Small Wins Add Up
# The Project I Almost Killed, And What Five Years of Hindsight Taught Me About Momentum I still remember sitting across from my programme manager in month three, watching her make a genuinely reasonable case for why we should stop. She was not wrong on the facts: the project had no visible wins, the team was tired, and the internal stakeholders who had commissioned the work had already moved on to three other priorities. We were rebuilding a regulatory reporting framework for a business unit that had been quietly non-compliant for years, not dramatically, not dangerously, but consistently enough that someone senior had eventually noticed and handed me the problem, the kind of problem that arrives without fanfare and leaves without applause. She laid out the argument for pausing clearly, professionally, with a slide deck that made stopping look almost responsible. I nearly said yes, not because I believed it was the right call, but because I was tired too, and tired people find well-reasoned arguments more persuasive than they should. The Situation I was working on this project in 2019. The business unit had been operating on a patchwork of manual processes and institutional memory for the better part of a decade. Nobody had deliberately built a broken system: it had simply grown in the way most broken systems grow, one pragmatic workaround at a time, until the workarounds became the system. My job was to replace it with something that would actually hold under regulatory scrutiny. The challenge was that progress, in this kind of work, does not look like progress for a long time. I was not building features, I was excavating. Every week we found another process that existed only inside someone’s head, another data feed that connected to a spreadsheet no one had updated since 2016, another exception that had been handled manually so long it had stopped being seen as an exception at all. To anyone watching from outside the room, we appeared to be standing still. My programme manager’s case for pausing was rational: a pause, she argued, would give us time to regroup, re-engage stakeholders, and come back with a cleaner plan. The logic was sound, and that is precisely why it was dangerous. In complex rebuilds, “coming back with a cleaner plan” is usually a polite way of describing the moment a team loses its nerve and never quite recovers it. I had seen it before, the pause that becomes a pivot that becomes a quiet cancellation eighteen months later. What I said instead was this: we are not pausing, but we are going to do one thing differently. Every week, I would identify one thing that is measurably better than it was seven days ago, not a milestone, not a formal deliverable, just one thing, documented, visible, shared with the team. It sounds almost embarrassingly simple, that is, I suppose, the point. What the Next Five Years Taught Me The first insight is that momentum is not a feeling, it is a record. What changed from month three onwards was not the pace of work, it was the existence of evidence. Every Friday, there was something concrete to point to: a data feed validated, a manual step eliminated, a process documented for the first time. Individually, each item was unremarkable, collectively, they became the proof that the project was alive. And that proof did something I had not fully anticipated, it made the team stop measuring progress against the original plan and start measuring it against last week, that is a much more honest comparison, and a far more sustainable one. I have since watched organisations spend enormous energy on formal programme governance, traffic-light reports, steering committees, milestone reviews, while neglecting the simpler practice of recording what actually improved. The bureaucracy of progress is not the same as progress itself. The second insight is that stopping teaches something you cannot easily unteach. Had we paused in month three, the framework would probably have resumed eventually, projects like this rarely die entirely, they get restarted, rebranded, handed to someone new. But the team would have carried a piece of learning that I think is genuinely corrosive in professional environments: that when progress is hard to see, stopping is the appropriate response. That lesson travels, it shows up in the next project, and the one after that, as a lowered threshold for retreat. The damage of an unnecessary pause is rarely visible in the project itself, it is visible in the people. The third insight is the one that took longest to articulate clearly: consistency is not the slow path. Most senior people I know, and I include myself in this, with some embarrassment, are instinctively drawn to the bold intervention, the restructure, the strategic pivot, the announcement that signals decisive leadership. These things have their place, but I have watched more value created by sustained, unglamorous consistency than by any single bold move, and I have watched more value destroyed by the instinct to reach for drama when patience was actually what the situation required. The regulatory framework that is now running across three regions was not born from a brilliant insight in month three, it was built one documented improvement at a time, over two years, by a team that had decided to stay in the room. What This Means in Practice If I am leading a complex programme right now, a technology rebuild, a regulatory change, a cultural shift, and progress is invisible, the question worth asking is not whether to pause, it is whether I have created the conditions for small progress to be seen at all. Most organisations are reasonably good at celebrating the launch and catastrophically bad at recognising the incremental work that makes launches possible. The team that ships quietly, week after week, without a milestone in sight, is doing the most important work in the building, they are also the most likely to be told to pause. I build the record, I show
Small Steps, Big Progress: A Personal Leadership Story
