting of your evening in the form of “Schrööm”, a penciled line on your coaster, one line for each beer you drink.
And the service is simple as hell: Your glas is empty, you get a new one (without asking) along a Schrööm on your coaster. When you are done for the day, you put your coaster on top of your empty glass. Your server (called Köbes) comes, adds the lines together, you pay, you go. Simple.
Most things we deal with are way simpler than we make them look in our brushed corporate realities. But most realities should fit on a coaster. If you cannot describe the current state of what’s going on on the back of a beer mat, you are most likely not describing it properly.
Take a physical coaster (or a Post-it note of the same size). Write down the one reality about your team or project that everyone knows is true but no one is talking about.
Just one sentence. No justifications. No “buts.”
Put it on your desk. Look at it. Et es wie et es.
Now, flip the coaster over. Write the first step you will take to address it.
The Poetry of Grey Concrete
I want to close this not with a management quote, but with a love letter.
The band Bläck Fööss wrote the definitive anthem for this city, “Du bes die Stadt” (You Are The City). It is remarkable because it is not a song about how beautiful Cologne is.
It is a song about how honest it is. They don’t sing about golden lights or perfect days. They sing about the grey Rhine, the wet streets, and the noise. They look at the flaws, they name them, and they stay.
“Du bes grau un grausam, du bes hell un heiter. Du bes aal un uralt, un doch geihst du wigger.” (You are grey and cruel, you are bright and cheerful. You are old and ancient, and yet you go on.)
This is the soul of Article 1. It is the understanding that you don’t need a perfect reality to move forward. You just need to see the one you have clearly enough to walk through it.
The concrete is grey. The rain is cold. Et es wie et es. Now, let’s get to work.