BYO Certainity

I’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing emergency response professionals. They regularly deal with chaotic situations. There’s a lot of inherent risk, both to their teams and to others. Despite that, they respond quickly and decisively. They bring a high degree of certainty to highly uncertain situations.

Many other teams are slowed down by uncertainty. They spend so much time trying to establish a clear picture that they lose momentum. Worst case, they add even more uncertainty. So how do response teams do it? 

Here are some of the patterns I’ve seen:

• Practice critical skills until they are instinctive. This means the focus can be up and out rather than in detail. Picture what it's like when you drive a car on a familiar route. You don’t think about indicating because you’ve done it thousands of times. Instead, you can focus on where you are going. 

• Tight trust. Teams have ways of working together that are well defined. It’s much easier for people to ‘have each other's back’ if you are clear about what that means in your team and have clearly agreed on the behaviour that creates the result.

• Bring Calm. Regardless of how chaotic the environment is, emergency response teams bring calm. Even if they don’t feel calm, they have practiced being calm, and they know that settles the situation.

• Prioritise attention. Teams have a set of priorities that are clearly defined to help decision-making. When faced with uncertainty, there’s often an overwhelming amount of important considerations to deal with. They need a way to quickly decide where their attention goes and in what order. Without that, everything is urgent, and attention is scattered. Build a priority set and have the discipline to use it.

• Character and demeanour. Teams discuss presence. How do we show up? What are we known for? How do we behave? Having an agreed set of expectations for this goes a long way to creating certainty. 

In our current climate, all teams need to bring their own certainty with them to their work. Expecting to find certainty in external circumstances will always be a flimsy recipe. How do you BYO certainty in your team?

Contradictory Truths - a leadership superpower

We started a short series last week on the chaos many businesses are experiencing and how it seems unlikely to ease anytime soon. Leaders need everyday superpowers in the face of such adversity. 

The ability to ‘hold’ more than one seemingly contradictory truth is a superpower. When we can only hold one truth, we sometimes lose sight of what we can control. We also add stress to the situation. 

For many leaders I work with, a current truth is “Our work is hard”. It’s definitely true. Challenges arrive thick and fast. Results matter and often carry consequences. Resources and bandwidth are stretched. Just as one hurdle is cleared, more appear. The list is longer than the hours available.

If "Our work is hard” is the only truth we hold, work is an exhausting grind. People feel there’s only so long they can hold onto the bar. 

More than one truth changes the game. 

How about “Our work is hard. Hard is good. We are great at hard”. 

Hard is good because it drives innovation, progress, and capability. It’s good because it matters — if it didn’t, it probably wouldn’t be hard. And if we are great at hard, then we embrace the important challenges we face, rather than feeling defeated by them. All three can be true at once, even if they feel contradictory. 

Here are some other examples:

So much is out of our control. There are always things we can control that make a genuine difference.

There’s so much rapid change. We adapt just as fast. We relish the pressure.

We care deeply about the results. We hold the results lightly.

We have high expectations. We know when it’s good enough.

This thinking helps leaders and their teams find energy and nuance under pressure. It changes the conversation. If you’d like to apply it to your team, follow these steps:

1.  Identify the complaints you most regularly hear, say, or think. 

2. Identify some contradictory and parallel truths. Discuss them — work out why they are also true.

3. Make sure they are genuine to you/your team; otherwise, it will be short-lived. 

P.S. If they don’t feel genuine to start with, it’s valuable to run a 2-week experiment where you pretend it’s genuinely true. Sometimes you’ll find it really is, sometimes the perspective you gain will work out the kinks and find something more authentic for your situation.

Let me know how you go!

What's Next

I’ve been working with several leadership teams for longer programs (1 - 2 years). Lately, many are making the same observation — The level of chaos they are currently experiencing is incredibly high, and a massive source of stress.

The uncertainty caused is rarely internal to the organisation. It’s the unpredictable and unexpected curveballs like:

• Trump is starting a war

• Fuel prices

• AI implications

• Reforms that fundamentally shift business models

Some are waiting (hoping) for an imagined future period of time where the uncertainty resolves, and there is a period of relative rest/stability.

My crystal ball has got a massive crack in it, so the reliability of my predictions of the future is low — but I reckon a better mindset is to assume the chaos will continue at the same pace, scope, and variety. 

Why is it better? A massive source of stress is when expectations don’t line up with reality, especially when the reality is worse than we expected or hoped for.