The Particular Silence of a Programme That Has Learned to Perform Momentum I recall a specific kind of organisational stillness that does not announce itself, no alarm, no escalation call, no red flag on the RAG status. Just the quiet hum of meetings that end with actions nobody completes, decks that get refined rather than decided upon, and governance forums that produce minutes instead of movement. If you have ever sat inside this silence, you will recognise it immediately. If you have not yet encountered it, you will, and you will almost certainly mistake it for progress, because it has learned to dress that way. Stalled is not stopped. Stopped is visible. Stopped has a reason, a postmortem, a recovery plan. Stalled is insidious precisely because it looks, from a distance, like careful deliberation. The calendar is full. The stakeholders are engaged. The strategy deck has been updated to version fourteen. And yet the organisation has not moved, not really, in months. I spent the better part of a year inside exactly this situation, and the most uncomfortable thing I can tell you is that I did not see it clearly until much later. Not because I was not paying attention. Because the absence of crisis can be its own kind of blindfold. Eighteen Months In I was mid-programme, the dangerous middle, where the initial energy has long since dissipated and the end is still too far away to generate any fresh urgency, when I finally sat with the numbers and let them tell me something I had been avoiding. We were eighteen months into a cross-regional data transformation. The kind of programme that involves multiple geographies, legacy infrastructure that predates most of the team, regulatory considerations across jurisdictions, and the careful, painstaking work of getting organisations that have operated independently to agree on something as fundamental as how data should be classified. I had the governance forums. I had the steering committee. I had a transformation office and a methodology and a set of principles that had been workshopped, reviewed, socialised and signed off. What I did not have, when I sat down and looked at it honestly, was a single team that had completed a full migration and was operating differently as a result. I remember the specific meeting where this registered. Not a crisis point, there was no shouting, no failed deadline, no public moment of reckoning. Just a quiet conversation with two of my leads in which we tried to articulate what had actually changed in the last quarter, and found ourselves talking mainly about what we had prepared rather than what we had done. The decks were excellent. The readiness assessments were thorough. The roadmaps were beautifully structured. I had spent months building a perfect runway and had not yet taken off. The dry version of this is: I had optimised for planning and confused it with progress. The honest version is: I had let the programme learn to perform momentum, and I had not noticed quickly enough. What Actually Shifted The first insight sounds almost embarrassingly simple in retrospect, which is usually a sign that it is genuine. I stopped measuring against the destination and started measuring against last Thursday. Not last quarter. Not the original programme plan. Last week. The question I began asking in every team check-in was not “where are we relative to where we need to be?” but “what is different today that was not true seven days ago?” This change in reference point sounds minor. It is not. Measuring against a distant destination in a multi-year enterprise programme is a near-perfect mechanism for generating demoralisation, because the gap never closes fast enough to feel real. Measuring against last week creates a completely different relationship with forward motion, because even the smallest genuine movement becomes visible, and visible movement compounds. The second shift came from a single word, and I want to be precise about this because the word itself matters. The word was adjacent. Not “forward.” Not “progress”, a word so large it had become meaningless in our conversations. Adjacent: the next thing that is close enough to reach without requiring the organisation to believe again in the entirety of the vision. In practical terms, this meant I stopped trying to create conditions for the whole programme to move simultaneously and started identifying one data domain, one team, one geography where the conditions were already nearly right. I migrated that domain. I made it real, visible, and unremarkable, not a pilot, not an experiment, just the way that team now worked. Then I waited. Within a few weeks, the team running that domain had begun talking informally to the next team along. A regional lead asked to replicate the approach. The conversation changed from “why should we do this” to “how did you do that.” This is not a new insight about change management. But experiencing it at enterprise scale, after months of stalled momentum, makes it feel like a discovery every time. The third insight is the most counter-intuitive, and it is the one I am most confident about after everything I have seen in large institutions: small steps are not a compromise. They are not what I do when I cannot get organisational permission for the real approach. They are the only mechanism that actually works at enterprise scale, because enterprise scale means I cannot ask the entire organisation to believe in something it has not yet experienced. I can only ask a small part of it to take a step small enough to be genuinely reversible, and then let the evidence of that step do the work that no vision document ever could. What This Means for Your Programme If any of this is familiar, the full calendar, the unremarkable governance forums, the strategy deck on its fourteenth iteration, the question worth sitting with is not “what is wrong with our approach?” but “what is the one thing that could be different by next Thursday?”
