Why the leaders who excel, don’t know the route, but they know how to read the conditions.

I have been writing the same book for six years.

That sentence is a little embarrassing to type, so let me be more precise about it. I have been writing a book for six years. It has been three completely different books in that time, and the one I’m finishing now (out in early 2027) is one I could not have described to you at the start, even if you’d held a pen to my hand.

Version one was about one-degree shifts. Small, deliberate moves that compound over time.

I still believe in the idea; it survived into the final book. But as I got close, I realized I had a mechanism with no problem attached to it. A beautiful tool, sitting on a workbench, solving nothing in particular. You can’t build a book on an answer that has no question.

So I started over. Version two was about authenticity. A real thesis this time, with something to say.

But the closer I got, the more I felt it pulling me off my own ground. It was a departure from what I’m known for that was just too drastic to commit to. The direction I actually wanted to move was toward more credibility and depth in the space I’ve spent a decade in: the future of work, how teams navigate uncertainty. Authenticity, for me, pointed somewhere else. So I let it go too.

Two false starts. Years of work, twice set aside. From the outside, it looks like someone who couldn’t make up his mind.

It wasn’t. It was something I didn’t have a name for until I read about a Harvard professor and a boat full of explorers.

The professor and the explorers

Linda Hill, who wrote Collective Genius, was stuck on the epilogue of her book. She and her team had rewritten it more times than they could count. Then one day she was reading about the explorers who first crossed the open ocean — the ones with no maps, no GPS, no satellite imagery. Just stars, currents, the moon, and a sense of where they were trying to go.

And she realized something the modern world had quietly forgotten. The leader we keep asking for; the one who stands at the front of the room and lays out the path, step one, step two, step three, follow me — made sense in a world where the path was knowable. A world where the future looked roughly like the past.

We don’t live there anymore. And the leaders we need now aren’t pathfinders. They’re Wayfinders.

Pathfinder vs. Wayfinder

A pathfinder knows the route. A Wayfinder knows how to read the conditions: the currents, the weather, the tools on hand, the people in the boat. A Wayfinder can’t tell you exactly which way the journey goes. But they know how to navigate whatever shows up. Wayfinders still plan. They simply treat plans as hypotheses rather than promises. They prepare rigorously, but they expect reality to teach them something the plan couldn’t anticipate.

It’s a small shift with enormous consequences:

• Pathfinders give answers. Wayfinders ask better questions.

• Pathfinders sell certainty. Wayfinders build the capacity to keep moving when certainty isn’t on offer.

• Pathfinders take you to the future. Wayfinders co-create it with you.

Here’s what I finally understood about my own six years. I thought I’d been failing to find the route. I hadn’t. I’d been Wayfinding the whole time and not realizing it was a method rather than a mess.

My direction never moved. It was fixed from the start: build something credible and useful in the space I’m known for. What kept moving was the destination, the actual thesis of the book. One-degree shifts. Authenticity. (Un)certainty. Each version was a course-correction, and the test I applied each time wasn’t “is this a good idea?” It was “Does this move me along my direction, or off it?”

Authenticity was a good idea. It just pointed off my line. A pathfinder, committed to the map, would have marched straight into a book about a topic that wasn’t his to own. The Wayfinder kept the direction and let the destination reveal itself.

And nothing was wasted. That’s the part that matters. The one-degree shifts from version one didn’t die, but rather, they became a load-bearing piece of the final framework. A wrong turn still illuminates. There is no such thing as a wasted move on the water; there are only moves that taught you something and moves you haven’t made yet.

“Anyone who tells you they know what the future looks like, doesn’t. Stop following pathfinders. Become one who reads the conditions.”

What changes on Monday

If you lead a team right now, three things shift.

• Stop pretending to know things you don’t. The team can tell. The credibility you think you’re protecting is the credibility you’re spending.

• Replace “here’s the plan” with “here’s the direction, let’s figure out the next step together.” That is not weakness. That is the entire skill.

• Spend less time perfecting the strategy deck and more time building the team’s ability to read conditions. Your job is no longer the map. Your job is the compass.

And if you’re not leading a team, if you’re just trying to navigate your own life, the same shift applies. Stop demanding a five-year plan from yourself. Nobody knows what five years out looks like, and the certainty you’re trying to manufacture is fake. Get good at reading where you are. Get good at the next move. The journey gets built one wayfinding decision at a time.

