I did something this week I rarely do. I read an online article twice. The second time I printed it out to read properly. The story goes something like this.

It’s April 1984. Two guys were sleeping in a Volkswagen in a car park in Basel, Switzerland. Every morning they’d wake up, wash themselves in the train station toilets, and walk to their stand at the industry’s big annual business show. If anyone asked where they were staying, they’d tell them the Hilton.

Their whole industry was going under at the time. Cheaper technology from abroad had already decimated the workforce and driven 2/3 of the companies out of business. By this stage anyone with sense had already jumped ship. That said, these two guys were trying to rebuild something everyone else had written off as flat-lining and near dead.

To cut a long story short, they pulled it off. The best bit is that the industry they saved is now the source of what wealthy (and/or image conscious) people wear on their wrists as a signal of who they are.

Simple enough story so why, you may ask, did I read it twice? Good question.

When you look at what they actually did, none of it was what I would have expected. There was no rebranding exercise or freshly minted mission statement. Given the lack of $$ there were no consultants brought in to write a vacuous culture deck.

They went to first principles and rebuilt the actual work at the component level. In other words, they redesigned what each craftsman did in the morning, stripped their product down from ninety-one parts to fifty-one and rejected the whole framing of the industry that was killing them and built something different from the ground up.

Simple. But simple is hard and what saved them was the boring, patient, unglamorous work of rebuilding daily practice.

I’ve thought about this a lot all week because it’s the exact opposite of what I watch most founders & business leaders do when something’s not working. The reflex is a new campaign, new values posters as posters and desktop screensavers, a team-building day to “get alignment” or a training day on whatever’s currently in vogue. None of that shifts anything meaningfully because none of it touches cornerstone daily practices.

It served as a timely reminder to me from days past in the world of sports performance.

Your culture is what your team does on a Tuesday morning at 10:47am when everyone is left to their own devices - in the office, at the home desk or on the road. So it’s certainly not what your values statement says they should do. Your performance is what emerges from a hundred small habits and not from the ‘campaign’ you ran to improve it. Over the long term your organisation thrives on the cohesion that arises from performing people that stay with you. A workplace team who go the distance and defend the work is the one that’s been formed by the actual work itself, not the one that’s been told they’re valued in a quarterly briefing.

You might be nodding along now but how would you litmus test this?

Pretty challenging, right?

Experience tells me that if your culture can be summarised in a slide deck, then it doesn’t really exist yet. That’s only the version of it you’ve been able to put into words. Real embedded practice is invisible from the outside. It can’t be copied by anyone who hasn’t spent many months inside it, feeling it and absorbing it. Everyone else tries to mimic what they can see - environment design, language, visible rituals - and none of that works because the visible bits aren’t the important components. Not close.

Anyways, two lads in a car park in Basel worked all this out in 1984 without a cent in their pockets. Most founders & business leaders today are still getting bent out of shape writing the values statement.

The majority of the start-up founders, business & sports leaders I get to work with are fat on input and starving for insight.

What do I mean? As I see it, they will tell you they consume enormous amounts of content e.g. four books on the go at once, podcasts on commutes, LinkedIn threads they scroll through in coffee queues etc. So they say they read voraciously & that they listen constantly but at the same time they can’t understand why their thinking hasn’t improved.

I’ve thought about this a lot; there’s a specific difference between listening to people and listening to outputs. Not many talk about that.

When you read someone’s book or long article, you’re following a mind at work. You watch the person think along with their stuttering starts, the corrections, the moment they realise their initial framing was wrong and then pivot. Real thinking is messy and looks like that when it’s exposed. It’s hard but appealing because it’s how you learn to think yourself.

When you consume the same person’s 15-second clip, their podcast summary or their algorithm-driven highlight, you aren’t watching them think. I reckon you’re getting the moment their mind produced something extractable. So not the twenty minutes of considered pondering that produced the moment or the rabbit holes they went down. Just the information hit; the least useful part of thinking.

Think about it. Someone, or something, else selected the moment you’re watching or hearing. Someone or something else decided what would hit you in the feels. The actual person who did the actual work is hardly there at all.

And so the founder or leader who listens to thirty podcasts in a month is not, in any meaningful sense, listening to thirty people, but to the algorithmically derived subset of what social platforms have decided is engagement-optimal or will increase dwell-time. They’re consuming a version of thinking that’s been designed to be consumable, which is pretty much the opposite of what actual thinking is for. A bit like the way fast-food is designed to mimic real, high-quality food.

I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s why I’ve come to understand that the input doesn’t produce insight. The mechanism that would let it convert has been removed at the source.

For contrast, those founders & leaders whose thinking improves perceptibly over time tend to be different in one regard i.e. they pick a small number of people whose minds they want to spend real time with, and they follow those minds via their long form content. They read the books, not the AI generated summaries. They sit with and through the essays, not clicky threads. They consciously reject the algorithmic feed as a substitute for the real work of engaging deeply with another person’s experience-driven intelligence.