Deep Focus as a Leadership Discipline
The Hedge Is the Trap I was running four workstreams across two geographies in late 2022. Each one had a legitimate case. I could have defended any of them in front of a board. There was a regulatory thread in one, a commercial opportunity in another, a partnership that had been eighteen months in the making, and a technology build that we had already sunk real money into. Individually, each made sense. Together, they made a very convincing picture of a senior executive who was across everything. By Thursday each week, I had touched all four and completed none. I told myself this was diligence. I told myself that senior work is inherently non-linear, that complexity requires parallel thinking, that running multiple streams simultaneously was evidence of capability, not avoidance. I was, as it turns out, an excellent storyteller, primarily to myself. Dubai, A Tuesday, A Question I Was Not Ready For. A colleague I have known for fifteen years sat across from me in Dubai. We were not in a formal review. We were between meetings, the kind of half-hour that exists because one meeting ran short and the next has not started. He did not ask what I was working on. He had seen the update decks. He already knew. He asked: “Which one would actually hurt to lose?” I answered in three seconds. Without pausing. One workstream. Immediately. No deliberation. He did not say anything for a moment. Then: “So what are the other three for?” I did not have a clean answer. What I had, sitting in that room, was the slow recognition that I had known for months, probably longer, which workstream actually mattered. The other three were not really about value. They were about optionality. They were insurance against being definitively, visibly, unambiguously wrong about the one that counted. The activity had felt like diligence. It was hedging dressed up as a work ethic. And I had been thorough enough about it that I had almost convinced myself otherwise. Three Things That Became Clear After That Conversation Focus is not a time management problem. Every article written about focus eventually slides into calendar hygiene, time-blocking, single-tasking, the Pomodoro technique. None of that is wrong, exactly, but it diagnoses the wrong condition. The reason most senior professionals scatter their attention is not that they have poor scheduling habits. It is that committing fully to one thing, before the outcome is certain, is genuinely uncomfortable. Spreading effort across four workstreams means that when something fails, you were not really betting on it. You were merely involved. Focus requires a different kind of exposure, the kind where, if the thing does not work, you cannot point to the three other things you were also doing. That discomfort is real. Managing it with busyness is entirely human. It is also, over time, professionally corrosive. The hedge is not neutral, it has a cost most people do not account for. When I was giving partial attention to four workstreams, I was not giving 25% to each. I was giving fragmented, context-switching, half-loaded attention to all of them, which meant none of them were getting the quality of thinking they needed. The one workstream that actually mattered was being shortchanged precisely because it mattered most. That is the cruel arithmetic of hedging: you protect yourself from the feeling of risk while simultaneously ensuring that your most important work is never fully resourced. The protection is real. The trade-off is invisible until it is not. Most senior people are not lazy. They are protecting themselves from being definitively wrong. I have seen this pattern in enough organisations now, across regulated industries, across geographies, across leadership levels, that I am comfortable saying it is structural rather than personal. The more visible your role, the more costly a clear, public failure feels. So the incentive is to stay in motion across many things rather than commit to one. This looks like productivity. It functions as risk mitigation. The organisations that break this pattern are the ones where leaders are genuinely supported when they commit and fail, not just when they succeed. That is a culture question, not an individual discipline question. Though waiting for the culture to change before you change is also a hedge. What This Means in Practice If you are leading a team or a function right now, the question worth asking is not “are we busy?” Almost certainly, yes. The question is whether the things consuming your week are the things that will matter when you look back in eighteen months. In my experience, the workstreams that get described as “important but not urgent” are often neither. They are placeholders, things that justify the feeling of motion without requiring the commitment that real priorities demand. Strategy fails when priorities are vague, which I wrote about separately when working through how we communicate decisions inside organisations. The same logic applies here: when everything is a priority, the word loses its operational meaning entirely. One of the clearest signs of leadership maturity I have seen, and this connects to the kind of continuous, embedded readiness we talk about in the context of operational resilience, is the ability to say “we are not doing that” and mean it, rather than “we will get to that” and not mean it. The work of focus is not scheduling. It is the act of committing to one thing before you know how it ends, and being willing to be wrong about it in public if it comes to that. The Close Most people are not scattered because they lack discipline. They are scattered because they have not yet decided that being wrong about one important thing is less costly than being irrelevant across many.