I know this works because I lived it the long way around. I didn’t plan my way to this book; I navigated to it, keeping the direction fixed and letting two destinations go when the conditions told me to. The book about why you can’t pre-plan your way through a changing world could not, it turns out, be pre-planned. It had to be wayfound.

Stop following pathfinders. Become a Wayfinder

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post Be A Wayfinder, Not A Pathfinder appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

We have been taught the wrong things. Stop picking destinations

My mentor just opened a time capsule from 20 years ago. He’d written it the week his nephew was born, a one-pager that captured goals, predictions, things he hoped would be true by the time the kid turned twenty. Sealed it. Put it away.

Last week, on his nephew’s twentieth birthday, the two of them sat down and opened it together.

Over lunch later that week, he laughed about what was inside. The job titles he’d predicted: wrong. The income numbers: wrong. The house: wrong. The car: wrong. He’d missed almost every single specific.

Then he said something that hit me like a freight-train:

“But almost everything I wrote was right directionally. I wanted more freedom. I have it. I wanted more time with the people I love. I have it. I wanted to build something I was proud of. I did. The destinations were nonsense. The directions were dead-on.”

I asked him what he’d put in his next time capsule, twenty years from now. He didn’t hesitate.

“More of and less of. That’s it. More time with the people who matter. More health. More energy. Less of the noise. Less number-chasing. The numbers were wrong last time. The specifics will likely be wrong next time, too. But I know the directions won’t be.”

That lunch reframed how I think about goal-setting.

We’ve been told for years that goals need to be specific. SMART. A number, a date, a finish line. In a stable world, that worked. The five-year plan made sense because five years from now looked roughly like today.

The world doesn’t sit still anymore. In 1965, the average company on the S&P 500 stayed on the list for 33 years. Today it’s around 15. About half of today’s S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years, and the CEOs I’m talking to in tech think that pace is still accelerating.

The role you’re chasing might not exist in five years. The company you’d kill to work at might be gone. The city you want to move to might be a different city by the time you arrive. The destinations we set today are guesses about a future that won’t exist by the time we get there.

Direction is a different animal. More freedom. More health. More mastery. More time with people you love. Those don’t go obsolete. Those don’t get acquired. Those don’t change shape when the market shifts.

Direction is durable. Destination isn’t.

Direction tells you who to become. Destination tells you where to arrive.

Direction grows with you. Destination holds you hostage to the version of you who set it.

You’ve felt this. Are you exactly where you thought you’d be ten years ago today? My guess: the specific destination is completely off, but the direction is probably pretty accurate.

The version of you who set those goals didn’t have access to what the version of you reading them now knows. That gap is going to keep widening. The faster the world moves, the bigger the gap, the more the destination drifts.

You can keep picking new destinations and missing them. Or you can stop picking destinations.

So here’s the move. Take the biggest goal you’re carrying right now and do what my mentor is doing with his next time capsule.

I call it the Time Capsule Test.

Two columns. More of (left). Less of (right).

More of the work that lights you up.
Less of the work that drains you.

More of the people who energize you.
Less of the people who don’t.

More of the kind of leader you want to be known for.
Less of who you fall into when you’re tired.

Then ask only one question at the end of the year: Did the left column get bigger? Did the right column get smaller? That’s the entire scorecard.

This isn’t an excuse to drift. Direction is harder than destination, not easier. It requires you to know what you actually want at the level of values, not the level of nouns. Freedom. Mastery. Connection. Health. Energy. If you can’t name what you’re moving toward without using a number or a title, you don’t have a direction yet, you have a wish.

But once you do have it? It will outlive every plan you write.

My mentor with the time capsule didn’t drift through twenty years. He chased his direction harder than most people chase their destinations. The difference was what he was chasing. The specifics were wrong. The trajectory wasn’t.

That’s the trick. The world will keep changing the destinations on you. It cannot change your direction unless you let it.

Stop picking destinations. Pick directions.

“The destinations will keep being wrong. The directions, if you pick them well, almost never are.”

PS. HERE is a podcast episode with my mentor (he hates when I call him that), Mike, if you’re interested.