Can you name three people whose thinking you’re following & immersing into in longer format right now? If the number is less than three, you have your diagnosis.

Last Sunday I sat in the bar of a cool local hotel here in Mallorca and watched the staff turn out €15 cocktails like they were doing them for the first time. Aesthetically, the bar is comfortable, appealing & embracing to sit in. The service is prompt & pleasant .

The drinks were a disaster.

I spoke to the F&B manager later. He’s a friend. He told me client feedback had been strong. He was pleased with how the summer had gone.

He’s my pal so I had to tread carefully but at the same time if he’s my pal then I’m doing him no favours just nodding along, right?

I asked how many people had reordered a second cocktail that night. The number was zero.

The people whose opinion actually mattered had voted, and they had voted with their next drink. The feedback he was collecting from those willing to fill in a form or offer a comment was easy praise from people who either didn’t know what a good cocktail was or didn’t want to spoil the atmosphere or offend anyone. The people whose experience had been genuinely compromised were saying nothing at all.

Theirs is the only signal that matters.

Most business founders & leaders are falling head-first into the same trap.

They’ll tell you that the clicks are up and the comments say something like “wow, cool idea.” The engaged customers keep coming back. Somewhere in the middle of all that, however, the specific piece of the operation that’s quietly killing the business goes unmentioned because nobody in the business feels like they should, or can, voice an alternative narrative.

Bill Walsh, the coach who built the San Francisco 49ers NFL dynasty, described what he wanted in the people around him. People who could hold their own view with conviction and change it just as readily when evidence or logic demanded it. The line he used was memorable. “Sometimes there are three sides to a coin.”

The specific thing Walsh built into his teams was the discipline of inviting constructive challenge and rewarding people for delivering it. Important to note that it wasn’t tolerating it but actively creating the conditions where it happened. The founder who cannot access that discipline is running the same business as my pal, the F&B manager; they’re surrounded by pleasant feedback while the important & critical signal goes unheard.

It's Summer so with attention spans narrowing due to overheating I’ll leave you with this to think over. And please do because I think, actually I know, that it’s hugely important for you: who in your business/organisation is currently encouraged to tell you the thing you don’t want to hear? More than that, when did you last create the conditions where they willingly could and would?

In my work I’ve had an itch about a pattern & trend in founder & business leader behaviour. But it’s so common that most others I mention it to just can’t see it. I’ve come to understand that it’s not just one behaviour but something known as “a register”.

For example…..

“Would you be open to...” is what they say/write when they mean I want.

“I’d love to explore...” is what they say/write when they mean I’ve decided.

“Just checking in...” is what they say/write when they mean this matters.

“I hope this makes sense...” at the end of something they say/write that made perfect sense.

Every one of these sentences serves the same purpose.

Asking permission the founder has already earned.

They soften the ask so that the person on the other end feels big and important and the founder feels small.

In short, it’s the language of ‘The Applicant’.

When you see it you can’t unsee it…..it’s oozing out of every prospect email, investor update, and team message the founder writes.

Most founders think this is professionalism. Some might call it humility or staying respectful.

No, it’s none of those. It’s the exact behaviour that trains buyers, investors, and team members to treat the founder as a candidate rather than ‘The Source’. And then, over months & years, the founder wonders why the calendar hasn’t filled with the kind of work they want and can do.

Reason: The founder trained the market to see them that way, one sentence at a time.

Have a think on this question for the week ahead: what am I asking permission for that I’ve earned the right to just do?

Most founders & business leaders I meet believe two things about their own personal performance.

The first is that working harder produces more output.

The second is that when the output starts to drop, the answer is to work harder still.

Neither belief is examined and both are the operating assumptions underneath most daily and weekly calendars.

Both are wrong.

Not partially wrong. They’re wrong in a specific way that turns effort into an active force against performance rather than a source of it.

The framework I use to explain this to founders is deliberately simple. You’ve heard it from me before in previous articles.

Capability multiplied by Ability equals Performance.

Ability is what most founders think they’re trading in. Skill, experience, intelligence, judgement. The stuff on the CV. The stuff they hire other people for. The stuff that gets talked about in board meetings.

Capability is what allows Ability to actually happen and land. Whether the founder has slept enough this week to make the decision the business needs them to make on Thursday afternoon. Whether they have the physical and cognitive room to hold the difficult conversation the sales team has been avoiding for a month. Whether they can walk into a room and be present in it rather than partially there with three other conversations in their head.

Ability without Capability is not a reduced version of Performance; in fact it’s the illusion of Performance; the founder still knows what to do but they just cannot execute it at the level the moment requires.

Multiply anything by zero and you get zero. It doesn’t matter how large the first number is.

This is where this piece gets uncomfortable.

Most founders under pressure respond to declining Performance by increasing Ability inputs. Longer hours. More meetings. Deeper involvement in things they should have delegated. More content consumed on the commute. More frameworks & emails read at night.

