In a meeting or discussion, the act of pointing at something broken feels productive and resembles progress (you’ve done your bit, right?). What is far rarer is the move from recognition to action: the person who not only identifies the blocker but does the unglamorous, uncertain work of trying to remove it. The gap between noticing problems and taking action to address them is a gap that human behaviour predicts almost perfectly.

So, why is inaction so often the more natural response to things that frustrate us?

Why noticing feels like enough

Part of the answer is that diagnosis and action draw on very different psychological resources, and our minds reward the cheaper of the two. Identifying a problem is a low-cost, low-risk activity. It requires no commitment, exposes us to no failure and can be done from the comfortable position of the observer. Acting, by contrast, means putting something at stake.

The behavioural economics literature offers a pretty sensible explanation for why that stake feels so heavy:

• Back in 1979, research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky established that people evaluate outcomes as gains and losses from a reference point, and feel losses more acutely than equivalent gains.

• Several years later, the same authors estimated that a loss is felt roughly 2.25 times as strongly as a gain of the same size.

• Later work found somewhat different and lower multipliers, but the underlying fact that losses are felt more strongly remains.

To be honest, you can probably tell from your own life experience! So, in simple terms, the downside of trying something and failing looms larger than the upside of succeeding.

Inaction also carries a second advantage: when you do nothing and things go wrong, the failure feels less like your fault. This is omission bias, documented by Ilana Ritov and Jonathan Baron: in their hypothetical vaccination scenarios, many participants would not vaccinate a child when the vaccine itself carried a small risk of death, even though declining left the child at a higher overall risk from the disease. People who did not vaccinate their child tolerated a worse expected outcome to avoid being the cause of harm through their own action. We feel more responsible for what we do than for what we merely allow to happen, which makes standing back the psychologically safer choice even when it is the worse one.

There is also the matter of how good it feels to be the person who understands. Labelling a problem astutely signals that we are perceptive and not easily fooled. The issue here is that this signal is satisfying enough on its own to substitute for the actual work it was supposed to kick off. So the diagnosis becomes the destination rather than the starting point.

The diffusion of responsibility

Even when a problem is widely acknowledged, action often stalls for reasons that have little to do with any individual's willingness.

Some great evidence comes from John Darley and Bibb Latané's study on bystander intervention. Participants who believed they were the only witness to someone apparently having a seizure went for help 85 per cent of the time; when they believed another person was also present, that fell to 62 per cent; and when they believed they were one of five witnesses, only 31 per cent acted. Those in groups also hesitated longer before doing anything.

The mechanism they identified, the diffusion of responsibility, is not cowardice or indifference. It is a reasonable inference that when responsibility is shared across a group, each person's individual obligation feels smaller, so everyone waits for someone else to move first. Organisations reproduce this dynamic constantly: a problem that everybody can see is, for that very reason, a problem that nobody feels they specifically should act on.

The wider the agreement that something is wrong, the more diffuse the sense of who ought to fix it.

The same logic shows up in ordinary group effort. Latané, working with Kipling Williams and Stephen Harkins, found that individual effort also declines as group size grows, because each person’s contribution becomes harder to identify and therefore harder to hold to account.

Visibility and ownership turn out to be the conditions under which people often act. And a roomful of people agreeing that something is a problem provides neither.

The intention that never becomes behaviour

A third strand of research addresses the cases in which people genuinely mean to act and still do not. The gap between intending to do something and doing it is one of the findings I personally find most frustrating.

Paschal Sheeran synthesised earlier meta-analyses covering 422 studies and found that intentions matter, but they leave most of the story unexplained: a large share of people who sincerely intend to act do not follow through.

What closes the gap is not stronger intention but more concrete planning.

Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found that forming a specific plan like “If situation Y is encountered, then I will initiate goal‐directed behaviour X” produced a medium-to-large improvement in goal attainment.

Vague resolve dissolves on contact with a busy day, whereas a plan that pre-decides the moment and manner of action removes the need to summon willpower. It becomes what you do, like a standard operating procedure in everyday life!

This connects to a broader feature of how people manage effort: the brain treats deliberate action as costly and defaults, where it can, to the path of least resistance. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser demonstrated across a series of experiments that people disproportionately prefer things to stay as they are, even when an alternative is plainly better, simply because changing requires a decision and a justification that staying put does not.

The existing situation, however frustrating, has the considerable advantage of already existing. Acting means accepting the friction and personal exposure that the status quo avoids. This is exactly why the above goal-directed plans are so valuable.

Take a small, accountable step

Accurate diagnosis is necessary. It is just nowhere near sufficient, and the research is clear about why: we overweight the risk of acting, feel less culpable for what we passively allow, assume someone else will step in and let sincere intentions evaporate for want of a concrete plan.

These are default settings of ordinary human behaviour, so the practical implication will sound quite demanding: if inaction is our natural state, then action has to be engineered against the grain of it.

That means:

• Giving problems a single named owner rather than a shared audience.

• Converting “we should” into a specific commitment about who will do what and when.

• Accepting in advance that trying carries a risk of making mistakes.

The people who close this gap are the ones willing to take the small and sometimes awkward first step while everyone else is still admiring the problem.

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Six successful, fast-paced years at Bain with rapid promotions came alongside mental and physical health he would later rate at three out of ten. Then, as CFO of a 60-person boutique going through a brutal sale process, with two children under five at home and twins on the way, he found himself on a call with twenty senior advisers and simply exploded: will you please let me speak? What made his story land was that none of that pressure had been visible to him at the time.

The frame of our conversation comes from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership:

Everyone drops below the line several times a day. Deri noted that around 90% of people have a light-bulb moment when they hear this, and that the 10% who object tend to be demonstrating the framework rather than disproving it.

On what to actually do, Deri set out four layers of self-awareness (measure, track, reflect and crack) with trigger tracking as the practical entry point. You note what happened, the thoughts and feelings it produced, how you behaved, what the impact was and how you would have behaved above the line.

Once you develop these skills yourself, the multiplier is the team. If a group shares the language we discussed in our conversation, someone can say “I’ve dropped below the line, give me a minute” without it costing them anything, and that shared vulnerability is a real asset.

If you want one step after watching, start with the (free!) templates in the accompanying article. 👇🏼

If you would rather read, Deri recommends The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Klemp, and Growing Yourself Back Up by John Lee.

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In those cases, it’s possible that you were talked at.

Most people have been on the receiving end of this, but far fewer notice when they’re doing it themselves. This piece is about both sides: what “talking at” looks like in practice, why it’s so common among otherwise strong (and well-intentioned) communicators and what it takes to build exchanges where meaning is genuinely shared.

We misunderstand each other all the time

Misunderstanding in conversation is a structural feature of how language works, and one we tend to wildly underestimate or at least overlook.

First of all, communication is not the transfer of a thought from one head to another, because that is simply impossible. When you say something, you produce a set of words whose meaning is shaped by context, relationship, shared history and more, far beyond the literal content.

“Can I have a word?” never means “I would like one word from you.” The same five words can be a friendly aside, a request for your input or a summons that makes your stomach drop, depending entirely on who’s saying it and the tone. This kind of misunderstanding is especially common when using expressions just like this one, where the meaning is not literal and people who simply grew up in different places cannot reliably infer it.

Then there’s the problem of common ground, which we tend to assume far more of than actually exists. We routinely treat our own knowledge and assumptions as shared when they aren’t. The nod you get from your colleague doesn’t mean that they have interpreted your words in the same way as you intended. More often than not, it just means they’re tracking the conversation, which is quite a different thing.

Conversation also has a power economy. Who gets to finish a thought without being redirected? Who gets interrupted, who gets summarised? I am confident that a vast majority of readers have stopped talking in a given context or group because their contributions were too often abbreviated or steered back towards someone else’s framing.

In short, talking at people is what happens when one person tries to make their meaning certain rather than aiming for mutual understanding.

Some patterns you should learn to recognise

The trickiest thing is that talking at people doesn’t feel that way from the inside. It tends to feel like efficiency or helpfulness. Or maybe like being especially good at moving things forward.

Here are some patterns worth recognising in yourself.

⛔️ Pre-loaded conclusions. You open a conversation by presenting the outcome you have already reached, inviting the other person into a conversation that is, functionally, already over. The structure looks collaborative, because you’re asking, after all, but the content and tone have already determined where this is going. The other person can agree, defend a contrary position or correct a factual detail. The first of these things is often unhelpful, whereas the others are uncomfortable (which means people are less likely to do them).

🏁 Questions with built-in assumptions. “Don’t you think the timeline is the real issue here?” is technically a question, but it has loaded the frame, picked a culprit and positioned disagreement as difficult. Whoever answers has to do extra work just to reopen what should have been the starting point.

🚗 Topic steering. This is the quick pivot after someone says something that doesn’t fit where you wanted the conversation to go: things like selective hearing, parking something until later and never returning or redirecting to your preferred frame. These moves are easy to miss when you are in front of an expert speaker. But the pattern is harder to ignore once you’ve seen it, especially as some particularly manipulative people do this all the time.

✂️ Premature summarisation. This is probably the most common and the most well-intentioned pattern. You’re trying to show you have understood and to give the other person a sense of being heard. But the difference between “So what you’re saying is X” as a landing point and “So what I’m hearing is X, is that right?” is huge. Also keep in mind that people who get cut off too often will just stop contributing, so I would argue that this behaviour is especially harmful when you’re trying to invite new voices in a conversation.

Let us also spend a minute on the idea of “active listening,” because its use in corporate training has turned an otherwise helpful concept into something rather problematic. The nodding, the paraphrasing and the “I hear you” have been trained into so many professional development programmes that they have stopped doing much work. Many professionals have learned to signal listening rather than do it. But a fluent reflection delivered in a warm tone is really unconvincing if what you are saying doesn’t match what they other person shared. Or when your next sentence in the exchange makes it obvious that nothing has gone in.

Language and words matter more than we think

When people talk about “professional communication,” they tend to describe it as if it were simply clear, correct and neutral, a standard any competent adult can meet if they bother to. But professional language is not neutral. It was shaped by particular groups and their norms, and people who were socialised into that register from an early age tend to be heard as more credible and authoritative, regardless of what they’re actually saying.

Code-switching is the adjustment some people make to be taken seriously in that environment. They modify vocabulary, sentence structure, formality, accent and the degree of emotion they allow themselves to show. This takes real cognitive effort and makes it feel impossible to improvise and contribute naturally to a conversation.

So if you assume everyone starts talking with the same ease of expression, you will misread people. You might read a pause as uncertainty; careful phrasing as evasiveness; or a less polished register as a proxy for weaker ideas. But what you’re actually witnessing is someone do extra translation work in real time.

Genuine listening, then, includes creating enough room for meaning to emerge without penalising the speaker for how they’ve packaged it. And clarity is something you build together, not a minimum standard someone else has to meet before you take them seriously.

In a recent live with , we explored why a well-structured, well-delivered message still lands differently depending on who delivers it and how gender shapes that gap. 👇🏼

What to do differently

The tips below need some serious practice, because they run against the grain of how most conversations are structured. But they really do work and are worth the effort!

1. Invite repair early. Create a norm within your exchanges that being corrected is welcome. Something as simple as “If I’m off here, tell me” changes the social permission structure of what happens next. Most people won’t volunteer a correction to someone who appears certain.

2. Offer a candidate understanding. Paraphrase what you’ve heard as a test rather than a conclusion. “What I’m getting from this is… is that right?” does something different from “So what you mean is…” The first positions your reading as provisional and invites adjustment; the second positions it as complete and moves on.

3. Delay solutioning on purpose. This is the hardest one in time-pressured environments. The instinct to offer a fix is a good instinct in the right moment, but if the solution arrives too quickly then the other person will feel cut off. By the way, holding the silence a little longer and asking a follow-up rather than rushing to close are some of the most effective coaching techniques, because they create space for others to figure things out themselves.

4. Ask what kind of response would be useful. Some moments need problem-solving, some need help seeing a situation more clearly and some simply need another human being to witness what’s being said without offering anything at all. Asking “Are you looking for thoughts on this, or mainly to think it through?” takes about five seconds and prevents you from delivering a careful analysis to someone who needed something else entirely.

5. Imagine what might be at stake for the other person. What feels risky in this conversation? Might they feel like they need to protect their credibility? Is there a significant power dynamic? You don’t need a precise answer, but asking yourself these questions makes you infinitely more empathetic over time.

What we’re after is a conversation that ends with both people holding a more reliable picture of reality than either had going in. That requires exchanges to evolve and flow until what each person actually means has a chance of coming through.