Going Deeper

The research behind why this works

The instinct to set specific, measurable destinations feels rational. It’s what every productivity book, business plan, and high-performance methodology has trained us to do. But decades of research across economics, organizational psychology, and forecasting tell a consistent story: in a rapidly changing world, destinations decay quickly, get gamed easily, and rarely deliver the experience we expected when we set them. Direction is the more durable unit.

1. When a measurement becomes a target, it stops being useful.

In 1975, British economist Charles Goodhart, while studying monetary policy at the Bank of England, articulated what is now one of the most cited principles in management, education, and economics:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

The mechanism is straightforward and brutal. Once a metric becomes the goal, people optimize for the metric, not for the underlying thing the metric was supposed to represent. Behavior bends. Shortcuts emerge. The number gets hit. The outcome it was tracking doesn’t.

The destinations you commit to most specifically are the ones most vulnerable to this corruption. You hit the number. You arrive at the place. And somewhere along the way, you sacrificed the thing the number was meant to track.

Goodhart’s Law has been confirmed across education (teaching to the test reduces learning), healthcare (treating to the metric distorts care), business (quarterly targets erode customer health), and even AI alignment, where “specification gaming” is now a recognized failure mode in goal-seeking systems.

Charles Goodhart, Bank of England: “Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience” (1975, formally published 1981); subsequently formalized by anthropologist Marilyn Strathern as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (1997).

2. The world is changing faster than ever and even experts can’t predict it.

The premise underneath direction-over-destination is empirical, not philosophical. The pace of change really has accelerated, and the data is hard to argue with.

The most cited measure is corporate longevity. Innosight’s longitudinal study of the S&P 500 found that the average company tenure on the index has collapsed from 33 years in 1965 to about 15 years today, with forecasts projecting just 12 years by the end of the decade. About half of today’s S&P 500 will be replaced over the next ten years. The institutions that defined economic stability for previous generations now turn over twice as fast.

And we are not equipped to predict around that turnover. Psychologist Philip Tetlock spent more than twenty years running the largest longitudinal study of expert forecasting ever conducted. Across more than 80,000 forecasts from credentialed political scientists, economists, intelligence analysts, and journalists, long-range predictions performed only marginally better than chance. Confidence and accuracy were inversely correlated, the most certain experts tended to be the least accurate.

Combine the two findings. The world is changing faster than at any point in recorded business history, and trained experts with full information cannot predict it. The version of you setting a long-range destination has even less of a chance than they do.

Innosight: 2021 Corporate Longevity Forecast; Apollo Academy: “Average Tenure of Companies in the S&P 500 Index: 15 Years” (2026). Philip E. Tetlock, University of Pennsylvania: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (2005); Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015), with Dan Gardner.

3. The strategies that actually work almost never play out as planned.

Henry Mintzberg, one of the most influential strategy researchers of the last fifty years, spent decades studying how strategies actually form inside real organizations. His findings overturned the strategic-planning industry.

The successful strategies were almost never the ones written down in the original plan. Mintzberg distinguished between deliberate strategy (what you set out to do) and emergent strategy (what actually formed through acting, learning, and adjusting). The most effective organizations started with a direction and let the specifics emerge from contact with reality. The ones that clung to original destinations consistently underperformed.

Direction over destination, expressed in management form: have a direction, move toward it, let the path appear.

Henry Mintzberg & James A. Waters, McGill University: “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent,” Strategic Management Journal (1985); The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994).

4. Direction-style goals make people happier than destination-style goals, even when the destinations are hit.

There’s a fork in the goal-setting literature most people never hear about. Psychologists Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and Tim Kasser have spent decades studying the difference between intrinsic goals (oriented toward growth, connection, mastery, and contribution = directions) and extrinsic goals (oriented toward wealth, image, fame, and status = destinations).

The findings, replicated across hundreds of studies and dozens of countries: people who orient their lives around intrinsic, direction-style goals report substantially higher well-being, lower anxiety, and stronger relationships than people who orient around extrinsic, destination-style ones.

And here’s the part that bites. The effect holds even when the extrinsic goals are achieved. Hitting the number doesn’t deliver the feeling. Reaching the title doesn’t pay off the way you expected. The direction was always the prize. The destination was a proxy you mistook for the thing itself.