If you want to make it even more robust, consider this:

There’s little point in trying to predict the nature of future chaos/uncertainty unless you have some specific expertise or information. There’s a lot of value in broad forecasts (eg, what happens if fuel shortages become a daily reality vs what happens if fuel stays much the same for the foreseeable future vs what happens if things return to normal sooner than expected).

There’s little value in trying to foresee details in domains where we don't have sufficient expertise or information. It is tempting to come up with a prediction as a way of generating certainty, but it actually makes the stress worse if it’s inaccurate (and for most situations, that’s a pretty predictable outcome).

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll talk about what leaders can do to add certainty within their organisations and the superpower of paradoxical thinking.

A Kinder Voice

I’ve written over the years about treating people around you with kindness. It’s a good and powerful way to act. Recently, I’ve been reminded anew about how we treat ourselves — the self-talking-voices-in-our-head that throw self-directed harsh judgement in ways we would never talk to another person. Mine have been noisy of late, and it's been a theme of a few coaching sessions, too. 

What are the loudest voices for you? Mine tend to fall into 4 groups, and I reckon they must be common as they are referred to by lots of people, from ancient philosophers to modern psychologists:

• The Tyrant - holds us to impossible or unreasonable standards. This voice has lots of should, must, right, and wrong. Our efforts, no matter how they go, are never quite good enough.

• The Judge - constantly looks over our shoulder and tells us we are not good enough.

• The Critic - looks at our efforts/outputs and picks holes in every little thing.

• The Cynic - whispers to us that we are likely to fail and keeps reminding us of past situations where we were not our best or something didn’t go well. 

These voices have a place, but when they get really noisy, they can hold us back and hurt us. Over the years, I've found the best way to treat them is with kindness and a little humour. Notice the voice. Notice what it's saying. See if you can work out what it's trying to do — often it’s about safety or mitigating fear. Ask yourself what a kind and supportive friend would say to you, and listen to that more balanced opinion. 

And when the harsh voices pipe up again, have a little chuckle to yourself. Without that kind humour, the voices can easily pile on with criticism of the voices themselves — a fascinating loop indeed.

Getting Hammered

Have you ever had an emotional response to a set of circumstances that led to a bad decision, which made things worse? I reckon you have — you are human just like me.

Way back in my early 20’s, I was working on the farm. Ploughing a paddock of recently cleared bush. We’d made a mistake by burning it first to make it easier to plough. That left a field of fire hardened, super-sharp spikes everywhere. Tyre Killers!! On the worst day, I spend more time fixing flats than moving forward. I was frustrated beyond belief and getting angry about the situation.

Eventually, I blew my cool and belted a tyre as hard as I could with a big hammer. The recoil nearly broke my wrist, which blew up like a balloon and was sore for days. It was my first conscious insight that emotion rarely helps a decision, and often makes it worse. 

Emotion is important because it tells us a lot about the situation and ourselves. It has to be dealt with. Knowing if we are angry, scared, frustrated, timid, passionate, bored, etc., is useful. Feel the feels, and respect them. Deal with them, don’t bottle them up. And then do your best to keep the emotion out of whatever decision needs to be made.

What circumstances are you in at the moment? How do they make you feel? What impact could that emotion have on your next move?

The Reality Paradox

Simple but not easy. That saying rings so true for me when it comes to accepting challenging realities. Simple, smart, wise — definitely not easy. It can take me ages to arrive at acceptance. And it’s a powerful place to be. I reckon it's hard because it can feel like quitting, or losing hope, or dropping standards (Sometimes all of the above if the reality is challenging enough). Acceptance is none of those things. It simply gets us focused on the right pieces — the pieces where we can make a difference. 

The reality paradox is finding acceptance while holding onto your ability to act meaningfully. Without the paradox, it’s fatalism. We have no say and are pushed where the winds of chance will take us. With the paradox, we get to act on the parts of the experience that make a difference. Sometimes the field of action is small — perhaps only choosing how we will face this adversity. Sometimes it’s vast - deciding on something that changes everything. 

Either way, the faster we can find acceptance, the better. What’s that like for you? I understand the wisdom and it can still take a long time to arrive. And I reckon that's OK — especially if I can accept it with grace.

On Perfection

Last week's article ‘On being right’ drew quite a few responses from readers about how wise it is not to go in hard, and also how challenging it can be to do that in practice. Several people highlighted the parallels with wanting perfect outcomes. 

There’s a pragmatic balancing act when it comes to solving problems. We can easily get bogged down in way too much detail, seeking the perfect outcome. Perfection very often stops us from moving at a sensible pace and sometimes bogs us down completely. 