Momentum Through Small Progress
Momentum Is a Lie You Tell Yourself in Retrospect I was rebuilding in 2021, not the kind of rebuilding that makes for a clean narrative at a conference: I sat in my home office at 7am with cold coffee and genuinely wondered whether the version of myself I was trying to recover was actually worth recovering. The business pivot I had made the previous year had cost me more than I was prepared to admit publicly, or privately, for some time. The financial exposure was real but survivable. What surprised me, and I say this with the full awareness that I should have known better, was what the failure took from me that I had not put a value on: my confidence in my own judgment, time I will not get back, and a kind of professional identity I had worn for so long that I had mistaken it for my actual self. I had spent two decades advising organisations on transformation, risk strategy, and resilience. Apparently, the curriculum did not include a module on what to do when my own plan unravels on schedule. The Rule I Set Because I Had Nothing Else Somewhere in early 2021, I made a decision that felt embarrassingly small at the time. I gave myself one rule: do one visible thing each day, not a strategy review, not a restructuring plan, not the ambitious Q2 roadmap I kept drafting and abandoning. One thing: an email sent, a conversation completed, a document closed and filed, something that existed in the world after I did it, that had not existed before. I want to be honest about how that rule felt in practice. Some days, sending a single email was a genuine achievement. I would look at the rule, one visible thing, and think: this is a standard set for someone recovering from surgery, not someone who has run teams of several hundred people across multiple geographies. The bar was, objectively, on the floor. I kept the rule anyway, partly because I had nothing better, partly because the alternative was producing nothing, and I had enough experience with organisations in freefall to know that zero output days compound in the wrong direction just as fast as progress days compound in the right one. Ninety days in, I reviewed what I had produced, not to feel good about myself, I was not expecting to feel good about myself, but because I needed an honest read on whether the approach was working or whether I was simply managing a slow decline with better optics. What I found genuinely surprised me. The volume of work was not the surprise. What stopped me was that I could not draw a straight line from where I had been to where I was. The distance had appeared gradually enough that I had not registered it. Momentum, it turned out, does not announce itself. Three Things That Pivot Taught Me That No Strategy Course Ever Did Progress made quietly does not feel like progress. This is the trap most capable people fall into when they are behind. They have succeeded visibly before, they know what it feels like when things are working, the energy in the room, the metrics ticking up, the sense of forward motion that others can see. When none of that is present, my instinct is to conclude that nothing is working. That instinct is usually wrong. The compound effect of consistent small action is not a motivational phrase, it is arithmetic. But arithmetic does not feel like anything while it is happening. The ledger is invisible until I run the numbers. Waiting for readiness is a strategy for staying still. There is a version of professional discipline that looks like patience but is actually avoidance in good clothing. I have watched senior leaders wait for the right conditions, the right quarter, the right team configuration, and I have watched them wait themselves into irrelevance. In 2021, I was at risk of doing exactly that. The energy to do something significant does not precede action, it follows it. That sequencing matters. Getting it backwards is one of the most common and most expensive mistakes I have seen in executive careers, including my own. Consistency is a decision, not a character trait. I used to believe, and I hear this belief echoed constantly in leadership conversation, that some people are naturally consistent and some are not. That consistency is something you either have or you develop through habit. I do not think that is right anymore. What I experienced in that ninety-day period was not the emergence of a new habit, it was a daily decision, made again every morning, often against my own inclination. Some mornings the decision took five minutes of sitting at the desk and arguing with myself. Consistency is not a trait I possess, it is a choice I make when nothing feels worth doing. That distinction matters because traits are fixed and choices are not. What This Means If You Are Running Something Right Now If I lead an organisation, a team, or a professional practice that is currently behind where it should be, and most are, in some dimension, at any given time, my instinct is to wait for the moment when I can make a significant move. Restructure properly, relaunch with conviction, come back strong. I understand that instinct, I have acted on it, and I have watched others act on it, and I have seen what it produces. What it produces, mostly, is a longer period of stagnation with a more elaborate justification. The organisations I have seen recover fastest from genuine difficulty were not the ones that waited for the transformational moment. They were the ones that kept producing output, imperfect, incremental, sometimes undistinguished output, on the days when producing nothing would have been entirely forgivable. The compound effect is not selective, it does not care whether I am in a good quarter or a difficult one. It runs in
Managing Energy, Not Just Time: A Leadership Reality