Edward Deci & Richard Ryan, University of Rochester: Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness (Guilford Press, 2017); Tim Kasser, Knox College: The High Price of Materialism (MIT Press, 2002).

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post How to Set Goals the World Can’t Break appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

You’re not short on information. You’re short on the people who feel safe handing it to you.

Drive at night, and your headlights reach about two hundred feet. Past that, nothing. And yet you don’t sit in the driveway waiting for the whole route to light up, you pull out, you drive, and the road keeps revealing itself a little further with every foot you cover. The light moves because you do.

I’ve built most of a career on that idea: you can see a short distance ahead, you move anyway, and the next stretch appears. It’s the spine of the book I’m finishing. You can’t pre-plan your way through a changing world; you drive into it. I believed that completely, and I still do.

But there’s a part of the headlights I missed for years, and it’s the part that actually changes how you lead. How far you can see in the dark is not fixed. You can widen the beam. And the fastest way to do it has almost nothing to do with you. And almost everything to do with who’s further up the road than you are.

The general was never the one who could see

Before there were maps worth trusting, an army moving through unfamiliar country lived or died on a single role that almost no one remembers: the scout on the high ground. While the column marched the valley floor, the general included, banners and all, a rider was sent up the ridge. From the deck of the valley, you could see a few hundred yards of trail. From the ridge, you could see the river crossing, the dust of the enemy, the pass that didn’t go through, hours before any of it reached the column below.

The general had the authority. The scout had the sightline. And those are not the same thing, a fact every competent commander in history had to swallow, because the most important information on the worst days came from the lowest-ranking person on the highest ground. The general who insisted on trusting only what he could see from the valley floor didn’t look decisive. He marched his people into the ambush he’d been warned about.

Here’s why this should bother you. As you rise, the instinct is to assume more authority means more visibility, that the higher your title, the more you should be able to see. It’s exactly backwards. Rank pulls you down into the valley, into the meetings and the column and the deck, where your view is no better than anyone else’s and often worse. The corner office has a terrible line of sight to the customer, the frontline, and the dust on the horizon. The org chart is a topographical map of who’s standing where, and the people who can actually see are almost never at the top of it.

Authority is not sightline

Once you separate those two things, a lot of leadership behaviour you’ve tolerated starts to look like what it is:

• Weak leaders defend the view from the valley. Strong leaders send someone up the ridge.

• Weak leaders staff the room with people who confirm what they already see. Strong leaders post scouts exactly where they’re blind.

• Weak leaders ask, “What do I think?” Strong leaders ask, “Who can see what I can’t… and do they feel safe telling me?”

A scout is anyone whose vantage point reaches past yours: a mentor who has already walked the country you’re entering, a peer in another industry who sees the weather a season before it reaches you, a junior person close enough to the customer to spot the washed-out bridge while you’re still reading last quarter’s map. None of them outrank you. Every one of them can see further than you in the one direction that matters right now.

“The leader who refuses to send anyone up the ridge isn’t decisive. He’s blind on purpose.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand my own job here. I thought I was paid to see further than the people around me; that’s what the title implied and what the stage seemed to demand. I was wrong. My job is to hold the direction and assemble the widest set of honest sightlines around it. The seeing was never meant to be a solo act. My headlights reach two hundred feet like everyone else’s. What changes the distance isn’t better eyes. It’s a ridge full of people I’ve actually given permission to tell me what they see.

What changes next week:

Three moves, in order of how much they’ll cost you.

• Find the decision you’re calling “my call to make” and admit it’s the one you’re most blind on. The decisions we guard most jealously are usually the ones where our valley-floor view is worst. That’s the one that needs a scout, and it’s the one your ego will fight hardest to keep to yourself.

• Ask the lowest-ranking person closest to it what they see and then shut up. Not the verdict, the view. The failure mode isn’t forgetting to ask; it’s asking and then talking over the answer because it complicates the plan. If the scout’s report only ever confirms what you already believed, you don’t have a scout. You have an echo.

• Notice who stopped reporting and why. Every leader has scouts who’ve gone quiet. They didn’t run out of things to see. They learned that the last time they rode down with bad news, it cost them. The ridge isn’t empty. You emptied it. Find one of those people this week and make it safe to climb back up.