Getting something done at an acceptably good standard, getting it out and moving on is usually a lot better than fussing over tiny details that will not contribute much in the way of results, but will increase the amount of work to be done. There are few exceptions to this. Notable ones are high-consequence decisions that are difficult or impossible to reverse, or high risk situations where controls need to be very carefully implemented - Those scenarios are pretty rare.

Good enough and done will almost always beat perfect, but still polishing. Get after it.

On being right

‘What we are doing carries substantial risks. I’ve got the data to prove it. I’ve been trying to get the decision makers to see it, but the conversations are going nowhere.’

This was the essence of 3 recent coaching conversations with leaders who have significant influence, but they are not the decision makers. All three had been working hard to prove their point and galvanise a decision or action. It’s not going well for any of them. 

Going in hard seldom works - even if you are right and can prove it. It’s inherently adversarial and tends to get various parties digging in on their perspective. When we try to influence like that, we can argue until well after the cows come home. 

Going in hard forgets:

• There may be other factors I can’t see from my position.

• Other parties may have investment (time, money, resources, ideas) in the way things are. If they feel personally attacked, they are likely to dig in.

• Even if I have the problem right, I may not have the solution right.

• Even if I have both the problem and the solution right, I’ll need others to fix it. I need agreement or at least alignment.

• If the perfect solution gets no buy-in, it’s no solution at all. A partial solution with solid buy-in will beat it hands down. 

• There may be an even bigger problem that is the cause of what I can see.

• What else might be missing?

Instead of going in hard, get curious about what constraints might be present for others. Are there ways to work with them to remove those obstacles? Explore for understanding, not for ‘right’. You’ll likely expand your influence.

Faster than before

Once a team gets clear about what's important, both culturally and transactionally, they can start to build speed. Clarity brings the possibility of mantras… pieces of language that are packed with shared meaning.  

For example Atlassian, a global company founded and headquartered in Australia, has several mantras. One of them is “Be the change you seek”. For them, it means:

• Take initiative rather than seeking/waiting for permission. 

• If there’s a problem, find a way to get involved in the fix.

• If there’s a gap in the market, fill it.

• If the product is not up to standard, change it. 

Smart leaders build mantras with the people around them. Then they find clear examples to reinforce their meaning. Mantras and clarity go hand in hand. Once you have them, you can remind people of what is important and set direction with a few words dense with shared meaning. It takes effort to get to that place, but on the other side of it is speed.

Do you have any mantras? If not, what might they be?

Get the Reps in

If you want to get good at something, repetition is critical:

• Skills - reps

• Strength - reps

• Handling pressure - reps

It’s the same for building culture in a team or organisation. Doing something occasional and expecting it to stick is like lifting a dumbbell once and expecting massive biceps.

It simply won’t work. Get clear on what the guiding principles for your team and work are, and then find ways to get the reps in:

• Discuss success stories and applications to other areas of the work

• Notice when things go less well, and harvest lessons learnt

• Get people to share examples of things that are important and do it often

• Refer to core principles in decisions of consequence

When teams filter everything through what matters to them, alignment and consistency can't help but follow. 

What’s important in your world?
How and where is it reinforced? 

If you can't remember the last time team culture or standards were shaped, or if it only happens once a year, then you are missing lots of low hanging fruit.

Dig Deeper

The Dig Deeper Podcast is a great resource for leaders who want to create lasting impact. Digby Scott hosts a great conversation, and it was a pleasure to be a guest on the show. You can listen to the episode here.

If you enjoy this conversation, keep an eye out for a joint event Digby and I will be running in Perth next month. We'll be inviting leaders to a session on proactive and impactful leadership in a rapidly changing environment. Event details coming soon - if you'd like to be directly updated, send me an email, and I’ll put you on the list.

Meaning Matters

In 2026, I’ve already had a number of conversations with really smart leaders about meaning.  Knowing what we mean and what we are talking about matters when we are working to align a team for great results. Here are a few examples:

• Impact vs Legacy - Turns out what people meant was almost identical, but both held a firm view of which word to use and why. The debate over which word is important, but shared meaning gets you further.

• Brutal Honesty - meaning openness and transparency, but for some ‘brutal’ also meant unnecessarily harsh or cruel. That's an important distinction.

• Feedback - A team wants to create opportunities for reflection, improvement and growth. In their context feedback has become a loaded word. They could either create new working meaning within their team and/or choose another word. At the moment the lack of shared meaning is distracting them from their intent.