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This isn’t a bad week. It isn’t a crunch before a launch, nor the fallout from a missed quarter. It’s the ordinary texture of the job.

The pressure in Silicon Valley, where is a therapist to CEOs, founders, engineers and their families, has some defining features:

• Teams are distributed across time zones, so the inbox never sleeps; by the time you’ve cleared London, San Francisco is waking up.

• Capital cycles force constant narrative-building, so even a company that’s doing well is forever fundraising, forecasting and explaining itself.

• Talent markets are tight enough that every retention conversation feels existential. The engineer you lose today is the one a competitor has been courting for six months.

A similar texture shows up well beyond tech. For example, the world of consulting runs on many of the same features: continuous client demands, distributed teams, the expectation of constant availability and a sense that the workload will never cool down. That’s the world that I (Andrea) work in.

Why standard advice on how to cope falls flat

Most of the advice aimed at people in these situations is about prioritisation. Time-blocking, the Eisenhower matrix, ruthless calendar audits, the two-minute rule, the weekly review. These tools are useful, and almost everyone reading this will already have tried several of them.

Yet, this type of advice assumes boundary conditions that don’t apply in environments operating at high pace. Every one of these techniques treats the load as finite and the main problem as sequencing: you have a fixed pile of work, and the skill is putting it in the right order so that the important things get done and the rest waits for its turn. That model works perfectly when there is, somewhere on the other side of the effort, a cleared queue and a quiet afternoon.

At this intensity, however, the load is effectively infinite and the rhythm is continuous, so sequencing alone doesn’t cut it. You can order the work perfectly and still find that finishing the top item simply reveals three more beneath it. And that the restful break you were sequencing towards never actually materialises.

This means that a different approach is needed. In cases where the pressure is relentless, the job is to keep operating at altitude and at pace for years without burning out the engine. The people who manage that have stopped expecting to be on top of their work. They have built a way of working that survives the unique features of their environment and enables them to stay Above the line.

Here is what they actually do.

Lesson one: Manage your energy instead of your time

Most time-management thinking treats the day as a container of hours and the job as fitting tasks into it. But the founders and executives who last think in cognitive and emotional bandwidth instead, and they make trade-offs against that. They know that there is no point in fighting against the clock.

The clinical reality is that decision quality, emotional regulation and the ability to deal with complexity are not constant across a day. They draw down, and we’re sure you have experienced this directly regardless of what you do: two hours in the morning and two hours at 6pm are not the same two hours, and this even varies by person. You need to identify when you are most energised and productive, and cluster your high-intensity tasks around that time of day. In practice, people who do this well protect the windows where their judgment is sharp and spend the depleted windows on things that don’t need that judgment quite as much.

One executive that Nicole works with refuses every meeting before 10am. This isn’t because mornings are sacred in some abstract, wellness-poster way but because the first three hours determine the quality of her decisions that day. Those hours are when she does her major thinking.

The hard part isn’t recognising that bandwidth is finite, but following through on this concept: guarding your best hours means declining things that look perfectly reasonable on the calendar and doing it consistently enough that people stop expecting otherwise.

Lesson two: Drop the ball deliberately, out loud

Time management advice is built to help you do everything. At this level of intensity that’s the wrong goal, because everything was never going to fit anyway.

The people who last do something that looks almost cold from the outside. They decide, deliberately and ahead of time, what they are going to be bad at in a given period of time. We are not talking about prioritisation here, but things that they actively choose to let slide, with full knowledge of the cost. And then they say it out loud, both to their team and to the people at home, so that the gap is expected.

The difference is between dropped balls that are visible and chosen and dropped balls that are hidden and accidental. The first kind is a decision you can defend and that others can plan around. The second kind affects trust, because it looks like unreliability. On top of that, it costs you twice: once in the thing that didn’t happen, and again in the scramble when someone finds out it didn’t.

Note that this doesn’t have to be dramatic. While this technique could be applied to an entire month or quarter, it can be very effectively scaled down to the level of a day. For example, something I do on occasion is tell colleagues that on a certain day I will not be responsive on email or Teams, and that in that window things will either need to be parked or escalated through other colleagues. This could read as a leader stepping back, but the reality is that people can adapt quickly and learn to see this as a stated operating constraint rather than an unexplained failure to reply.

The thing that makes this approach work isn’t the boundary itself but the fact that it’s discussed explicitly.

Lesson three: Build recovery into the rhythm, not after it

Most people treat rest as the reward waiting at the finish line: get through this stretch, ship this thing, survive this quarter, and then you’ll recover. It’s a reasonable instinct, and at normal intensity it works, because the finish line does exist. But if the sprint never ends, the reward after the finish line never arrives.

So the operators who last do something counterintuitive. They treat recovery as an input, scheduled into the rhythm of the work the way a serious athlete treats sleep. In practice, recovery and rest are a condition of performing at all. The recovery comes first, or at least reliably, and is not treated as the thing that gets sacrificed the moment the week gets heavy.

Let’s be precise about why, because this is an operational argument and not a wellness one. The case for recovery isn’t that “you deserve it” or that balance is nice. It’s that decision quality degrades without it, measurably and fairly quickly, and that a depleted leader making a string of slightly-off calls does more damage in a week than a rested one would undo in a month. You protect recovery for the same reason you protect a production system: because the cost of it failing is higher than the cost of maintaining it.

As in the previous lesson, you can start small. For example, you can make physical exercise a non-negotiable part of your routine. I personally insist on doing my daily working hours at a high pace and intensity, then break for a gym session (which includes a bike ride to the gym and some Italian music). Then, I feel like I can pick up any work left over from the day.

You can scale this up or down based on your circumstances: a software engineering leader Nicole knows has a habit of booking a full day off every third Friday and holding it regardless of what’s on fire that week. They arrived at the rule through experimentation, by noticing that pushing through those Fridays reliably cost them more the following week in poor calls and slow thinking, as well as small things they would normally have caught.

Lesson four: Find one or two people you can be honest with

The performance demands of these roles mean that most of the conversations are filtered. The board gets the confident version, and the team gets the calm version, because if the team feels the leaders panic they’ll carry it into everything they touch that week. The person at home often gets a version designed not to worry them. This is a way to balance feelings and vibes around you.

But as you become better at managing expectations and emotions, you will also notice that it’s lonely at the top. You will end up surrounded by people all day and not actually known by any of them. Since every version of the truth is shaped for someone else (to steady them, to reassure them, to protect them), there’s no one left who simply gets you, the unedited person underneath all the managed ones. These gaps often go unattended for a very long time.

What sustains the people who last is at least one relationship that sits outside all of these balancing acts. A peer founder in the same weather. An old colleague with nothing at stake in your company. A coach, a therapist, a sibling. It is one place where the unfiltered version can go and where you don’t have to manage the impact of what you say before you say it.

The cost of not having this is concrete. If the pressure has nowhere to leave the system, it quite simply doesn’t leave: it piles up internally and comes out sideways in the form of sleepless nights, or a flatness where your energy used to be.

The people most at risk are rarely the ones you’d expect. They are usually the most capable, so fluent at being what everyone needs that they have disappeared as someone with needs of their own. When they finally have somewhere to set the real version down, the relief tends to surprise them.

Lesson five: Separate the role from the self

Pressure becomes genuinely unsurvivable when you take every business setback personally and start reading it as a verdict on you as a person. For example, you might feel that a churned customer means you’re not good enough, or that the missed quarter means you were always going to be found out.

It’s worth reflecting on how those fusions form. For example, taking the company personally is usually what powered the early years of one’s career. The difficulty is that the same wiring doesn’t work when the company evolves and the stakes rise. The thing that drove you at the start is the same thing that, later, leaves you with no protection when the work goes badly. And, at some point, it will.

The people who last find their way to something different. They still care enormously about the outcomes, more than most. That intensity is usually the very reason why they’re doing that job. But they can hold the company in real trouble and still find a self that exists separately from how the quarter is going. That bit of separation is what lets them make a clear decision in a crisis.

It can be harder than it sounds, and it is usually learned painfully. One founder that Nicole worked with got there after her company failed. The thing she’d spent years worrying about just happened, and what surprised her after was that she was still here. She was grieving and she felt smaller for a while, but she was still herself. The company going under hadn’t taken her with it, which it would have, if the two had really been the same thing. She came out of this situation able to take risks again, because failing at something didn’t feel like she’d failed as a person.

That’s why the separation is what makes it possible to keep caring this much, for this long, without the caring slowly consuming the person doing it.

What this changes

Taken together, these five lessons mark a shift in the question being asked. The instinctive question, the one all the productivity tools are built to answer, is “how do I get on top of everything?”

The question these leaders have learned to ask instead is “how do I keep functioning well inside something I will never be on top of?”

This question is uncomfortable, because answering it means giving up the fantasy that if you just found the right system or worked the right number of hours, the load would finally resolve and you could relax. Letting go of that is a genuine loss, and it’s why many of us resist the reframe for as long as we can.

But that reframe is also where the real work starts. Once you stop waiting for the queue to clear and accept that the job is to operate well at altitude for years, the questions turn concrete: which hours you guard, what you allow to drop, how you build recovery in, who you tell the truth to, and how you keep the role from swallowing the self.

None of it makes the pressure stop. But it makes you someone who can keep doing the work for years without it hollowing you out.

About : Therapist to Silicon Valley’s CEOs, founders, and engineers. And their families. Founder of the Coherence Approach, a practice built on one premise: it begins with you. Relational intelligence — with yourself, at home, at work. Meditator.

Read more of Nicole's work here!

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In this live conversation, we went further and explored the lived reality behind the research on how women are heard in professional settings, and some of the nuances that can’t as easily be put into a written article.

To kick things off, Claire described the additional cognitive load that many women carry into high-stakes meetings. This takes the shape of a continuous background process on how their delivery will be read, calibrating tone, second-guessing whether confidence will come across as competence or as something less welcome.

Even individual word choices get scrutinised. Claire talked about the word “passionate,” which sounds like a compliment but sits uncomfortably close to “emotional,” which sits close to “irrational”. And none of those words sound commercial, which is the language most appreciated in senior leadership circles. A mentor once suggested she swap it for “intentional” or “purposeful,” words that would shape how people subconsciously associated with her and her professional brand.

That’s how granular the extra work gets, and nobody accounts for it.

We also talked about an exercise that Claire runs at conferences, where she asks women in the audience to raise their hands if they’ve ever made a suggestion in a meeting that was ignored, only for a man to make the same point later to general approval. Every woman raises her hand. Then she asks how many experienced it in the past week, and about half the hands stay up. It’s the second answer, she said, that surprises the men in the room. That moment of recognition is usually where something starts shifting in their minds.

One of the things I valued most about this conversation was how Claire held two things together. On one hand, there are practical techniques that help individuals get heard: slowing down, pausing more, simplifying language, leading with a recommendation. On the other hand, there’s the honest admission that a system requiring women to work harder just to receive equal attention is itself the problem.

So, the communications advice you have heard is still good. But we cannot pretend that it’s enough.

Towards the end of our discussion, we broadened the lens. The dynamics we covered do not stop at gender. Introverts face a version of it. So do non-native English speakers, neurodivergent professionals and anyone whose natural register doesn’t match the loud-and-certain template that still dominates in most organisations. Ethnicity, disability, age, caring responsibilities and more also play into this in a way that compounds.

Claire’s parting thought was that if you want to make change but don’t have billions to invest in a foundation, you can shift things one conversation at a time. Go home and ask a partner, a daughter or a colleague: has this happened to you? What does it feel like? What are the signs I might not notice?

Between now and the next meeting you chair, our suggestion is a small one: pay attention to who you’re hearing, and to who you are not. Once you start noticing, there’s no turning back.

The full article is on Claire’s publication, Gentle Consulting. I’d encourage you to read it and subscribe! 👇

Gentle Consulting

Why "Speaking For" Delivers More Than "Speaking Up"

There’s plenty of good advice out there on how to communicate with senior leaders: lead with your recommendation, structure your argument clearly, and commit to your position…

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19 days ago · 6 likes · Claire Barrett and Andrea Chiarelli

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Between the two of us (Andrea and ) we have watched capable people come undone under pressure, losing their judgement and their composure when they most needed it. Deri spent six years at Bain & Company and another six in other consulting roles before founding Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training, which has now trained thousands of consultants; alongside that he coaches kids’ rugby and football and is a father of four (talk about pressure!). Andrea is a management and strategy consultant at a boutique firm, where the pace is unrelenting and the inner critic has plenty to feed on.

We have learned the hard way that, for real progress to be made, you have to get past the visible Outer Game of appearance, behaviours and achievements. The real gold lies in the invisible world underneath: the parts of ourselves that Deri and his Honeycomb colleagues call the ‘Inner Game’.