And if you’re not leading anyone, if you’re just trying to navigate your own life, the same move applies, minus the org chart. Stop trying to see the whole road from the driver’s seat. Find the two or three people who’ve already driven the stretch you’re squinting at, borrow their view, and go. You still won’t see the whole route. You’ll see further than you did, and further is all you ever need to take the next stretch.

You can’t light the whole road. You can choose whose eyes you borrow.

GOING DEEPER

The research behind why this works and where it breaks

It feels like leadership should mean seeing the most and knowing the most. The evidence mostly says the opposite: power filters your information, the most valuable signal sits at the edges you can’t reach, and warnings only help if people feel safe enough to raise them. But the research also names a real limit, a point where adding sightlines stops helping, and someone simply has to decide. All four studies below, including the one that pushes back.

1. Power quietly narrows what you can see.

Across a series of experiments, psychologist Dacher Keltner and colleagues found that gaining power reliably degrades perspective-taking, the ability to accurately read what other people see, know, and feel. The more authority people are handed, the more they default to their own vantage point and the worse they get at registering anyone else’s. It’s a near-perfect description of the general who stops sending scouts: the position itself erodes the sightline the position depends on.

Adam D. Galinsky, Dacher Keltner, et al.: “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science (2006); Keltner, The Power Paradox (2016).

2. The freshest information sits in the gaps, not at the top.

Sociologist Ron Burt spent decades mapping how information actually moves through organizations. His central finding: the people with the best, earliest, least-redundant information aren’t the ones highest on the chart, they’re the ones positioned across “structural holes,” the gaps between groups that otherwise don’t talk. A leader’s direct view is, almost by definition, redundant with everyone else near the top. The signal that matters, the dust, the washed-out bridge, reaches you through someone bridging to a world you’re not in. Those bridges are your scouts.

Ronald S. Burt, University of Chicago: Structural Holes (1992); “Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal of Sociology (2004).

3. Disasters happen when the people who can see aren’t heard.

Examining catastrophes from aviation to the Columbia shuttle loss, researchers keep finding the same pattern: someone in the organization saw the danger in time, and the structure failed to carry that view to the person with authority. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety shows that teams catch more errors and perform better when people lower down feel able to say what they see, and that the binding constraint is almost never knowledge. It’s whether the scout believes the general actually wants the report.

Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business School: “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly (1999); The Fearless Organization (2018).

4. But more sightlines aren’t free, and at some point, someone has to decide.

Here’s the limit, because it’s real. Research on information load and group decision-making finds that gathering more input has a downward slope: past a point, additional perspectives stop sharpening the picture and start blurring it, raising confidence without raising accuracy and stalling the call entirely. The lesson isn’t “post infinite scouts.” It’s that scouting and deciding are two different jobs. The general still has to choose a direction the moment the reports stop converging, and the leader who hides inside endless input is failing in the opposite direction from the one who ignores it. Widen the beam, then commit.

On information overload: Eppler & Mengis, “The Concept of Information Overload,” The Information Society (2004). On analysis paralysis and decision quality: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (2004).

Put them together, and the shape is honest. Power narrows your view; the signal that matters sits at edges you can’t reach, and the warnings only help if people feel safe enough to raise them, so you need scouts. And more is not always better; the reports eventually have to stop, and someone has to choose. The lone visionary at the front of the column was always a myth. So is the leader who gathers input forever to avoid making a decision. The skill is knowing you can’t see it all, building a ridge that can, and then driving.

Send someone up the ridge. Then take the next stretch of road yourself.

Thanks for reading Eric Termuende’s Newsletter! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post Why Key Information Might Not Reach You appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

For the better part of a decade, I tried to answer one question: What does the future of work look like?

For the better part of a decade, I tried to answer one question:

What does the future of work look like?

I am proud of the work. I have spoken with leaders, studied organizations, and spent years exploring technology, talent, culture, and workplace change.

I also have a confession.

I am bad at predicting the future.

So is almost everyone else.

Why This Matters for Leaders

The forecasts around AI alone can give a leader whiplash. Different experts see different timelines, different jobs at risk, and different definitions of what work will become.

I no longer think “What does the future look like?” is the most useful question.

The better question is:

How do we build teams so good that it does not matter what the future looks like?

That changes the work.

Instead of trying to predict every disruption, build trust so problems surface early.

Remove friction so information can become action faster.