• Good and Done from last week

We don’t have to completely agree on the details, but it’s critical to discuss and share meaning broadly if we seek to align teams. The nuance in conversations like these is important. If a leader is intentionally using particular words to frame action, direction and connection in a team, it’s useful if they can clearly articulate what they mean. Sharing tangible examples and stories helps. If a particular word blocks progress, it's OK to find another that better articulates the shared meaning.

Word choice counts. Meaning matters.

Refine “Good” and “Done”

If you want to go further and faster with a team, cohesion is critical. Cohesion is driven by clarity. 

A few days ago I was working with an excellent leadership team. They  invest heavily in finding clarity. Even so, there's uncertainty.  One leader said, “We don't have iron clad agreement on what ‘Done’ is or what ‘Good’ is. Great places to start if you want clarity.

When leaders and teams explore this, they refine clarity with each iteration of work. While the answers may seem simple, perhaps even obvious, getting clear creates alignment. Every  team member can orient their effort to team standards. Not just for the task in hand, but for how this particular team does its work.  A void here gets filled by silos. Sub teams focus on getting their work right, rather than looking at the whole picture. If the silos seem strong, but the whole seems weak, ‘Done’ and ‘Good’ is a great place to start.

Get clear - then repeat often. Not using exactly the same words and examples, but shining light on finer and finer detail. Then empower others in your team to do the same. Once a clear baseline is set,  a team can move very rapidly because they know exactly what they are attempting to achieve. There’ll be more and more reinforcement of a job well done both inherently from the task, and from satisfied team leaders. With consistency, it self perpetuates.

How clearly can you answer those questions?  What does good look like? And what does done look like?

It’s Magic

Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law says that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think that applies to skills too. Any masterful use of skill is indistinguishable from magic. And magic is… well it's magical. It inspires wonder, curiosity, and admiration.

Sleight of hand is one skill that seems like literal magic. I love it as a delightful demonstration of the gap between what we see and what is really happening. Spoiler alert - Stuff doesn't mysteriously vanish from one place and magically reassemble itself somewhere else. A good sleight of hand magician elegantly makes that appear the only logical explanation for what you are seeing.

Magic ignites my child like wonder, and it reminds me that I’m unlikely to have the full picture in any situation. That knowledge is helpful if I'm solving problems, planning, resolving conflict, making decisions etc.

Making the Leap

There’s a paradox happening among the Not for Profit organisations I work with. On the one hand, they are dealing with the slimmest operational margins ever. On the other, many are experiencing radical growth. Dealing with the duality of that is challenging.

Some of my clients have grown by more than 3X over a 12 - 24 month period. It’s taken them from less than 50 employees to over 150, which represents a radical transformation and an epic challenge for leaders.

When a whole organisation is less than 50 people, culture, purpose, values and standards are easy to lead. Everyone knows enough about each other and the various parts of the business to feel connected to the core purpose. Culture happens in conversations where significant portions of the staff are present. A meeting between 5 people is 10% of all staff. If 20 people get together it's almost half.

At 150, everything changes. Organisations become more reliant on systems to make it work. People know less about the whole. They know less of their colleagues well. And that meeting of 5 is now around 3% of your staff. Leaders who ‘lead by walking around’ no longer have time to meet and greet everyone. Recruitment is more diversified. People get more focussed on the work they are tasked with and have less visibility of the whole.

If leaders don’t make an intentional shift in how they lead, strong culture erodes due to less connection back to purpose. It’s been a great pleasure to work with organisations making the leap. There are some easy shifts leaders can make to continue building a strong and purposeful organisation. It’s definitely challenging with rapid growth, but it can be done.

Going Potty

A leader was telling me about challenges with their team not producing work to a high enough standard. Everyone's a bit frustrated. This seems to be a trend - expecting great results on the first effort.

There’s a leadership legend passed around about a pottery class where students were given the choice of submitting one perfect piece for assessment, or producing as many pots as they could and submit them all for assessment. The best quality pots came from the quantity group, not the quality group. Turns out this never happened in pots, but it did in a photography class. It was written about in a book called Art and Fear, where there were already too many photography examples, so they changed it to pots. The pottery story has since spread like wildfire, and keeps popping up refreshed. Why? Because the principle makes sense.

For many (maybe most) things, we need reps to get good. This is challenging, especially when there are significant consequences that go with getting something wrong - Pilots, Lawyers, Accountants, Soldiers and Surgeons spring to mind. Note - all these professions create opportunities for practice alongside someone who is already accomplished.