You Are Not The Same Person You Were Eight Hours Ago I once missed a critical concession during a high-stakes regulatory negotiation at 4:15pm. A concession I would have caught in seconds at 9am. Not because the issue was buried in the documentation. Not because the counterparty had been particularly clever about it. Because I was not the same person I had been when I sat down that morning, and I had convinced myself otherwise. That cost six weeks of rework. Six weeks of calls, revised positions, internal re-briefings, and the particular exhaustion that comes not from hard work but from correctable mistakes. The kind that follows you home. What I remember most clearly is not the moment I spotted the error – that came later, in the debrief. What I remember is the certainty I felt getting on that call. Tired, yes. But experienced. Seasoned. Twenty years in the room for situations exactly like this. I had done harder things on less sleep. I would be fine. I was not fine. The Situation This was 2021. I was in a regulatory settlement negotiation – the kind where the stakes are measured not just in money but in precedent, in relationship, in what I would have to explain to a board that trusted my judgment. The counterparty’s team had pushed for a late afternoon slot. I knew this was not an accident when it happens in negotiations. Scheduling is a tactic. I knew that. I agreed anyway. By the time the call started, I had already been in five hours of prior meetings. The morning had been sharp – I had gone into an early session and caught two inconsistencies in the counterparty’s position before the first coffee had gone cold. That version of me was good. That version of me was not on the 4:15pm call. The concession slipped through in the language of an indemnity clause, framed as a minor administrative provision. In the context of the full document, in the state I was in, it read like standard boilerplate. At full capacity, the phrasing would have stopped me cold. Instead, I moved on. We concluded the call. I noted it as a productive session. This was not a productive session. The error surfaced forty-eight hours later during a legal review. What followed was not a crisis – we recovered, we corrected, we rebuilt the position. But the cost was real. Six weeks. And the harder cost: I had to sit with the knowledge that I had known, at some level, that I was not sharp enough for that call. I had chosen to get on it anyway, because the alternative felt like an admission I was not ready to make. What I Got Wrong – And Had Been Getting Wrong For Twenty Years The first thing I got wrong was the assumption that experience is a substitute for condition. For most of my career I had treated my own cognitive state as essentially stable. Adjustable by caffeine, by willpower, by the professional obligation to perform. My logic ran something like: I have navigated complex situations before, therefore I can navigate this one now, regardless of timing. This logic is seductive and it is false. Experience sharpens my tools. It does not mean I am holding them the same way at 4pm as I was at 9am. Neuroscience has been clear on this for decades – decision quality, working memory, and the ability to detect subtle inconsistencies all degrade across the day for most people, particularly after sustained cognitive load. Knowing this intellectually and actually scheduling around it are two entirely different things. The second thing I got wrong was conflating busyness with prioritisation. For years I had scheduled my hardest thinking into whatever slot remained after everything else was placed. Board preparation at 6pm. Critical document reviews at end of day. Strategic planning sessions wedged between operational calls. My reasoning was efficient: get the administrative and relational work done first, then tackle the substantive. In practice, I had it entirely backwards. I was giving the work that required the least of me my best hours, and giving the work that required everything I had the hours when I had nothing left. My calendar looked productive. My output suffered in ways I had not tracked carefully enough to notice the pattern. The third thing I got wrong was making this a personal failing rather than a structural one. After 2021, I did not immediately change how I operated. What I did first – and I say this without pride – was file the mistake under “lessons learned” and quietly resolve to be more careful next time. As if vigilance was the missing ingredient. What I actually needed was a different architecture. The sharpest executives I have worked alongside do not rely on willpower to protect their cognitive peak. They protect it structurally. They decline late afternoon calls for high-stakes decisions. They build buffers before complex work. They are, in this specific sense, harder to schedule than their less experienced peers – and that difficulty is not arrogance. It is professionalism. I have written before about the conditions under which teams perform at their genuine best – and the same principle applies at the individual level. The environment and the timing are not irrelevant context. They are part of the result. What This Means In Practice This is not an argument for becoming precious about my calendar. Most senior roles do not afford the luxury of perfect scheduling, and the executives who refuse any meeting after noon are usually protecting mediocrity more than sharpness. But there is a meaningful difference between unavoidable scheduling constraints and the habit of treating my cognitive peak as a flexible resource I can deploy wherever the day demands. The question worth asking is a simple one: do I know which hour of my day I am genuinely dangerous – the hour when my pattern recognition is fastest, my judgment is cleanest, my read
Investing in Junior Talent: The Leadership Edge