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

Create a culture of bounded experimentation so teams learn through movement.

Set a direction that can survive a changing destination.

Build identities flexible enough to outgrow yesterday’s success.

Make One-Degree Shifts instead of waiting for the perfect transformation plan.

The future of work will keep changing.

The organizations that thrive may not be the ones that predicted it best.

They may be the ones that became ready before change demanded that they be.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post The Future of Work Is Impossible to Predict. Here’s the Better Question. appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

The AI conversation has become a prediction contest. Jobs will disappear. Jobs will be reshaped. Entry-level work is at risk. Middle management is at risk. AI will create enormous productivity. AI will create new problems we have not imagined.

The AI conversation has become a prediction contest.

Jobs will disappear. Jobs will be reshaped. Entry-level work is at risk. Middle management is at risk. AI will create enormous productivity. AI will create new problems we have not imagined.

The forecasts conflict.

That is the point.

If intelligent people with access to enormous amounts of information disagree about what comes next, leaders should be careful about building an entire strategy around one confident prediction.

Why This Matters for Leaders

A better question is: what capabilities remain valuable across multiple possible futures?

I would start with five.

Direction. Teams need to know what matters even when the tools change.

Trust. People surface problems and admit what they do not understand faster in high-trust environments.

Learning speed. The advantage may belong less to the organization that picks the perfect tool and more to the one that learns responsibly.

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

Experimentation. Small, bounded tests can create organization-specific information that generic predictions cannot.

Adaptive identity. Leaders and teams must be willing to outgrow old descriptions of what their role, expertise, or organization is.

This does not mean ignoring AI strategy.

It means building an organization capable of updating the strategy as the technology changes.

Nobody knows exactly what AI will do next.

Build the kind of team that can move when the answer arrives.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post AI and Leadership: What Leaders Should Build When Nobody Knows What AI Will Do Next appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

The obvious objection to experimentation is chaos. If every team is constantly trying new things, how does an organization maintain standards, focus, or accountability?

The obvious objection to experimentation is chaos.

If every team is constantly trying new things, how does an organization maintain standards, focus, or accountability?

The answer is bounded experimentation.

A good experiment has five parts.

A clear direction. What are we trying to create more or less of?

A specific friction. What problem are we trying to reduce?

Why This Matters for Leaders

A small shift. What is the smallest meaningful change we can test?

A boundary. Where, for how long, and with whom will we run it?

A learning question. What are we trying to discover?

This is very different from “everyone do whatever you want.”

The direction creates alignment. The boundary contains risk. The learning question turns activity into information.

Leaders should also define what cannot be experimented with casually: safety, legal obligations, core ethical standards, and other true anchors.

Everything else deserves a more precise question.

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

Is this a standard because it must be?

Or is it simply the way we have always done it?

Experimentation works when trust is high enough for people to report bad results honestly.

The goal is not to prove the idea was right.

The goal is to become less wrong, faster.

That is not chaos.

That is learning with guardrails.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post How to Experiment at Work Without Creating Chaos appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

As leaders rise, it is easy to assume that more authority creates more visibility. Often the opposite happens.

As leaders rise, it is easy to assume that more authority creates more visibility.

Often the opposite happens.

Rank pulls leaders into meetings, dashboards, and summaries. The frontline gets further away. The customer becomes a number. The information arrives after it has been cleaned, condensed, and made safe.

Authority is not sightline.

Before modern maps, a commander moving through unfamiliar country depended on scouts on the ridge. The general held the direction. The scout could see the river crossing, the blocked pass, or the dust on the horizon.

Why This Matters for Leaders

The strongest leaders understand this distinction.

They do not ask only, “What do I think?”

They ask, “Who can see what I cannot?”

A scout may be a junior employee close to the customer, a peer in another industry, a mentor who has already crossed the terrain, or someone whose lived experience reveals a blind spot.

The leader’s job is not to see everything.

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

It is to assemble the widest set of honest sightlines around the direction.

Try this: identify the decision you are most tempted to call “my call to make.”

Then ask who has a better vantage point on one part of it.

Invite the view before you defend your own.

The leader who refuses to send anyone up the ridge is not decisive.

They are blind on purpose.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post Authority Is Not Sightline: Why Leaders Need People Who Can See What They Can’t appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

Psychological safety is often described as a culture where people feel safe to speak up. In uncertainty, I think of it as an information system.