What we argue in this article is straightforward: when the Inner Game is off, the Outer Game follows.

The Inner Game shapes our behaviour

The Inner Game is invisible, yet it deeply affects our interactions and responses to everything that happens to us. It is our emotional state and the beliefs running underneath.

The Conscious Leadership Group, in their book The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, clearly articulate the impact of our Inner Game being off. When you are Above the line, you are open, curious and committed to learning; conversely, when you are Below the line, you are closed, defensive, and committed to being right.

Being Below the line tends to be the baseline, because our brains are wired to perceive threat and respond accordingly, through what you will probably have heard of as the fight-or-flight response. The additional challenge is that the brain cannot reliably distinguish between a physical threat and a threat to our ego: a client who challenges your expertise in front of senior stakeholders activates the same neurochemical response as genuine danger. The amygdala fires, higher thinking shuts down and we drop Below the line without choosing to.

This is biology rather than a character flaw, and it happens to all of us, multiple times a day. We might not be able to stop it, but we can learn to notice it. And, even better, we can build the skill of finding our way back Above the line.

Consulting is built to push you Below the line

Consulting is unusually rich in pressure points that pull people Below the line:

• The work swings between feast and famine, lurching from stretches where you are drowning in deadlines to sudden lulls with very little booked in.

• A project’s goalposts can move halfway through, so the analysis you spent two weeks perfecting is dropped because the client’s goals have shifted.

• You can find yourself “on the bench,” watching colleagues buried in client work and wondering whether you are still useful.

• A client might challenge you publicly on something you know better than they do.

A common mindset among consultants is known as the Insecure Overachiever: driven, high standards, externally successful and carrying a deep yet largely hidden fear of being found out as inadequate. This character produces excellent work, and it comes with a psychological cost that many firms do little about. In a recent webinar, Deri and his colleague Greg Segal asked participants to share the message that plays in their head when the pressure rises, and imposter syndrome dominated the responses. “I am not good enough.” “I do not belong here.” “My peers are better.” “What if they find out?” These are self-sabotaging messages, and they activate when we are triggered, pulling us Below the line.

Three roles you fall into under pressure

When we go Below the line, we typically slip into one of three dysfunctional roles, described by psychologist Stephen Karpman as the Drama Triangle:

🥺 The Victim feels powerless and helpless. In consulting this looks like “this client is impossible,” “my partner keeps editing my slides for no reason,” or “I don’t know where to find the data I need.” The Victim seeks rescuers, avoids accountability and externalises blame.

🛟 The Rescuer feels compelled to help, often without being asked. In consulting this looks like the Manager who avoids the difficult conversation with an under-performing junior, or the Partner who says “yes” to every request from the client. The Rescuer grows resentful when their help is not appreciated, and that resentment tips them into Victim or Persecutor.

👆🏼 The Persecutor is critical, controlling and blaming. In consulting this looks like micromanaging, criticising colleagues publicly or endlessly beating yourself up for a mistake you have made (yes, you can Persecute yourself, too!). The Persecutor often believes they are simply being direct or holding standards.

If these scenarios feel familiar, then you and your team have moments where you drop Below the line. If they do not feel familiar, that suggests you are not paying close enough attention (and, if you want to dig deeper, check our this article by ).

A practical first step is trigger tracking. For one week, note which situations pull you Below the line; what thought each one generates; and what behaviour follows. You do not need to fix anything just yet, because mapping the pattern is the bulk of the work. If you want to explore the self-awareness dimension of this, Deri has written more on the topic here:

The Skilled Consultant

Self-aware consultant: 4 layers to dig deeper

Why am I talking about self-awareness for consultants? Simply put, I think it's critical to cultivate a deep level of self-awareness if you want to become a consulting master…

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3 years ago · Honeycomb Consulting Skills and Deri

Finding your way back Above the line

Self-regulation is the most important immediate skill. It means changing your brain state deliberately, moving from survival mode back to clear thinking.

When you are in survival mode, your body tells you first. You might experience shallow breathing or tension in the jaw or shoulders (or many other variations on this theme). Most of us only realise we were activated once the conversation or difficult situation is over. Catching it in the moment is learnable, and it changes everything.

In our experience, the template below can help you start to notice how you respond to pressure (a blank workbook is available under the image):

Getting Back Above the Line - Worked example and blank Canvas (Deri Hughes and Andrea Chiarelli)

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Under pressure, our minds catastrophise, and everything feels urgent. When you notice you’re in such a state, the most valuable response is to create space. Acknowledge it, even just to yourself. Sixty seconds of deliberate calm is enough to begin the shift back. And here are three questions that help to restore focus:

• What are the three things that matter most today?

• What can I actually control here?

• What is one meaningful next step?

Another tool is something that Deri calls a ‘High Road Mission Statement.’ In practice, you need to know what the best version of yourself looks like, and the person you are committed to being on the way there. Building this starts with an honest look back.

• What did your younger self find hardest to handle?

• What belief did you take on from that experience?

• What would a wiser, older version of yourself say to that younger person now?

From there, the format is: My mission is to create a world of [three aspirational words] by being [three committed ways of behaving].

This produces a statement that looks something like: “My mission is to create a world of connection, calmness and fun by being vulnerable, supportive and playful.” Over time, this type of statement should evolve as you do.

The key is to make the behaviours a genuine stretch. They should be something that does not come easily and that pushes you into a development edge. If the behaviours feel comfortable already, you have probably written what you already do rather than what you are trying to become.

When you have a statement that is honest, the self-sabotaging messages start to lose their grip. It is harder to believe “I am not good enough” when you know clearly the world you are trying to create and how you have committed to showing up in it.

The Inner Game is a skill, and teams can build it together

The Inner Game is the foundation on which every visible consulting skill rests. Most professional development focuses on the Outer Game: communication, analytical frameworks, client management, business development. These all matter, but the skills that most readily fall apart are the ones that depend on our Inner Game being stable.

There is real value in closing this gap, at the individual level first and then at the team level. A team that has shared language for Below-the-line states, and the courage to say openly when they are in one, operates very differently from one that pretends the Inner Game does not exist and insists on projecting confidence at all times.

The switch between Above- and Below-the-line states happens dozens of times every day, mostly invisibly. Making it a more conscious choice is one of the most impactful changes we know.

Hughes is Founder and Managing Director of Honeycomb Consulting Skills Training. He trains consulting teams across professional services firms and, through the Mankind Project, a global organisation focused on men’s personal development, has supported hundreds of individuals through personal development work.

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In our (real) story, it’s a Wednesday. A US healthcare provider with eleven sites and roughly a thousand employees has payroll due Friday and about a million dollars missing. Panic ensues, as you would expect.

The CEO’s initial diagnosis is that referrals have dropped because of a business development restructure. Once Jason and his team start interviewing employees and patients across the sites, however, a different picture emerges: long-standing patients are leaving, and staff who have been there since the founding are walking out. This is a cultural and operational problem manifesting as a financial one.

In our talk, we covered what high-reliability organisations like wildfire crews, NASA or deep-water drilling do differently to keep this kind of situation from developing in the first place. And Jason shared a brilliant quote from a fire chief that I keep returning to:

Indeed, the part I’d point people to is our discussion on lookouts in wildfires. A fire chief directing a wildfire response stands close enough to the flames to direct the work, which means their field of vision is almost useless for judging where the fire is going. So the crew establishes lookouts: junior people on a ridge, or others back at the station watching weather patterns, who can be consulted on a regular cadence and will also proactively raise a hand the moment something concerning happens.

What makes this uncomfortable is that it inverts the usual direction of authority, as junior colleagues can significantly steer the fate of an operation. Under pressure, most organisations do the opposite: decision-making pulls upward, and the people with the clearest view of what is happening find they have the least standing to intervene. Jason’s framing is that the leader’s job in a crisis shifts from giving sense to making sense, which sounds like a small distinction until you watch a board try to do it.

The company we discussed in the video is still trading, incidentally. Not out of the woods, but also no longer sliding. What turned it was not the million dollars the founder put in (that only bought two or three weeks) but a board that eventually started asking where its information was coming from.

If you enjoyed the video, Jason and I wrote up the underlying arguments in The Certainty Trap:

Enjoyed this piece? Become a paid member and get my Consulting with AI prompt library, the full Asking Questions Like a Pro course ($199 standalone), practical templates from a decade of fieldwork, and discounts on many other resources. 🔗 See everything included in the paid tier.

The crisis wasn’t driven by inferior service or bad frontline delivery. This was a pure liquidity stranglehold.

In moments like that, the pressure is felt in the gut. It’s the sudden realisation that you are carrying the weight of hundreds of families who rely on that money, alongside customers (patients, in this case) whose care is hanging in the balance. It’s a tangled mess of competing priorities, and the sheer ambiguity of it can feel suffocating. When the conversation starts to spiral, the natural knee-jerk reaction is simply to act, because action feels non-negotiable.

However, complex situations hide secondary dangers. Acting decisively on what you can see does nothing about what you cannot, and the visible problem is rarely the whole of it. The craving for a clear answer is itself part of the trap, because it makes the partial picture in front of you feel like the full one.

Speed pulls against accuracy, while anxiety narrows what leaders can see. So leaders begin making high-velocity decisions based on partial truths, unintentionally creating second- and third-order consequences that amplify the original disaster.

In that specific event, board members personally advanced the funds to bridge the immediate payroll gap. It bought them three weeks. But it also fired the starting gun on a deeper investigation: discovering how they could lose sight of a multi-million-dollar pillar of stability so fast.

The crisis in that room was treated as a financial one. In reality, it was an epistemic crisis: a total breakdown in the organisation’s ability to know what was actually happening inside its own walls.

The pressure dial

Pressure doesn’t simply switch from “normal operations” to “catastrophe.” In our work with leadership teams, we view pressure as a fluid dial from 1 to 10. For example:

• Dial 3 (tense project review): A missed milestone leads to filtering of uncomfortable details.

• Dial 5 (customer churn): Declining performance causes teams to protect their own functions; silos begin to optimise for survival.

• Dial 7 (acute cash strain): Board scrutiny increases, authority centralises, and meeting rooms shrink.

• Dial 10 (imminent collapse): Total operational or solvency crisis. Dissent is reclassified as delay.

As the dial turns, curiosity slowly becomes a luxury, which is a predictable behavioural response. The structural research of Barry Staw and the cognitive insights of Karl Weick show us exactly why this happens. Staw’s work demonstrates that organisations under threat naturally restrict information, rely on familiar routines and centralise control. Meanwhile, Weick explains that, under acute stress, our collective capacity to make sense of an unfolding reality completely collapses.

When the fast answer is the expensive one

In high-stakes environments, speed is often non-negotiable. Indeed, delay is irresponsible when payroll must be funded or operations have halted. The strategic error is to confuse the speed of an action with an understanding of the problem.

To see how high-speed, centralised answers create systemic failures, look at wildland firefighting.

When a wildfire suddenly undergoes a violent “blowup” and jumps a control line, the pressure dial hits a 10. The instinctive response is aggressive: throw resources at the visible head of the flame immediately, to suppress the fire. Taking action feels like safety. But a wildfire is an interlocking system of fuel, terrain and shifting winds. If a command team orders a direct attack without analysing the broader topography, real disasters can happen.

High-Reliability Organisations survive these environments because they maintain an operational protocol known as LCES: Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes and Safety Zones.

The critical node is the lookout. In the case of firefighting crews, a lookout is often a junior firefighter positioned on a distant ridge. They have no authority to direct heavy machinery, but they hold the one asset the commander lacks from deep inside the action: an uncompromised view of the horizon. In a disciplined system, the data provided by the lookout can instantly override the strategic plan of the command post. Speed is maintained, but it is explicitly bound to real-time, distributed data from the edges.

Four questions to open the room

To keep an organisation effective under strain, a leader must shift from a commander dictating answers to an epistemic facilitator, someone who manages the flow of collective intelligence rather than the execution of a singular will.

You need structural circuit breakers to make this happen, as good intentions are not enough. In our practice, we use four diagnostic questions to stop a room from closing too early:

🍾 1. Leveraging small wins to lower anxiety

A large-scale threat can paralyse an organisation because its sheer scale overwhelms what a human brain can hold. To lower collective anxiety and restart your team’s ability to think creatively, shrink the operational horizon by asking:

We cannot fix the entire system today. What is the most meaningful problem we can completely solve in the next 24 hours?

