I went to see the new movie, The Odyssey last weekend expecting a hero’s journey. But strictly speaking, it isn’t one.

The hero’s journey, as Joseph Campbell mapped it, is a three-part shape: we leave home, we are tested, we come back changed.  Homer, whose epic poem the director, Christopher Nolan is adapting, mostly skips the first two acts. The Trojan War (ten years of it, the thing that made Odysseus famous, the achievement his whole reputation rests on) is largely skimmed over. What we actually sit and watch for most of the three hours is the third act, which is the part most stories treat as an epilogue.

The Greeks had a word for it. Nostos. The return. And here is the interesting detail.  The war took ten years, but getting home took ten more.

I’ve worked with many people who have spent a decade or more on the outbound journey. The campaign, the restructure, the integration, the scale-up. They are extraordinarily well equipped for that part.  It is what every promotion, development program, executive education dollar has prepared them for. But what they are rarely prepared for is the way back, and the way back often takes longer than the war did.

He cannot come home as the man who won

When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, he does not walk through the gates as the conquering king, but arrives disguised as a beggar. He has to be unrecognisable before the place will have him.

If we read that as a leadership problem, it’s familiar. The identity that made him effective abroad (the cunning, the guardedness, the willingness to sacrifice, the capacity to be ruthless at speed) is precisely what he has to put down at the threshold. Those traits may have won the war, but they cannot run the household.

This is a gap I often see in senior leaders, even though it’s rarely identified as a gap. Often the problem is thought to be the role, or the Board, or the fatigue. But the actual problem is that the person the company rewarded them for becoming is not the person they need to be next, and nobody tells them the two are different. The armour that gets us there is rarely the armour that lets us stay.

He gets home alone

Spoiler alert.  Every member of Odysseus’ crew dies. The leader survives the journey, but the people who followed him do not.

Nolan has said what drew him to Odysseus was the strategist rather than the soldier.  His wiliness and inventiveness. Whilst some of the losses are the gods’ doing, and some are the result of the crew’s own greed, some are definitely the result of decisions Odysseus made.

When we’ve led through a transformation, a merger or a restructure, we already know this arithmetic. We made it through, but not everyone did. Odysseus at least names it (a long stretch of the poem is him naming the men he lost, one by one, to strangers). Most of us have only ever told the business case. The question is whether anyone has heard the other version.

The mast

One of the best leadership moments in the story is also one of the subtlest. Odysseus wants to hear the Sirens and he wants to survive them. So he has his crew stuff their own ears with wax and then tie him to the mast, with strict instructions not to release him no matter how much he begs.

He designs his constraints in advance, while his judgement is still intact, because he knows exactly how compromised he will be in the moment.  That is not weakness but good governance. It is the entire argument for a Board, a Chair we cannot charm, an advisor who is not on our payroll structure, a decision rule we wrote down when we were calm.

Most leaders I meet have no mast. They have willpower and a full calendar, and a plan to hold the line at the exact moment they will be least able to hold it. Odysseus assumed he would be compromised. We assume we won’t.

And then there is Penelope

The film’s centre of gravity is the man on the water but an equally hard journey is the one on land.

Penelope holds the kingdom together for twenty years with no mandate, no authority anyone is obliged to respect, no timeline, and no evidence whatsoever that her strategy will pay off.  For two decades the logical assumption is that her husband is dead and she is being stubborn. Her house is occupied by men eating her stores and pressuring her toward a decision she does not want to make.

And her play is a masterclass in holding. She announces she will choose a suitor once she has finished weaving a shroud. Then she weaves by day and unpicks her work by night for three years.

This is a powerful image of stewardship under siege.  Visible progress, deliberately reversed, to buy time we cannot ask for openly. Most leaders might call that stalling. But it was precisely the correct move for her when she had no leverage, no cavalry, and a conviction she couldn’t yet prove.

His journey was survival. Hers was endurance without applause, which is the rarer skill.

Then he comes back, and she does not simply take him at his word. She tests him and verifies before she trusts a returning leader. She is not punishing him, but doing the thing that twenty years of siege taught her to do.  She requires evidence before she reopens the system. Any of us who have watched a leader come back from a sabbatical, a health crisis, a failed venture or a coaching program swearing they are different now should recognise the wisdom in it. Trust is rebuilt on proof, not on declaration.

Two returns, one home

In contrast to The Hero’s Journey, there is a whole body of work on the heroine’s journey, Maureen Murdock’s, most notably.  This was written precisely because Campbell’s arc did not describe most women’s experience and it is worth a read. But we do not need a separate framework to see what Homer already put on the page. There are two returns in this story running in parallel. His is the one we film. Hers is the one most of my clients are actually living.

So the question I would leave you with is not what’s your hero’s journey, but which return are you on? The one where you have to stop being who the institution made you, or the one where you are holding something together, unwitnessed, with no proof it will be worth it?

Both of them end at the same house. Neither of them is the journey anyone prepares us for.