Psychological safety is often described as a culture where people feel safe to speak up.

In uncertainty, I think of it as an information system.

Before reliable maps, armies moving through unfamiliar terrain depended on scouts who climbed to higher ground. The general had authority. The scout had the sightline.

Those are not the same thing.

Modern organizations have scouts everywhere. Frontline employees see customer behaviour. Junior employees see new tools. People in different markets see weather before it reaches headquarters.

Why This Matters for Leaders

The question is whether they feel safe telling leadership what they see.

If speaking up is punished, ignored, or made politically expensive, the information never reaches the people making decisions.

That makes psychological safety a strategic capability.

Weak leaders defend the view from the valley.

Strong leaders ask, “Who can see what I cannot—and do they feel safe telling me?”

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

Comfort is not the objective. Better information is.

A psychologically safe team can still have standards, accountability, and hard conversations.

The difference is that people do not have to choose between protecting themselves and protecting the organization.

In a stable world, blind spots are costly.

In a fast-changing world, they can become existential.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post Why Psychological Safety Matters More When the Future Is Uncertain appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

When an organization is tired of change, the answer is rarely another change initiative. Teams can become exhausted by the machinery of transformation: new language, new committees, new dashboards, new launch meetings.

When an organization is tired of change, the answer is rarely another change initiative.

Teams can become exhausted by the machinery of transformation: new language, new committees, new dashboards, new launch meetings.

Meanwhile, the original friction survives.

A better approach is smaller.

Start with the lived experience of the work. Ask where people lose time, energy, confidence, or clarity.

Choose one source of friction.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Then make the smallest meaningful shift that could improve it.

Do not brand it.

Do not build a twelve-month roadmap before testing it.

Run the experiment with the people closest to the problem. Decide in advance what you are watching. Then keep it, kill it, or change it.

This reduces change fatigue for a simple reason: people can see the relationship between the problem and the shift.

The change is not being done to them. It is being built with them to remove something they already experience.

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

Large transformation may still be necessary.

But even large transformation is made of smaller behavioural and operational changes.

Find the friction.

Make the shift.

Learn before you scale.

Change feels different when people can see what it is fixing.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post How to Remove Friction Without Creating Change Fatigue appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.

Organizational friction is anything that makes the right work unnecessarily harder, slower, more confusing, or more draining. It can be a twelve-step approval process.

Organizational friction is anything that makes the right work unnecessarily harder, slower, more confusing, or more draining.

It can be a twelve-step approval process.

A meeting nobody needs.

A handoff that loses information.

A leader who has become a bottleneck.

A policy built to solve a problem that no longer exists.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Friction matters more as the world speeds up. A slow process is not simply annoying. It increases the distance between information and action.

The challenge is that leaders often cannot see the friction from where they sit.

The people closest to the work can.

This is why trust comes first. If employees believe naming friction will be interpreted as complaining, they will route around the problem privately. Leadership sees the output but misses the drag underneath it.

Ask three questions.

What is harder than it should be?

A Practical Way to Apply the Idea

Where do we lose the most time?

What do we all complain about but no longer question?

Then resist the urge to launch a transformation.

Find one piece of friction and make a One-Degree Shift.

Friction is rarely removed by a speech.

It is removed when a team can name what is slowing it down and is trusted to try something better.

A SIMPLE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE

Use the question or framework in the next real decision, team conversation, or planning session. The objective is not to admire the idea. It is to create information about the work while the cost of learning is still small.

COMMON MISTAKES

• Turning the idea into a slogan without changing a behaviour, meeting, decision rule, or feedback loop.
• Scaling a solution before the team has learned whether it addresses the root friction.
• Confusing adaptability with a lack of standards. Values, safety, ethics, and other true anchors still require clarity.
• Waiting for complete certainty when the next responsible action is reversible and can create better information.

RELATED RESOURCES

• Plans Are Hypotheses, Not Promises: A Better Approach to Strategic Planning
• Why Trust Matters More During Change and Uncertainty
• How to Lead Through Uncertainty: A Practical Guide for Leaders

The post What Is Organizational Friction? How Leaders Find What Is Slowing Teams Down appeared first on ERIC TERMUENDE.