🪓 2. Dropping clunky tools that are slowing things down

This stems from Karl Weick’s landmark study of the 1949 Mann Gulch fire disaster, where firefighters being overtaken by the blaze refused to drop their heavy tools to run faster, perishing with their axes and shovels in hand because those objects defined their professional identity. Teams routinely cling to legacy processes and metrics out of habit, even when the environment changes. Ask your team:

What metric, workflow, or legacy habit are we carrying out of comfort that we need to publicly drop to move faster?

🫡 3. Listening to the lookout for frontline perspectives

Under stress, executives instinctively pull decision-making power to the top, isolating themselves from the frontline operators who actually hold the data. Before committing to a high-velocity path, pause the room and ask:

Who is closest to where this decision will actually land, and what do they see that contradicts the strategy we are building?

♦️ 4. Red-teaming the label to shift the macro perspective

The anxious brain craves a simple, clean label (”market failure,” “PR disaster”) just to relieve the short-term stress of ambiguity. Simple labels yield generic, blunt-force solutions. Force a cognitive pivot by asking:

Suppose our diagnosis is wrong. What structural issue might we be missing?

Check out this video discussion with to learn more about navigating ambiguity in your business. 👇

Turning the Dial Back

Returning to the distressed organisation from our opening, the emergency funding advanced by the board bought time, but it did not solve the structural blindness that caused the cash drain.

The turnaround began when the team understood that they could not fix a multi-million-dollar collapse in a single stroke. They used the first question to solve for immediate threats and begin restoring collective trust. They dropped legacy metrics that were hiding operational friction to begin seeing the problem differently. Simultaneously, they invited site-level directors to offer new perspectives from across the organisation. Importantly, they used the fourth question to stop treating their issues as a standard cash shortfall and begin diagnosing the deeper errors that caused the blindness in the first place.

Today, that organisation not only survived that three-week runway, but are beginning to transform how they operate. Their view is extending a bit further out toward the horizon, and they are actively working to recover their most critical asset: the capacity to learn from their own operations

The fundamental test of leadership under duress is not whether an executive can produce a confident answer. Most can. The harder, more significant question is whether they can preserve the organisation’s intelligence while doing it.

About : 3Fold Outcomes unpacks why some strategies quietly succeed while the vast majority (>70%) unravel. Jason writes for those leading change in the real world: executives navigating complexity, operators trying to move systems, and curious minds who know that culture eats strategy only when strategy ignores culture.

Check out his publication here!

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What this is about

The Art of Asking Questions explores questioning as a practical skill: how the questions we ask (and the ones we avoid) shape our conversations, our decisions and our careers. I draw on more than a decade in management consulting and research, so expect grounded, usable ideas rather than abstract theory. I write about workplace communication, leadership, persuasion, research methods and how AI is reshaping professional work. Some of my pieces are collaborations with other writers, which I sometimes complement with live conversations.

If you’re a a manager, a consultant, a researcher or simply someone who wants to think and communicate more clearly, you’re in the right place. New articles arrive weekly.

Where to start

Rather than scrolling through the archive, here are a few pieces that give you a good feel for the publication:

• What Your Questions Are Actually Saying — why well-intentioned questions land badly, and how to design them so they don’t (a collaboration with ).

• 3 Principles for Keeping Questions Human — the difference between asking to understand and asking to confirm what you already suspect (a collaboration with ).

• Ask, Don’t Argue — what a blues musician who talked 200 people out of the Ku Klux Klan can teach us about persuasion (accompanied by a live video discussion).

• The Board Whisperer — how to communicate with senior audiences who have no time or patience for your workings (a collaboration with , accompanied by a live video discussion).

• The Pyramid Is Crumbling — what AI means for the business model of professional services firms (a collaboration with ).

• The Five Superpowers of Consultants (And How to Develop Them) — the skills that consultants deploy daily but everyone can learn (a collaboration with ).

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Say hello

I read every comment and reply, and many articles here started from a reader’s question. If something resonates, or if you disagree, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.

Thanks for being here, and remember: when in doubt, ask.

Andrea

When I tell people I build AI apps as part of my consulting work, the reaction is fairly predictable. There’s a pause, then some version of “but you don’t code, do you?” And you’d be right to question that, because I don’t! What has changed over the past couple of years and with increasingly sophisticated models is that in-depth knowledge of coding is no longer necessary for a large class of genuinely useful tools (as a footnote, it does matter for many other things!).

There are two ways to build AI apps without writing code yourself:

• The first is to have an AI write the code for you, using something like Claude Code, where you describe what you want and watch the machine produce a real software project. That’s powerful, but it still involves code, files, and a certain amount of things that can break. This is what I typically do now, because I need pretty complex applications.

• The second way, which is what this article is about, involves no code at all. Everything runs in your browser, you build by clicking and describing, and the whole thing works in minutes. And this is where I started my AI app-building journey!

The tool we used is called PartyRock, made by Amazon. It’s free, and you sign in with an Amazon, Apple or Google account. The way you build apps is by adding widgets to a canvas: places to upload files, boxes for text, AI outputs, chatbots, image generators. Then you wire them together in plain English.

If you can write a decent brief for a colleague, you can build one of these apps. And that, really, is the point we want to make in this article. Whether your app is any good comes down to the same skill I bang on about in almost everything I write here: knowing what you actually want, and asking for it clearly.

App one: An honest job application coach

The first app we built live is one I’d describe as genuinely useful, especially if you’re job hunting right now.

Here’s the everyday problem it aims to solve: you have found a job you want, you have got the ad, your CV, and a covering letter. Normally you would send the lot off and hope to get a call back. What we built instead is a small app that reads all three documents, takes on the role of an honest job application coach, and tells you where you’re strong, where you’re weak and what can realistically be fixed. It then also helps you fix it wherever this is advisable.

Find the Job Application Coach here!

The build took a few minutes, which you can watch in the video. The process is very straightforward to follow live, so do have a look if you feel stuck when reading the description that follows.

In PartyRock, you start by creating a blank app, then add widgets to the canvas. This is what you need for this specific setup:

1. Three file-upload widgets, labelled Job Description, CV, and Cover Letter. That’s your input layer.

2. An AI output widget called Review. This is where the AI functionality lives, and it is based entirely on a straightforward prompt, just like anything you would enter in your favourite chatbot. It begins: “You are an experienced hiring manager reviewing a candidate for a specific role…” - if you visit the app here, you can click the widget and see the whole prompt. The prompt instructs the AI to read the three uploaded documents (you reference other widgets by typing @ and picking them from a list, so the wiring is literally point and click), and to assess the fit. Crucially, it says: be fair but honest, do not flatter, do not be needlessly harsh, base every point on evidence from the documents.

3. A chatbot widget called Coach, wired to all three documents plus the Review. This gives you a career coach that already knows your situation, so you can ask it things like “rewrite the paragraph about my lack of management experience so it sounds confident but honest” and get a before-and-after with an explanation of what changed.

4. A second AI output called Competitor Research, which reads the job description, then goes off and finds real, currently operating companies that are competitors or close peers of the employer, with working links and an explanation of why each one is worth studying before an interview. Again, the prompt used can be seen in the app.

Two settings deserve a mention. For the Review widget, we chose Claude Sonnet as the model, switched internet access off, and turned deep thinking on. Why? Because the review should be based purely on the three documents in front of it. We don’t want the web polluting the assessment, and we do want a careful, reliable answer. For the Competitor Research widget, we did the opposite and gave it permission to search the internet, because there the whole point is fresh, real-world information. Neither choice is technical, and both are enabled with a click. These design decisions are the product of asking yourself what a good answer would look like before you ask the machine for one.

When we demoed the app with a test CV and job ad (both AI-generated for the occasion), the app correctly spotted that the profile was too junior for the role, down to details like the candidate having managed a much smaller marketing budget than the £400,000 the job required. Honest, evidenced and considerably more useful than a friend telling you your CV “looks good”.

One caveat Leor raised during the stream is worth bringing up. If you tell the coach that your lack of management experience isn’t really a problem, it will tend to agree with you. AI tools take their cue from how you frame the request, so the honesty of the output depends on the honesty of the input.

Remember: The app checks your work, but it shouldn’t do your thinking. And it certainly shouldn’t write your application for you. You do the work, you put it in for review and you improve it based on the feedback.

App two: A fun trip planner

The second app was lighter, and we built it mainly to show the breadth of what’s possible. You type in a destination and a few notes about your trip. One AI widget, with internet access on, writes a realistic day-by-day itinerary matched to your notes. A second widget then reads that itinerary and paints a vintage-style travel poster to match, mood, highlights and all.

Access the Trip Planner app here!

The build was even simpler than the first: two text inputs (Destination, pre-filled with Paris, and Trip Details), one AI output for the itinerary and one image output for the poster. The trip details we used were the sort of thing you’d tell a friend: four days, a couple, love food and markets, a bit of history, relaxed pace, mid-range budget, at least one great viewpoint. The more detail you give it, the better the plan. Again, the quality of the output tracks the quality of the brief.

To switch things up, here’s the image it makes if you ask it to visit Rome instead of Paris (the destination we showed in the live).

What this is good for, and what it isn’t

I use PartyRock apps regularly in my day job, and the reason behind the useful ones is consistent: they shine on highly repeatable tasks, things that always look the same on the way in but need tailored judgement on the way out.

Here are two concrete examples from a consulting setting:

• Public-sector clients regularly publish invitations to tender describing what they want. I’ve built an app with a description of what my firm does embedded in it; I upload the invitation to tender, and it tells me whether this is a good fit for us or too far from our typical areas of expertise to be worth bidding on.

• Another pattern I rely on is structured extraction: if you’re working through a stack of reports or academic articles and need the same section pulled out of each one, embedding the extraction prompt in an app makes the task reliable and nearly effortless.

It is worth noting that PartyRock comes with a daily usage allowance; I’ve never hit it in normal use, but this isn’t the right tool for a production pipeline or anything at serious scale (for that you’d graduate to Amazon Bedrock, or build something proper with a coding agent).

Also keep in mind that each run starts clean rather than remembering previous sessions, although there’s a neat workaround: a static text widget can hold standing context, such as “I am a consultant working in the field of [X]”, which every other widget can then reference. This offers a degree of permanence without any database in sight.

Two features make these apps unexpectedly social. You can share a snapshot of any result, so a colleague can see, say, a bid assessment exactly as it appeared on your screen (or you can see a proposed itinerary for a trip to Rome - which is where the picture above comes from). And anyone can remix your app: take a copy, change the prompts, and make it their own.

The actual skill

Here’s the reflection we closed the stream with:

Look back at what actually determined the quality of those two apps. Deciding that the reviewer should be fair but honest, never flattering. Deciding that the assessment should be sealed off from the internet while the research should be steeped in it. Telling the trip planner that you’re a couple who love food and markets rather than just typing “Paris”.

So our encouragement is this: pick one small, recurring task from your week, open PartyRock, and spend twenty minutes describing the job to a machine as carefully as you’d brief a junior colleague. If the first version disappoints you, the fault will almost certainly be in the brief, and the fix is a better question.

That, in our experience, is the whole game. And the real prize when you finish is confidence: once you’ve watched one app come together in an hour, you’ll find yourself spotting the next three.

Enjoyed this piece? Become a paid member and get my Consulting with AI prompt library, the full Asking Questions Like a Pro course ($199 standalone), practical templates from a decade of fieldwork, and discounts on many other resources. 🔗 See everything included in the paid tier.

This experience is common, and rarely talked about, partly because it doesn’t look like a problem. You’re a “strong candidate” who never gets “selected.” At some point the pattern becomes the story.

What’s disorienting is the mismatch between how you feel about your work and how the system seems to be reading it. You go into the year-end review with confidence, leave with warm feedback, and somehow the role you wanted never quite materialises.

The temptation is to look for a single cause, but there usually isn’t one.

“Stuckness” is almost always the outcome of several factors meeting at once. The org chart above you may simply be narrow, with few roles opening up and a lot of people eyeing each one. Your alternatives can also feel unappealing: a lateral move might read as a step down, and leaving means starting over somewhere you don’t yet trust. And underneath all of that, the relationship between doing strong work and being promoted, which felt fairly direct earlier in your career, has stopped working the way it once did.

The rules have changed

Strong delivery is the entry ticket in leadership roles, not the basis on which decisions are made about who moves up. What gets weighted instead is judgement, and this is harder to evidence because it is projected in subtler ways than a deliverable landing on time.

Senior leaders are looking for signs of judgement in how you behave under uncertainty:

• whether you saw a problem coming six months before anyone else did;

• whether you can hold a coherent line in a meeting where the facts keep changing under you; and

• whether you can make a call when the available information is genuinely insufficient and accept that you might be wrong.