How and where could you/your team benefit from reps? How could you set that up for maximum experience/exposure with minimum risk?

Don’t expect awesome if there’s been no practice.

Ferocious Heart

Some of the high performance environments I have been exposed to burn people at the altar of success. It’s always felt unnecessarily harsh to me - that performance often costs humanity, humility and health. People pushing for a result at the cost and exclusion of all else. Some heavy hitters claim it’s the only way. Musk has achieved more than many and asserts that, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy”. As if care prevents success and progress.

So it’s been great reading Gilbert Enoka’s book “Become Unstoppable”. Gilbert was the mindset coach for the New Zealand All Blacks during their most dominant era. High performance. Highly competitive with people head-to-head on a weekly basis for selection. Ferocious on the field. Unyielding standards. Enoka clearly lays out a recipe for success which has at its heart Care, Belonging and Vulnerability. Not words that immediately spring to mind in elite sport. But essential to building the culture the All Blacks are famous for, on and off the field.

The book is rich with insights that can be applied to many endeavours. And if you happen to be a rugby or sport fan it’s an intimate look into the detail behind one of the most successful teams of all time. Well worth a read.

Not a Knot - passing skills to another person

I was teaching someone relatively new to abseiling. Gina (not her real name) was quickly building skills and was hugely enthusiastic. I’d delegated the rigging of the ropes on a cliff she’d never worked on before. As I walked back along her ropes, I spotted a knot that was not. It was sloppily tied and not fit for the purpose she’d used it for. Abseiling is very safe if all the gear is properly used, but get it wrong and the consequences can be spectacularly fatal. 

A group was about to join us for the day, so I quickly called Gina over, discussed the problem and demonstrated a better knot to tie. After the group left we did a couple of practice rigs to expand her knowledge about rigging. It would have been easy for it to be awkward, or to feel like micro management, but we were following an explicit skill transfer process:

We had discussed and used the process for other skills and were moving from We Do Together, to You Do, I Watch. The process encourages demonstration, clarification, and thinking. It’s a great way to hand your skill set to another person. If they know what you expect from them at each stage and what they can expect from you, it takes much of the potential stress and clunkiness out of learning. 

A couple of weeks later, Gina rigged all the ropes, and inspected them herself while I laid out equipment for the group that was arriving. We both knew that she had developed enough skill and judgement to set the ropes. She also knew that I would answer questions and/or assist if she found herself not sure what to do. We’d taken the time to build mutual trust in each other in relation to that activity. Next week, we’d start the process again on a more complex skill set.

Can I trust them?

“Can I trust them?” is one of the most asked questions when I am coaching leaders about delegation. When we delegate stuff, often it remains our responsibility - If it doesn’t work out we may be the person who will be held responsible.

In many environments there is a regulatory responsibility too - if something you delegate goes wrong, your ‘licence to operate’ may be on the line. Potentially you’ll face regulatory penalties of some kind. This is true whether you are a board delegating to a CEO, or a frontline nurse manager, delegating to a team of nurses. It applies in many settings and at many levels.

So how can you trust someone to do what you have delegated properly - trust them enough to not be constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure it's OK? Especially if what they are doing is complex and/or complicated.

It takes time. How much time will depend on the person's prior experience, their confidence and their skill. It’s useful to have a system for handing skill sets on (We’ll talk about that next time). It’s also useful to consider what you will need to see from them to be satisfied that they know what they are doing.

Be transparent about how long you will be watching and what you are watching for. Explain the risks/consequences if it goes wrong and the incentives for getting it right. By doing so you are creating an environment where trust can develop and delegation will be successful.

Really Quick?

We spend a lot of time smashing through to-do’s. Pumping it out. Getting stuff done. But is it as quick as it seems? Some situations I’ve encountered recently:

• A major rewrite of critical messaging, because a subject matter expert speculated on something, rather than verifying with data. Quick answer, but the result is days of work, with many people involved to get an accurate picture. 

• An Executive team spent a day reflecting and discussing the evolution of their business. They highlighted 3 significant pressure points in the 12 -18 month future. They are now planning for those periods. In the past, they have been ‘surprised’ by similar pressure points that haven’t gone well due to lack of planning. That day seemed slow and could be viewed as unproductive, but they are now well set up for what’s coming.

There are many situations where stepping back and taking more time results in a slower moment, but a faster future.

Where could you step back and gain a future advantage this week?