Standing in the lift at Canary Wharf one morning, I realised the most important professional conversation I’ve had in the last twelve months happened over a flat white in a coffee shop around the corner from the office, with someone who had been on my team for eight months and whose full professional history I could not have described accurately if asked. That says something. I’m not sure it reflects well on me. Senior leaders talk a lot about inclusive culture, psychological safety, and building teams where every voice is heard. We commission surveys, review results, and nod at the right parts. Then we walk back upstairs and spend the next three weeks talking exclusively to the four people whose names appear on our recurring calendar invites. The hierarchy doesn’t disappear because we have good intentions. It calcifies quietly, one polite meeting at a time., – The Situation Last quarter, I had a catch-up with a junior analyst, no agenda, no prep, no performance review. We’d walked past each other in corridors for eight months. She was quiet in meetings, solid in output. The kind of person a busy senior leader files under “performing well, nothing to flag.” I knew almost nothing about her. What I didn’t know, and this is the part that has stayed with me, is that before joining us, she’d spent two years on the ground in East Africa building financial inclusion infrastructure. Payment rails in low-connectivity environments. Regulatory navigation across multiple sovereignties with overlapping and sometimes contradictory frameworks. The kind of operational context you simply can’t build in a classroom or a London risk team. She mentioned it the way you mention something you’ve stopped expecting people to find interesting. I sat with that for a moment. And then, because the coffee shop wasn’t a meeting room and there was no deck to move through, I asked her to tell me more. She did. And somewhere in that conversation, she flagged a gap in our risk model, a regional assumption we’d baked in without realising it was an assumption. The kind of gap that looks fine from the inside and only becomes visible when you’ve sat in the specific context it fails to account for. We reviewed it. We changed the decision. That change mattered. The conversation that prompted it had no entry on any project plan., – What the Coffee Actually Did The first thing I understood from that morning is something I should have understood earlier: proximity is not the same as understanding. I’d been physically near this person for eight months. I’d seen her work. I had a mental model of her contribution that was accurate as far as it went, which was not far at all. The corridor version of a person is a silhouette. The coffee version is a human being with a history. There’s a pattern in this that I’ve seen cause real damage to organisations. It’s not malicious. It’s the natural bureaucratic gravity of seniority, the way that as you move up, the information you receive becomes increasingly curated, filtered through layers of people who are, consciously or not, optimising for what they think you want to hear. I’ve written about how this kind of slow signal distortion quietly kills projects before anyone names the problem, the silent killer in teams is often not conflict or failure, but the steady narrowing of what gets said out loud. Coffee breaks the curation. Not entirely. Not permanently. But for forty minutes, it relaxes the hierarchy enough for people to say the true thing instead of the safe thing. The second thing: expertise does not announce itself in organisations with strong hierarchies. This is the counter-intuitive part. You might assume that genuinely valuable experience surfaces because people share it, because meritocracy works, because good organisations recognise good thinking. That’s not consistently true. What surfaces is the experience that has been given permission to surface, by title, by tenure, by proximity to the right meetings. Everything else waits. A junior analyst who spent two years building payment infrastructure in East Africa will wait a long time to be asked about it in a risk team meeting that already has an agenda. The third thing is less comfortable: the gap between what I thought I knew and what I actually knew was invisible to me until I accidentally closed it. That’s the specific failure I’ve been sitting with. It wasn’t that I chose to ignore her background. I genuinely didn’t know it existed. That’s not a knowledge gap I could have managed, because I didn’t know to look for it. The only way to find that kind of unknown unknown is to create the conditions in which people tell you things unprompted, in a setting where unprompted honesty feels safe. No survey instrument captures this. No one-to-one performance template gets you there reliably. Coffee gets you there. A walk gets you there. Lunch with no deliverable attached gets you there., – What This Means If You Lead Anything If you run a team of any size, there’s almost certainly someone three levels below you sitting on a professional history, a regional insight, or a technical understanding that’s directly relevant to a decision you’re currently making without it. Not because they’re withholding it. Because no one has asked, and the architecture of the working week doesn’t create the moment when they’d offer it unsolicited. The fix isn’t a new meeting. It isn’t an initiative. It’s the deliberate, unstructured hour, the coffee, the walk, the lunch with no outcome attached. Block it. Do it consistently. Accept that most of those hours will produce nothing immediately measurable. The one that does will make the others worth it., – I’ve been more wrong about the people closest to me professionally than I have about markets, models, or forecasts. The difference is that markets tell you when you’re wrong. People tend not to.