These are different muscles from the ones that got you here. A capable operator who can reliably ship a complex project is not necessarily someone who can sit in a meeting where the strategy is unclear and the answer has to emerge from the conversation rather than be prepared in advance. The shift catches a lot of people out, because the things they were rewarded for earlier (clarity, control, reliable execution) are not the things being tested now. In some cases they actively get in the way, because the instinct to resolve ambiguity quickly can look, from above, like an unwillingness to sit with it.

These capabilities develop through deliberate exposure to situations that demand them, which is where sponsorship comes in. The distinction between a mentor and a sponsor is worth clarifying: a mentor gives you advice, while a sponsor advocates for you when you’re not around and puts you in situations where the next set of capabilities can actually develop. Plenty of accomplished people have mentors and no sponsors, and wonder why they’re not moving.

The catch is that sponsorship depends on a senior person seeing something in you worth spending political capital on. If the signals you are sending are off, the sponsorship tends not to materialise in the first place.

Your team stalls before you do

A key signal you send, by some distance, is the state of your team.

Past a certain level of seniority, you stop being judged on your own output and start being judged on what your team produces and how it carries itself. A senior leader two levels up isn’t watching how you run a meeting; they’re noticing whether your people show up to other meetings prepared; whether your function gets pulled in early on important questions or late as an afterthought; and whether decisions that originate with your team tend to hold up over time. A leader who has lost traction with their team rarely realises how visible that is from a higher vantage point, and the signal reaches senior people long before they know it’s been sent.

By the time promotions stop, something has usually been going on inside your team for a while that registers as a signal to the people above you, even if neither you nor they could pinpoint it.

None of this is necessarily your fault. Teams flatten for all sorts of reasons that have little to do with the person leading them. But the response is yours regardless, because you are the variable in the system that can actually move.

A few things tend to be in play, and they usually overlap rather than appear cleanly one at a time. The team often shifts underneath you without any single dramatic event: people who carried the energy leave, newer joiners haven’t been properly brought into how things actually work, and you carry on leading the way you always have without registering that the group is no longer the same group. Sitting alongside that is the harder-to-see problem of your own style hardening over time. What began as a recognisable approach becomes a default, and you gradually stop reading the room because, for years, the room read you. The most uncomfortable version of all this is that the role itself has changed as you became more senior: what the team now needs from you is less task direction and more help with ambiguity and meaning. If nobody tells you the requirements have moved (and you don’t notice), you will carry on delivering the old version with full confidence while the team goes silent around you.

These shifts don’t announce themselves. Meetings still happen, and on paper nothing is wrong. What disappears is the forward pull that used to propel your career.

Five things you can do to get unstuck

1️⃣ Start with your immediate colleagues. When you’re stuck, the instinct is to look outward, but the most useful diagnosis usually sits one step closer. If something has gone flat between you and your team, that’s where the work begins, because everything else you might try rests on getting that part right first.

2️⃣ Test whether the structure above you is actually the problem. For example, you could check how many roles have opened up at the level above in the last two years, or whether anyone has been promoted internally rather than hired in. If upward movement is genuinely blocked, continuing to push internally is mostly a way of feeling busy. Recognising that is uncomfortable but useful, because it frees you to put your energy somewhere it can make a difference.

3️⃣ Seriously explore sponsorship. You can’t ask for it directly and you can’t shortcut it, but you can put yourself within range of it: aligning your work with what a senior leader is trying to achieve, making their life easier in concrete ways, becoming someone whose name comes up in good contexts more than once. It’s a slow accumulation of credibility rather than a campaign.

4️⃣ Close a few specific gaps: exposure to P&L responsibility, board-level communication, and external visibility are conspicuously absent on the CVs of people who keep getting stuck just below the next rung. These are not things you can pick up in a quarter, so it helps to plan on an 18–24 month horizon rather than a few weeks. Here’s an example:

5️⃣ Re-examine what you actually want. After enough years, your title and status start to shape what you’re willing to consider, and moves that might genuinely help begin to feel as though they don’t fit the story you’ve been telling about yourself (check out ’s article on this subject!). A smaller company where your experience is rarer, a different sector where it carries more weight, an adjacent function with a thinner supply of senior people: these often look sideways or even backwards on paper, and turn out to be the most generative thing someone does in a decade.

Check out this article and I wrote on engaging senior leaders. 👇

The bigger picture

Advancement in leadership roles is contextual. Good performance on its own doesn’t translate cleanly into progression, and sponsorship, visibility, and positioning matter just as much.

The ones who move tend to make the kinds of unconventional, slightly uncomfortable shifts described above, rather than waiting for the conventional path to open for them. There’s a big difference in agency between these two scenarios.

If you’re sitting in the ‘successful but stuck’ zone, the question worth asking is whether you understand what you’re actually being evaluated on now. The criteria have shifted, and continuing to optimise for the old ones is what keeps the pattern in place.

Understanding that is most of the work. The rest is being willing to act on it.

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Most people have watched this happen. The difference between the person who gets heard and the person who doesn’t is usually about things that happened before they opened their mouth.

This article shares two stories, inspired by experiences we have lived, about how influence actually gets built.

Want to go straight to our top tips?

The researcher who got invited in

Maria is a social researcher, eight months into her role. Her job is well-defined: collect the data, produce the interim reports, deliver the final evaluation. She sits in the research team but works across several programme areas, which means she interacts with people in other teams regularly without belonging to any of them. She’s not involved in strategy, she’s not part of the senior leadership group and she has no formal say in how programmes get designed or commissioned.

But when the organisation starts scoping a major new initiative, the director leading it asks Maria to sit in on the planning meetings.

She didn’t lobby for this. What she had done, over those eight months, was pay attention to the people around her, not just the work in front of her. When someone from another team asked her a data question that wasn’t part of her remit, she answered it properly and quickly. When she noticed something in her findings that was relevant to a problem another team was wrestling with, she sent a two-line email flagging it. She showed up to a couple of cross-team sessions she could easily have skipped, said something useful, and left without making a performance of it.

None of these things were remarkable on their own. Nobody pulled her aside and said, “We’ve noticed how helpful you’ve been.” The effect was cumulative and largely invisible, not until the moment someone needed a person they trusted to help them think. And Maria was already the person who came to mind. They didn’t have to go looking. She was already in their peripheral vision, because she’d spent months making herself useful to other people’s problems rather than just delivering against her own.

The thing Maria understood, whether she would have put it in these terms or not, is that professional relationships aren’t built in the margins. Many people try to build relationships at the point they need something: a promotion conversation, an invitation, a favour. But by then it’s too late. You’re asking someone to trust your judgement before they’ve had any reason to form an opinion of it.

Maria had been depositing trust for months without making a withdrawal, and when the moment came, the relationship was already there. You get invited in by being useful before anyone’s thought to ask.

The policy adviser who navigates disagreement

Wei is a policy adviser in a government agency, two years into the role. He reports to a director whose portfolio covers programme design, and his job is to provide evidence-based recommendations on how new initiatives should be structured. He’s good at it: rigorous and well-informed, clear in his written work. But so are several of his colleagues, and most of them share the same frustration. They write sound recommendations that go nowhere, or get diluted by the time the director reaches a decision.

Wei’s recommendations get picked up more often. Not always, but noticeably more than his peers’. When colleagues ask what he does differently, he doesn’t have a dramatic answer.

The current situation is a good example. The director’s preferred approach to a new initiative has a serious flaw: it underestimates the operational burden on frontline teams, and Wei has seen enough similar programmes stall for exactly this reason. He could raise it in the next planning meeting, where the full project team will be present. The evidence is on his side and he’s confident in his analysis. But he also knows that raising it publicly would put the director on the back foot in front of their own staff, and that a director who feels cornered in a meeting is a director who digs in rather than adapts.

So he asks for fifteen minutes beforehand. He lays out his concern plainly, explains the evidence behind it and offers two alternative approaches he’s sketched out. The director pushes back on one and asks sharp questions about the other, but ultimately adjusts the plan. At the end of the conversation, the director says something Wei’s colleagues rarely hear: “This is why I want you in the room for these things.” In the meeting itself, the director presents the revised approach as their own decision - which it is - but asks Wei to walk the team through the operational rationale. It’s a small moment, but it matters. Wei is being positioned as someone whose judgement the director is prepared to lean on publicly.

What earned Wei that position wasn’t any single conversation. It was the fact that, over two years, he’d been consistently right about things that mattered as well as consistently honest when he wasn’t sure. Over time, he told the director things they didn’t want to hear, and had been proven right often enough that the discomfort was worth it. He’d also been wrong occasionally, and when he was, he’d said so openly rather than hoping nobody noticed.

That combination is what makes someone’s judgement worth trusting. His peers who struggled to get their recommendations adopted were often just as rigorous. The difference was that they treated each recommendation as a standalone piece of analysis, delivered and forgotten. Wei treated each one as a chapter in a longer story about whether his judgement could be relied on.

The lesson here is that credibility isn’t something you can assert or attach to a single piece of work. It’s a reputation, built over time, and the people who have it are the ones who think about what their track record says about them as much as what their current paper says about the problem.

What the work doesn’t teach you

Maria and Wei work in very different organisations, at different levels and in different fields. But they both got the same result: when a decision needed to be made, someone turned to them because they had earned a kind of trust that doesn’t show up in job descriptions.

Most knowledge workers have never been taught how to do this. The skills that get you hired (analytical rigour, technical expertise, clear writing) are necessary but insufficient. They’ll make your work good, but they won’t make it land. The part that determines whether anyone acts on what you’ve produced is rarely assessed, and almost never developed deliberately. But it can be learned and practised.

If you've read this far and recognised yourself in the colleague whose recommendation didn't get picked up, or in the person who does good work but keeps getting passed over for the room where decisions happen, that recognition is the starting point. And we have built a playbook that helps you practise exactly this. It includes development paths for beginners, intermediate and advanced practitioners, tools, AI prompts and frameworks that we use every day.

This article maps to the Engagement section in the playbook - which is one of five! For the Engagement section, we have four tailored assets:

1️⃣ Building Effective Relationships

2️⃣ Preparing to Influence

3️⃣ The Repair Diagnostic

4️⃣ AI Prompt: The Stakeholder Simulator

This toolkit is part of our full guide on the five superpowers of consultants - the capabilities that consistently separate impactful from merely competent people in high-stakes environments. You can read more about Synthesis, Curiosity, Adaptability, Leadership and Engagement - the SCALE framework - here:

Enjoyed this piece? Become a paid member and get my Consulting with AI prompt library, the full Asking Questions Like a Pro course ($199 standalone), practical templates from a decade of fieldwork, and discounts on many other resources. 🔗 See everything included in the paid tier.

The premise we started from is that almost all of us are coached, formally or informally, on how to present a win, yet hardly anyone is taught how to talk about a miss. That gap matters, because how you handle the misses tends to shape your reputation more than any win, since those are the moments that reveal your judgement and how you hold up under pressure.

We grounded the conversation in two real misses before getting to any theory:

The heart of the discussion is a four-stage approach for the hours and weeks after something goes wrong: process, prepare, narrate, and follow up. The instinct is either to hide or to rush in and explain, and the argument we make is that two stages of work need to take place before you open your mouth.

1️⃣ Process is making sense of what happened, on two fronts. There is the factual side, collecting the data and understanding the scale and root cause, and the emotional side, understanding what the miss has stirred up in you. Skip the emotional part and it shows up anyway, as blame turned on yourself or deflected onto someone else.

2️⃣ Prepare turns the attention outwards to the who. The same miss does not warrant the same conversation with everyone, so this stage is about who needs to know, what matters to them, which format fits, who else is in the room, and how much trust you already have in the bank.

3️⃣ Narrate is the actual talking, and we offered a structure for it called FOCUS (Framing, Observation, Context, Understanding and Solution), which mirrors how people naturally want to receive difficult news.

4️⃣ Follow up is what makes the trust genuinely rebuild rather than just patching the moment.

If you’d like the complete method, we have put it into The Setback Protocol, which is available on Gumroad. It covers the full four-stage protocol (Process, Prepare, Narrate, Follow up), the FOCUS structure with a before-and-after worked example, a ready-to-use AI prompt that reframes your draft and flags the gaps before you send, and a Harder Cases section.

You can get it below; it’s free for paid subscribers, and the price of a coffee for everyone else.

Read the Setback Protocol!

We also walked through the most common ways narration goes wrong: misjudging the audience (upstream of almost everything else), the surprise reveal of a miss you’ve sat on for weeks (which no narration skill can rescue, because the listener’s takeaway becomes “what else aren’t you telling me”), dumping unfiltered data without interpretation, skipping structure, and arriving with no credible next step, which simply hands your problem to the listener.

The through line is that a miss is rarely the thing that damages you. What damages you is walking in with your emotions first, talking to the wrong person, or handing over a problem with no plan attached. Do the processing, do the preparation, and frame things honestly, and the same failure can leave you more trusted than before.

Elina’s closing thought was to reframe failure not in a “fail fast and break things” way but as a measure of courage: the courage to attempt difficult things, and the resilience to deal with failure, learn from it and talk about it productively.

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He had spent nearly twenty years working alongside his father in the family business. A generational transfer attempted in 2017 quickly proved unworkable. The search for a buyer began in 2018. Then his father died unexpectedly in May 2019, before that buyer was found, and by January 2020 Peter had to close the company. A last-minute sale of the product line went through just as the pandemic arrived.

Nearly two-thirds of first-generation transfers of small family businesses fail, and more than three-quarters of owners who intend to sell or exit never manage it. These numbers have been documented for forty years with no real improvement, and Peter’s explanation is pointed: researchers keep applying corporate frameworks to businesses that don’t behave like corporations, which writes the owner — the most important variable in these cases — out of the analysis entirely.

I wrote about the framework he built in response, the 12 Fatal Issues, in an earlier piece. Speaking with Peter live filled in the parts a written summary can’t reach, and one idea anchored the whole conversation:

When an employee underperforms or a customer complains, our instinct is to address the visible thing and feel the relief of having done so. But chasing that relief is a trap, because the apparent symptom is usually information about a condition underneath it. The useful question shifts from “what caused this?” to “which system is failing to contain the pressure?” The first hunts for an event to repair. The second looks at the architecture that needs redesigning.

This is also why a fix that genuinely worked can stop working without anyone making a mistake. Peter argues that we should set aside the familiar lifecycle model of startup, growth, maturity and decline in favour of three operational states a business moves between: survival, scale and stability. Crucially, these don’t run in a clean line. A stable firm can be thrown back into survival within months when a key customer leaves or an undocumented piece of institutional knowledge walks out the door. The lifecycle model reads that as decline. The states model reads it as a structural re-entry, which tells you where you actually stand and what you are facing.

Underneath all of it sits the distinction that gives the book its title. Operating means the business cannot function without your daily presence; owning means it can. Many founders are what Peter calls accidental owners: they are superb at their trade, they left to stop building someone else’s equity and simply carried on operating, now in their own name.

His closing message was the one we opened with. Stop treating symptoms as problems, and be honest about whether you own the business or merely operate it, because that answer decides whether you have built something capable of outlasting you.

If any of this sounds like your own situation, the place he points people is the Fatal Snapshot — six questions, under five minutes, free — designed not to tell you where it currently hurts, but where the next breach is most likely to occur before things get messy.

Enjoyed this piece? Become a paid member and get my Consulting with AI prompt library, the full Asking Questions Like a Pro course ($199 standalone), practical templates from a decade of fieldwork, and discounts on many other resources. 🔗 See everything included in the paid tier.

Indeed, almost every conflict gets worse for the same reasons. People stop listening because they’re rehearsing their next point. They argue against a position rather than the person actually in front of them, so they end up swinging at a straw man. They confuse their preferences with their principles, which makes any compromise feel like a betrayal.

They are exchanging arguments instead of trying to understand the point of view and interests of the other person. And they let emotion run the conversation while pretending it isn’t there.

The basic strategies that help are also similar. Listen properly, which means letting the other person finish without composing a rebuttal in your head. Reflect back what you’ve heard before responding, even briefly, so the other person knows they’ve actually been heard. Try to find the interest underneath the position. Be honest about what you want and why. Be willing to discover you were wrong without treating the discovery as a humiliation.

Some related reading on the question-asking side of this:

Tone and timing matter regardless of context. A reasonable point delivered when someone is exhausted, emotional or already defensive is perceived as an attack. The same point made at a calmer moment can be agreed with promptly. Similarly, there is almost never an emergency that requires a difficult conversation to be had at this exact instant; a few hours, sometimes a few days, often improves the outcome substantially.

Sometimes, we approach the conflict totally disconnected from the other party and the context, unaware of what is happening with the people around us and of the system in which we all operate. For example, entering the office of a colleague and engaging in a discussion about the missed project deadline with determination and resolve, not knowing that they just had a heated argument with their partner over the phone and are still emotional — something totally unrelated, which will however significantly affect how they approach the work-focused conversation.

You might reasonably ask at this point: if it’s all so straightforward, why are we so consistently bad at conflict and difficult conversations? Could you just stop reading the article at this point? Not really. Knowing the moves and applying them well at the right scale are two different problems, and that gap is where most of us lose.

What changes as the stakes climb is the calibration of those instincts and the amount of structure you should build around them. The listening skills that resolve a row about the washing-up are not, on their own, adequate to a contested divorce; the formal apparatus that fits a divorce would be ridiculous in the kitchen.

People also make characteristically different mistakes at each level, which means the failure modes are worth exploring as well as the techniques. Let’s dive in.

Low-stakes conflicts

Examples: a flatmate not doing their share of the washing-up, a friend who keeps running late, a small irritation at work.

When the stakes are low, the main risks are letting the tension accumulate or overreacting. People often do both at once. They say nothing for weeks, then erupt about something trivial in a way that’s confusing for the other person and embarrassing for them. Unfortunately, conflicts don’t fade away on their own: they require attention and effort, and avoidance is not a good strategy.

The accumulation problem deserves a bit more depth: because each individual instance feels too small to mention, you don’t say anything. But the irritation doesn’t go anywhere. It just deposits itself somewhere, and after enough deposits the next instance lands on top of all the previous ones rather than being weighed on its own. By the time you do say something, your reaction is calibrated to the running total, while the other person, who has only experienced the latest instance, reasonably thinks you’re being disproportionate. They are right that you are, and you are right that the underlying issue is real. Both can be true at the same time, and the conversation goes badly because neither of you is talking about quite the same thing. This case is an example of the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The right response at this level is usually to mention things early, lightly, and without making them into a verdict on the whole relationship. “Hey, can we figure out the washing-up rota? I’ve been doing most of it the last couple of weeks and it’s starting to bug me” is a complete conversation. It doesn’t need to be solemn. Because the cost of getting it slightly wrong is small, you can be more direct and less rehearsed than you would be in a more loaded situation. The mistake is treating every minor mention as if it were the start of a Big Conversation. That’s exactly how a thirty-second exchange turns into an awkward evening.

Here’s an example:

There’s also a category of low-stakes conflict that needs to be dealt with separately: the kind that gets expressed obliquely. Sarcasm, eye-rolls, pointed silences, slightly cold replies, the well-aimed sigh. These are how a lot of people register dissatisfaction without feeling they’ve started a fight. The trouble is that the other person registers them too, but doesn’t get a chance to respond to anything explicit, so resentment builds on both sides about a conversation that hasn’t actually happened. If you find yourself doing this, it’s usually worth saying the actual thing instead. If you find someone else doing it to you, asking gently and without irony what’s going on tends to work better than matching the tone. Focus on facts, numbers, observable behaviours, not opinions or judgement. And avoid talking too much about the past — rather, discuss future behaviours or actions, only using the source of the current frustrations as a starting point.

A useful reframe is that low-stakes conflicts are often early signals of larger patterns. The argument about the washing-up isn’t really about the washing-up; it’s about feeling that your time is taken less seriously than the other person’s. Treating these small frictions as data, rather than just nuisance, lets you spot patterns while they’re still cheap to address. A medium-stakes conflict is, very often, a low-stakes conflict that nobody dealt with in time.

And, by the way, there is a very much alive myth that the closer we are to the other person, the fewer conflicts should emerge. Exactly the opposite is true: the risk of tension and friction increases as we get more intimate. A strong relationship is usually one where the people involved have the skills and ability to resolve small, low-stakes conflicts early and smoothly.

Medium-stakes conflicts

Examples: ongoing tensions at work, disagreements with partners about money or parenting, frictions with siblings or in-laws, disputes with neighbours.

Medium-stakes conflicts are where most adults spend a lot of their lives. The defining feature is that the relationship is going to continue and the issue is likely to recur in some form. That changes the calculation in two ways. You can’t just win and walk away, because you’ll see this person on Monday or at Christmas. And you can’t avoid the topic indefinitely without the avoidance itself becoming the problem.

These conflicts reward more structure. It helps to pick a deliberate moment to talk rather than letting the conversation erupt opportunistically, and to flag it beforehand so the other person isn’t ambushed. That gives them time to think rather than time to defend, and signals that you’re taking the issue seriously enough to plan for.

It helps to separate the specific incident from the larger pattern, so the other person isn’t being asked to defend a year of behaviour all at once. Most people will dig in if they feel everything is up for review, whereas they will engage if the conversation has visible edges (this is what we discussed as the ‘Movie Scene’ in a recent article and live with ). If the underlying pattern really is the issue, you can come back to it once the specific incident has been talked through. Trying to do both in the same sitting tends to produce a row about the wrong thing.

Writing things down beforehand, even only for yourself, clarifies what you actually think and stops you drifting onto tangents under pressure. The exercise often reveals that you want several things, some of which are in tension, and that you haven’t yet decided which matters most. If a workplace issue is heading anywhere that might involve HR or a tribunal, these notes become genuinely useful rather than just reassuring. Ideally, all conflicting parties should come prepared — improvisation from a blank page usually ends badly or takes too much time and energy.

A particular trap at this level is the difference between airing a grievance and trying to solve a problem. They look similar from the outside but have very different shapes:

• Airing tends to be one-directional and complete in itself: you say the thing, the other person hears it, the air is somewhat clearer.

• Solving requires both parties to commit to specific changes, which means both parties have to bring something to give up.

You should be honest with yourself about which one you’re going for. Going in claiming to want a solution while actually wanting to be heard is a reliable way to end up worse than you started:

A third party can help at this level, though they don’t have to be a professional. You mainly need someone who can slow the conversation down and reflect back what each side is saying. The point of a third party is to break the loop where each person keeps hearing the worst possible version of what the other one said (“He always takes me for granted!” or “She won’t tell me what she wants from me!”).

The judgment call at this level is when to escalate something towards more structured handling and when to keep working it out informally. The signals that something has outgrown informal handling are reasonably consistent:

• The same conversation keeps happening with no progress.

• One party is using power they didn’t previously have, such as a manager who has started writing things up or a partner who’s started talking about leaving.

• The issue is starting to spill into other parts of your life, like your sleep, your work or other relationships.

None of these on their own mean the situation has become high-stakes, but they suggest the informal approach has stopped paying off.

High-stakes conflicts

Examples: divorce and custody, major financial disputes, business breakups, serious workplace allegations, deep estrangements within families.

High-stakes conflicts are the ones where the outcome can reshape your life. Here the rules change in ways that can feel very uncomfortable if you’re used to handling things informally.

You generally need professionals, like a family solicitor, a mediator, an employment lawyer or a therapist. The consequences of a misstep at this level are large enough that you want someone whose job is to think clearly while you can’t. People often resist this on cost grounds and end up paying far more for the consequences of going it alone.

The choice of professional matters. A specialist in your kind of dispute is generally worth more than a generalist with more years on the clock. Personal recommendations from people who’ve been through something similar are more reliable than online reviews, which over-represent the very pleased and the very angry. It’s normal to have an initial conversation with two or three before picking one: you’re buying someone whose temperament you can stand for the next year, and whose willingness to tell you uncomfortable things you actually trust.

Here’s an example of how the choice of professional often goes wrong:

You also need to be more careful about what you say and where, and slow your communication down. Things written in anger by text or email have a habit of being read aloud later in rooms that you didn’t expect.

If you have seen recent high-stakes trials (like the Musk v OpenAI one), you will know that this isn’t paranoia. High-stakes disputes routinely involve people you trusted last year and don’t trust now:

So, a useful working rule is to assume any message you send during a high-stakes dispute might end up in front of a judge, an arbitrator or someone else’s lawyer. Most won’t, but writing as if they might removes a whole category of regret.

When it comes to high-stakes conflicts, friends and family are a complicated resource. You’ll need people to talk to, and the people who love you will want to help. They are also, in many cases, poor sources of strategic advice, because they care about you rather than about the outcome and they will often tell you what they think you want to hear. The healthier pattern is to use them for emotional support and use professionals for advice, and to notice when those two things are getting tangled up.

That kind of emotional support is important, because self-care is part of the strategy rather than an indulgence. Sleep, food, exercise and someone to talk to who isn’t a party to the dispute are what keep you from making decisions that look reasonable at midnight and disastrous in the morning. Long, high-stakes conflicts wear people down, and the side that holds itself together better often does better, because they’re still capable of clear thought when the other side isn’t.

The hardest skill at high stakes is knowing when to settle and when to hold out. Most people swing between the two extremes, capitulating early to make the discomfort stop, or digging in past the point where winning costs more than losing. A good, detached adviser helps you see the realistic range of outcomes and the actual cost of the fight, so the decision is made on something other than how you happen to feel that day or week.

The cost of the fight includes months or years of your life, the relationships that survive the dispute and the ones that don’t, and the version of yourself you’re becoming while it’s going on. So you need to avoid becoming the conflict. When something occupies enough of your attention for long enough, it can take over your sense of who you are, so that even when the dispute ends you’ve lost the ability to think about anything else.

The people who come through high-stakes conflicts best tend to be the ones who keep some part of their life ring-fenced from the dispute, even when that feels frivolous or disloyal to the cause. A weekly tennis game, a project at work, a friendship that has nothing to do with the matter: these things are how you preserve the person who will have to live the life that comes after.

A throughline

The counterintuitive thing about stakes is that most people get worse at conflict as the stakes rise, when actually they need to get better. The pull is in the wrong direction at exactly the wrong moment: less sleep, more fear, fewer reliable advisers, a stronger urge to win. All when the cost of winning badly is highest.

It also helps to remember what you’re actually trying to preserve. In a small dispute, it’s usually the ordinary functioning of a relationship you don’t want to have to think much about. In a larger one, it’s a partnership or a working arrangement you’ll need to keep using. In the worst kind, it’s something deeper: the version of yourself you’ll be living with when the matter is finally over, and the people you’ll still want around you then.

The unhelpful instinct in any of these is to treat the conflict as a contest with a winner. Most disagreements between people are problems to be solved together, even when one party has been clearly in the wrong. The aim throughout is a state of affairs both people can live with going forward, with as little damage along the way as possible.

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’s book, The Trapped Operator, is built on the conviction that this framing is, almost without exception, wrong. It argues that the named problem is not the problem, but a signal. So, until you are asking questions about the architecture beneath the signal, you are just responding to the noise that an underlying condition is making.

The business has changed, but the fixes haven’t

Bergeron observes that if we treat each problem as a discrete event we end up addressing the same problem repeatedly, in slightly different disguises. A cash crunch is solved with a new line of credit. Several months later, the same crunch returns, this time magnified by the debt accumulated from the last one.

The diagnostic alternative he advocates is to stop asking “What caused this?” and start asking “Which underlying system is failing to contain the pressure that is producing this?” The two questions sound similar, but they produce entirely different conversations. The first looks for an event. The second looks for an architecture.

However, the reason the same problems return is not always that the underlying condition was never addressed: the business itself might have changed, too. In practice, Bergeron rejects the traditional lifecycle framing of startup, growth, maturity, decline, and replaces it with what he calls operational states: survival, scale, and stability.

A business doesn’t move through these in sequence and exit them in a linear way. These are parts of a cycle, and a business can go back and forth across its history: a mature company hit by a new competitor can be back in survival conditions within twelve months; a stable firm that launches a new product line re-enters the scaling problems it had left behind.

The fixes that worked at one point were built for the structure and pressure of a particular state. When the business shifts and starts carrying a different kind of load, those fixes stop holding, because the architecture they were designed for is no longer in place.

The vocabulary problem

Seeing that the same problems keep returning is one thing. Describing what is actually wrong with the business is harder, and most people cannot do it until they find the right vocabulary.

When Bergeron names 12 recurring issues — inadequate capitalisation, client overdependence, ineffective marketing, ineffective management, and more — he reports that business owners find their own situation in the list within minutes. The relief on their faces, he writes, comes from the realisation that what they have been carrying alone is in fact a documented condition that other businesses have navigated.

The methodological warning here is that the line between giving someone the vocabulary they need and putting words in their mouth is not always obvious. In my own consulting work, I see this all the time: participants who light up when you offer them a phrase, and others who simply agree with whatever framing you bring. Telling the two apart is most of the craft. Bergeron’s framework manages it by being descriptive rather than evaluative, and by leaving people to recognise themselves in the description rather than being told where they belong.

Six questions to rule them all

I hope J.R.R. Tolkien will forgive me for turning his poem into a business lesson, but this is very much the argument that Bergeron makes in his book: six questions are enough to point you towards the specific conditions that determine whether a small business is stuck.

And the questions, which are meant to be rated on a scale of agreement (1-5), are deceptively plain. For example:

A sudden 50% drop in revenue for one month would not materially change how we operate.

The business continues to perform and adapt effectively when I step away from day-to-day decisions.

Each question is doing structural work, trying to surface where the business is most likely to break rather than what is currently noisiest. Together, they map the load-bearing points of the organisation. And, once these have been identified, the question becomes what to do about them.

Interestingly, most of the advice that businesses receive — and most of the advice that consultants are paid to give — is built around problem elimination. Bergeron argues that this is the wrong frame, because organisations always contain weaknesses, and the more appropriate question is whether the surrounding systems are strong enough to absorb the stress those weaknesses produce.

A business with a thin marketing function can run for years if its customer service and word-of-mouth are strong enough to compensate. A business with weak financial controls can survive if its margins are generous enough to mask the inefficiency. So the point is not whether each function is strong in isolation, but whether the whole architecture can take the strain.

This has two implications:

• The first is that triaging by visible severity tends to misallocate effort, because the most visible problem is often the one that has just exceeded its containment, not the one that is structurally most dangerous. Personally, I have seen large and mature organisations, too, address issues based on visible severity — and routinely advise my clients that the most frequent complaints we hear in a consultation are not necessarily the most significant.

• The second implication is that recommending the elimination of a weakness without strengthening the surrounding systems can leave the organisation worse off, because the workarounds that were absorbing the weakness might get dismantled along with it.

The question that cannot be asked from inside

Bergeron draws a careful distinction between operating a business and owning one. Operating means the business cannot function without your daily presence. Owning means it can. Most founders, by his account, set out intending to own and end up operating, without ever quite noticing the moment the transition stopped happening.

The test he proposes is simple to state: Could the organisation survive a sustained absence of its founder? Could the decisions, the relationships, the institutional knowledge and the directional judgement be carried by anyone else?

Founders struggle to answer this honestly because their own indispensability is the water they swim in. It is easy to mistake the workarounds they perform every day (the calls they take, the approvals they grant, the relationships they maintain personally) for ordinary management rather than for the substitute structure they have become.

It is common, in cases like these, for a founder to describe the business in operational terms while the staff describe it in personal-dependency terms. The gap between those two descriptions is the diagnostic finding, and it is often the founder, not the staff, who is surprised by it.

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Today, we sat down for our third live to dig into the subject properly, and the conversation went well beyond the article. Jen opened with a line that framed the whole hour:

We argued that withholding clarity from your team members, however gently you do it, is frankly mean. Jen sees the vague-feedback pattern constantly in her HR work, and she was emphatic that it almost never comes from bad managers. It comes from thoughtful ones trying to preserve trust, who badly underestimate how much employees would prefer a respectful, difficult conversation over a confusing one that leaves them with more questions than answers.

In practice, the employee always pays first, and the cost can be steep: they’re robbed of the specific information they need to improve, and an issue that was genuinely simple to fix in the moment can compound into performance improvement plans and a derailed career. Jen’s reminder throughout was that most of these conversations are far lower-stakes than people have built them up to be in their own head, so it is a true shame that they don’t get resolved.

Something we explored in our conversation is the fact that having serious conversations is genuinely hard work. You do need to prepare! Jen’s suggestion (and she acknowledged that people roll their eyes at role-play) was to rehearse the opening of the conversation out loud, in the mirror or to your cat, in your own natural voice. The opening is the hardest part. So once you have a couple of go-to first sentences that sound like you, the rest tends to flow. A script in someone else’s voice fails because the receiver can feel it. “You don’t normally talk to me like this” is not the reaction you want.

I shared my own version of this. Faced recently with a difficult conversation with a family member, I described the situation to Claude and asked for sensitive ways to broach it. And then I spent days rehearsing in the shower and the car, because whatever an AI gives you needs to be turned into something that will sound like you when you say it out loud. By the time the conversation happened, it came out naturally and with empathy rather than as a recitation.

We also kept returning to repair. If you catch yourself circling mid-conversation, you can simply say so and start again: acknowledging the thing lowers the temperature in the room rather than raising it, because the receiver almost always already knew. Jen widened this beautifully into parenting. She and her partner practise it with their son: when a conversation comes out harsher than intended, they go back and say “I don’t like the way I said that, let’s try that again.” I do something similar with my own child, and we agreed the workplace version earns the same response. Revisiting a conversation you handled badly tends to earn respect from your team, because both of you have had time to think.

The audience questions took us somewhere the article never went:

• Can feedback be weaponised? Yes, sometimes deliberately. For Jen, the marker is feedback with nothing actionable in it: telling someone something with no path to improving is feedback being used to break a person down. I described two further shapes: “pretend feedback”, which is really just frustration delivered in a nasty tone and dressed up afterwards as candour; and the slower, more corrosive pattern where a senior person uses a steady drip of criticism to keep a junior colleague small until they stop putting themselves forward at all. We agreed that the person doing the weaponising is rarely receptive to being asked to stop. Document the instances, use the proper channels, and seriously consider getting out.

• Motivational versus developmental feedback? Jen drew the line cleanly: motivational feedback builds confidence, developmental feedback expands capability, and both are necessary. The trap is treating feedback as something you only deliver when things go wrong. I shared two practices from my firm: opening team meetings with “good news stories” of recent client praise, and giving “what went well” its own box in performance reviews alongside “what could improve”. Jen described something richer from her organisation, which is Indigenous and Native-led: colleagues sit in circle and name the “medicine” each person brings to the work. Hers is relational. Because everyone knows it, colleagues notice when her medicine seems diminished, and that becomes a human entry point for a check-in. Feedback, in that framing, can be as simple as “You don’t seem quite yourself.”

• And the feedback sandwich? (Or, as our questioner cheekily called it, the S sandwich) We were unanimous: absolutely not. Burying the important message between two slices of praise feels like talking to two people at once, underestimates the receiver’s intelligence, and serves the giver’s comfort rather than the receiver’s understanding. Jen offered the best analogy of the hour, from her early career with Chanel: when applying blush, the first touch to the cheek carries the most pigment. Similarly, the first thing you say in a conversation leaves the deepest impression. Decide what most needs to land, and lead with it. The right time for good feedback is when good things happen, not three weeks later as packaging for bad news.

That's a wrap on live number three. If you enjoyed it, the original piece is here. And do subscribe to Jen's publication, Uncompliant, for more on what's broken in HR and what to do about it.

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🎥 Some of this article is also covered in a video on Exploring ChatGPT’s YouTube channel - take a look and subscribe!

There’s a habit that’s become surprisingly common for people who work with data. You export a spreadsheet, open your favourite chatbot, paste the whole thing in, and type something like: “Can you help me make sense of this?”

It works. Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are good at it. But it’s also a bit like printing out your bank statement to ask your accountant a question, watching them answer, then shredding the printout and doing the whole thing again next week.

You’re starting from zero every time. And that’s a problem worth solving.

Why you shouldn’t “just paste it in”

When you drop raw data into a general-purpose chat, you’re wasting a lot of time (as well as tokens, i.e. energy!):

• You have to copy the data manually.

• You have to explain the schema, at least to an extent (what the columns mean, what units they’re in, where the numbers came from).

• You have to explain to the AI the context and reasons for looking at the data in the first place.

And quite often you won't have visualised the data yourself before asking the AI your questions, which means you could be missing important cues, like peaks and troughs you weren't expecting.

The result is that you deal with an AI that is technically capable but contextually lost. Every answer comes with an asterisk: based on what you pasted, which may or may not be current, complete, or what you actually meant.

There’s a better way, and we’re here to help! (for free)

Embedding AI in your data

First, a fair caveat: if you have a one-off dataset and a one-off question, pasting it into a chat is probably fine. The friction is acceptable for something you’ll never look at again.

But most data worth caring about isn’t like that. It gets updated. And you come back to it weekly, or daily, or every time something changes. Each time you do, you repeat the same setup ritual (re-paste, re-explain, re-verify) and then spend time quality-checking the AI’s answers because you’re never quite sure what context it might be missing.

Think about the dashboards people actually live in: a business performance report that refreshes every Monday, a financial portfolio that moves daily, a weather feed that updates by the hour. In every one of these cases, the data changes but the questions stay roughly the same. And the opportunity is the same too: connect chat capabilities directly to the data source, so the AI is always working from current, correctly-structured information and persistent context rather than whatever you remembered to paste.

A concrete example: The API Whisperer

To make this tangible, we built a small app called The API Whisperer. The app is deliberately minimal: we’re not trying to impress anyone with the code. What we want to achieve is to show you the pattern as clearly as possible so you can adapt it.

The API Whisperer does four things:

1. Fetches live weather data for Rome, Italy from the open-meteo API (free, no key required)

2. Saves the data to two CSV files (one for hourly data, one for daily)

3. Renders an interactive dashboard with charts: temperature range, UV index, precipitation, wind speed (screenshot below)

4. Gives you a chat interface powered by Claude Code, positioned right next to the charts

The AI chat functionality reads the documentation, the code, and the data schema on every turn. So when you ask “Do I need sunscreen tomorrow?”, Claude isn’t guessing. It knows the UV index field exists, what scale it’s on, and what today’s date is relative to the forecast data.

The AI can even explain its own code. Ask it “How does the chat work?” and it will walk you through chat.py accurately, because it literally just read it. This is not what you’d do in a production app, as this processes unnecessary tokens - but it’s a great feature in an educational app like this.

One thing worth flagging up front: the chat runs through Claude Code rather than direct API calls, so you'll need this installed and authenticated. That takes a couple of minutes if you haven't done it before, and it means the app costs you nothing beyond your existing Claude subscription (i.e. no per-token billing).

Get The API Whisperer! It's free.

Would you like to hear more about this subject? Check out ’s YouTube channel to watch a full discussion!

The pattern, not the project

The weather example is illustrative, and the pattern is what matters. Swap the data source and you have something completely different:

• Replace open-meteo with a finance API and you have a portfolio dashboard where you can ask “How did my holdings perform relative to the S&P this week?”

• Replace it with a fitness tracker API and you can ask “Am I sleeping more on days I exercise?”

• Replace it with your company’s sales data export and you can ask “Which product line drove Q2 growth?”

In every case, the architecture is the same:

Fetch → Store → Visualise → Chat

The fetch step gets live or recent data. The store step writes it to a simple format (CSV is fine, no database needed for most use cases). The visualise step gives you something to look at and explore. And the chat step connects a language model to all of the above, with the full context baked in.

The barrier is lower than you think

The thing that surprises people about an app like The API Whisperer is how little code it takes. Three Python files. One HTML file for the visuals. No database. No cloud infrastructure. No API key for the weather data.

This simplicity is intentional. The app is designed to be read and understood in an afternoon, then adapted for whatever data you actually care about (and remember that your AI of choice can update it for you).

The key point here is the habit: when you’re working with data that matters to you, give your AI assistant the context it needs to be genuinely useful. Wire it in once. Then just ask.

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A client changes their mind. A new stakeholder walks in with different expectations. The thing your team built, and that everyone agreed was right, is suddenly under scrutiny from someone who wasn’t even there when the decisions were made.

What matters in those moments is not what you know, but whether you can manage and absorb the pressure before it affects your team.

Want to go straight to our top tips?

Be the heat shield

In space flight, re-entry is the dangerous part, because friction becomes extreme. The atmosphere doesn’t care that your design is elegant. You always need a heat shield to absorb the heat long enough for everything else to survive the descent.

That’s a useful metaphor for leadership in professional services. Here’s an example from Andrea’s experience:

Halfway through a project, the client lead who had commissioned the work moved into a different role. Their replacement, a newly appointed director, inherited the engagement with none of the context and all of the authority. Within a week, they had reviewed what the team had produced so far and scheduled a call to say they weren’t happy. The work was too strategic, they said. They needed operational detail, implementation timelines and clearer ownership. What they were really saying, though it took a few days to fully understand, was: I didn’t ask for this, I don’t yet trust you, but I need to put my stamp on it.

The team felt it immediately. A more junior colleague had built the core of the deliverable and had been getting positive feedback for weeks. Overnight, that validation disappeared. You could see the energy shift in our conversation, and my colleague started second-guessing their own work and hedging their language, asking for approval on things they would normally just get on with.

My immediate instinct was to get the new lead on a call and walk them through the rationale behind every decision. Essentially, defend the work and show them the evidence trail. That would have been satisfying and completely counterproductive, because the issue was never the quality of the work. The issue was that a new stakeholder needed to feel they had shaped the engagement, and until that happened, nothing our team produced was going to land.

So instead of defending, I absorbed it. I told my colleague that the feedback was manageable and that I’d handle the client relationship while they kept building. Then I went back to the client lead with a different framing: not “here’s why we did what we did,” but “help me understand what success looks like for you.” That gave them room to discuss the engagement on their terms, and provided us with the input we needed to reshape some of the deliverables. Within a fortnight, they were citing the team’s work approvingly in their steering committee updates, including things produced before the change in leadership. This was the same work they had initially pushed back on. They just needed to feel the ownership.

My team never saw most of that, and they didn’t need to. What my colleague needed was enough stability to keep thinking clearly while the ground shifted, and that meant someone had to stand between them and the friction without passing it through.

When ambiguity spikes and uncertainty becomes contagious, someone has to absorb the heat without transferring it. That doesn’t mean suppressing emotion or pretending nothing is happening. It means holding the pressure in a way that protects the team’s ability to think and act.

It’s all about trajectory

Leadership cannot stay inside your head, because it lives in the social system. And the gap between having a good read on a situation and actually leading through it is larger than most people expect.

Think about what usually happens when a project stalls or a team loses momentum. Most strong performers do the same thing: they analyse harder. They produce a sharper diagnosis of what’s going wrong or build a better deck. These are useful instincts, and in individual-contributor work they tend to get rewarded. But in a leadership moment, the bottleneck is that the group hasn’t converged on what to do about a new challenge, or that the social dynamics (whether internally or with the client) are preventing movement.

The kind of interventions that unblock these situations can sound disappointingly simple. It might be acknowledging a disagreement that everyone can feel but nobody has said out loud. It might be making a provisional call - “let’s go with this for the next two weeks and revisit” - so the team has something to move towards rather than something to keep debating. It might be noticing that the loudest person around us has been driving the conversation and explicitly inviting a person who’s been quiet to weigh in.

None of these moves require you to be especially brilliant. What they do require is that you stay alert and read what the group needs in that moment and to act on it. That’s what focusing on the group’s trajectory means in practice: pursuing the intervention that gets people moving in a direction they can sustain.

Status and charisma can make this easier, but they aren’t the mechanism. You can chair a meeting with full authority and still leave with nothing resolved, because you spent the time presenting your view instead of steering the group towards a decision. Indeed, effective leadership can come from people with no formal authority at all, who simply ask the right question at the right time.

You can be personally insightful and still fail to lead, because sometimes the room doesn’t need your thoughts. It needs an outcome it can live with and a process it can trust.

We have built a toolkit that helps you practise exactly this. It includes development paths for beginners, intermediate and advanced practitioners, tools, AI prompts and frameworks that we use every day.

This article maps to the Leadership section in the toolkit - which is one of five! For the Leadership section, we have four tailored assets:

1️⃣ AI Prompt: Post-Meeting Decision Checklist

2️⃣ Conflict as a Leadership Tool

3️⃣ Diagnostic: Closure, Patience or Avoidance

4️⃣ Act Like a Leader

This toolkit is part of our full guide on the five superpowers of consultants - the capabilities that consistently separate impactful from merely competent people in high-stakes environments. You can read more about Synthesis, Curiosity, Adaptability, Leadership and Engagement - the SCALE framework - here:

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People carry a surprisingly durable impression of how a colleague conducted themselves when a project failed, or of how a decision they had personally argued for fell apart (if you’re interested, you can read more about the negativity bias and peak-end effects). This has an awkward implication, and it is one that most people never act on. The moment a miss becomes visible is one of the highest-leverage moments in a career, not one of the lowest. It is rare, it is watched more closely than ordinary work, and the impression it leaves is unusually sticky.

A visible miss can cut either way. Handled badly, it does real and lasting damage, and most are handled badly. Handled with even modest skill, the same miss can build a kind of credit that a run of good results rarely produces, because conduct under pressure is read as a signal about the person, where good results are often put down to luck, timing or the team. The argument here is not that failing is good for you. It is that the outcome is unusually sensitive to what you do in the next day or two, and that the smaller number of misses handled well are what this is about.

The instinct, though, is to do the opposite when things go poorly: you just want to get through the moment, keep the exposure small, and move on as fast as possible. But that instinct throws the leverage away.

In a hurry? Read The Setback Protocol.

This resource (alongside lots of other things!) is free for paid subscribers to either of our publications.

What most of us are never taught

Most of us were trained carefully in the things organisations know how to train: planning, analysis, running a team, building and presenting a recommendation. But very few were ever taught what to actually do in the day or two after their own work falls short.

The standard advice fills the silence without helping. “Own it and move on” is true and close to useless at the same time, because it describes where you are meant to end up and says nothing about how to get there. It is the management equivalent of being told to “be healthier.”

To effectively deal with errors in real time, two jobs are involved – and most people try to do them at once:

• The first is internal: turning the miss from an emotional event into a clear, honest reading of what happened and what has to change as a result.

• The second is external: taking that reading and building it into a message for the people whose trust you depend on to do the job.

Fuse the two, or do them in the wrong order, and the result comes out either raw and slightly defensive or careful and evasive. Separate them, do them in sequence, and give each one a structure, and the same underlying facts read as competence rather than as damage being contained.

The part that can be learned

The encouraging thing is that handling a miss well does not depend on temperament, and no personality type is locked out of doing this part of the job competently.

Keeping your credibility intact through a turbulent situation, and sometimes strengthening it, is a learnable skill, and it begins with a single insight that people usually resist: you do not have to hide the miss, and you do not have to absorb all of the blame for it. Once that is settled, the situation becomes something you can think through rather than something you have to survive.

From our experience across corporate and consulting roles, the people who do this well tend to move through the same three stages, whether or not they would describe it in those terms.

The first stage is processing. At some point soon after a miss becomes visible, you will have to account for it to someone who matters, such as a manager, a client, a board or the team you lead. And before you do, you need a clean reading of what actually happened, both factually and psychologically. That ideally means collecting a few pieces of feedback from people who saw the situation from a different angle, though this depends on the environment in your organisation. If you skip this stage and walk into that conversation still carrying the emotional charge of the miss, the listener tends to register that within the first sentence, well before they register the content.

The second stage is preparation. The same miss does not warrant the same conversation with everyone, and the level of trust the audience already extends to you changes what can be said and how directly. Skipping this step is the most common reason a well-processed miss still lands badly.

The third stage is narration, which is where most of the anxiety sits, even though it is the most structured part of the three once the earlier work has been done. Several reasonable frameworks exist, and the approach we have found works most reliably across industries and levels of seniority is FOCUS. It stands for:

• Framing. How you position the miss.

• Observation. What happened, conclusion-first, with a number.

• Context. How bad things are, really.

• Understanding. The under-the-surface interpretation of why it happened.

• Solution. What now, and what support you need.

On the page it might sound elaborate, but in practice FOCUS is doing something quite simple. It forces you to think through the situation clearly before you try to communicate it. Running a difficult moment through that structure tends to produce a better message, and it often resolves a meaningful part of the underlying problem along the way, because the act of structuring your thinking surfaces what actually happened and what the sensible next move is.

The cumulative effect is that, by the time you are having the conversation, you are no longer simply reporting a miss. You are arriving with an analysis of it and a credible view of what comes next, which is much closer to what people are pointing at when they talk about “seniority” or “executive presence,” or when they say a colleague needs to “sound more confident” and “earn more trust from senior stakeholders.”

We put together a resource for anyone who wants to take this further. It includes a step-by-step guide to the processing and preparation stages, the full FOCUS message structure, guidance on adjusting your message by audience and trust level, and an AI prompt that will reframe any rough draft into a FOCUS-structured message in minutes.

Check how strong your narration skills are right now and get our formula to level it up - all at the price of a coffee! 👇 This resource (alongside lots of other things!) is free for paid subscribers to either of our publications.

Get The Setback Protocol via Gumroad!

Either way, none of this makes a miss enjoyable. What it changes is where you end up over time.

The credit you build on the hard days is invisible while you are earning it, and then it is decisive at the moments that are never put to a vote. This kind of standing traces back, almost always, to a few hard moments that were handled as though they mattered.

The bad day, in the end, is one they remember.

About : Most mid-level managers don't have a knowledge problem, they have a practice problem. Leadership Capabilities System publication is about closing that gap: translating leadership ideas into the specific behaviours and practices that change how you show up, day to day.

Check out her publication here!

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