None of that changes the multiplier. The multiplier is Capability, and Capability is being spent, not built, by every additional hour of work past a specific threshold that varies by person but exists in all of them.

The founder ends up in a situation that is arithmetically unusual and psychologically devastating. Their effective Performance is dropping. Their subjective effort is climbing. The gap between the two is what they misread as needing to work harder. And so they do. Which drops Performance further. Which increases the perceived need for more effort.

The name for that curve, mathematically, is a doom loop. The name for it in a founder’s life is roughly two years of feeling permanently behind while working the hardest they’ve ever worked.

I’ve watched enough of these to know what they look like from the outside. The founder is forty and looks fifty-five. Their energy in the room is manic rather than sharp. They tell you they’ve never felt better. They mean it, in the sense that they have lost the reference point for what better would feel like.

I’ve also watched it from the inside, some years ago, in a different workspace.

That’s the only sentence about that I’ll write. It was expensive and it took a long time to unwind. It taught me the specific thing this piece is about.

The move is not to work less. The move is to stop confusing Ability inputs with Performance outputs. Those are two different levers, and one of them is currently broken.

Capability is the multiplier. It cannot be borrowed against forever. It can be built, but only through the specific things you already know build it, all of which feel like doing nothing to a brain that has been rewarded for the last five years for doing everything.

Which is why the founders who need this most are the least able to hear it.

Most founders are one degree away from working out that effort is not the same thing as output.

The years that went are gone.

The question is what the next ones get to be.

In 1979, Akio Morita was about to release a portable cassette player with no recording function and headphones-only output. The market research was unanimous: people wanted recording. Buyers wouldn’t pay for listening they couldn’t share. Sony’s own engineering team thought it was a mistake.

Morita shipped it anyway. The Walkman sold over 400 million units across its lifespan and created a category that didn’t exist before he forced it into the world.

A bad idea, according to everyone who measured it.

Samuel Langley had a Smithsonian budget, a War Department contract, and the entire aeronautical establishment behind him.

Two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, beat him to powered flight by nine days.

The Wright brothers understood something Langley didn’t…simply because they came from cycling. An aircraft, like a bicycle, has to be balanced laterally while it’s moving. The aviation establishment treated flight as a power problem but in contrast the Wrights treated it as a balance problem.

The bicycle shop turned out to be the better laboratory than the Smithsonian.

Toy Story 2 was in production in 1998 and it was terrible. Pixar’s Braintrust, a small group of directors who held no formal authority over each other’s films, said so in a room with John Lasseter. Direct, specifically and without suage-coating. They said the script was broken and the film couldn’t be rescued without rebuilding it from the ground up.

Pixar rebuilt it in nine months. The film opened at number one and still sits on the list of highest-rated animated sequels ever made.

The rules of that room were simple. The Braintrust could be as harsh as they wanted. The director had to listen. And the director was not obligated to take a single note.

That third condition, the least stand-out, is what most companies who try to copy the format quietly miss.

So, it might not be obvious that here we have three pictures of the same thing.

The first says the people closest to the data are sometimes the furthest from the answer.

The second says the answer often arrives from a discipline that wasn’t supposed to be relevant.

The third says the room has to be designed so the difficult voice can speak, and so the person it lands on can’t outrank it.

Most founders I work with engineer the opposite. The sales decisions go through advisors who measure too much. The commercial hires come from inside the category the founder is already failing in. The rooms get designed to keep the difficult or challenging voice off the agenda before it reaches a meeting.

Then they’re head-scratching when their commercial function never finds its breakthrough.

Most start-up founders & business leaders are still waiting for the breakthrough to find them.

You’ve already met yours.

You just didn’t like how it looked.

www.paulclarke.ie

You know when someone says something to you but their body language screams that they’re bracing for a reaction?

I went quiet. Just looked at him for a second. He held it. Didn’t flinch, didn’t qualify it.

“Yeah,” he said. “You heard me.”

We were about forty minutes into a conversation about why the sales report & pipeline looked the way it looked.

They had a really good product with a decent team. And a founder who hadn’t slept properly in four months.

Somewhere in the middle of our chat, he’d pulled out a name; someone from LinkedIn, an ‘accelerator’ figure, if you will. A guy with a beautiful studio and a sharp suit and a post that had tons of ‘Likes’ & “100% agree” comments. And this was the advice he laid on the table between us like it was evidence.

The advice was the polar opposite of what I’d been saying.

I didn’t argue. I asked one question instead.

Had that guru ever had to close his first ten sales himself? Or was he the visionary who hired sales later and now retrofits a narrative that sounds smart & profound?

Anyways, our founder guy thought about it. Genuinely thought about it.

“I actually don’t know,” he said.

In a nutshell, that’s the problem right there.

There’s a specific type of content that founders are drinking down right now. Posts and threads and what-I-wish-I-knew wisdom from people who speak well, look great, and have the engagement numbers & vanity metrics to prove that a lot of other people find them convincing. It’s everywhere. It’s seductive. And consuming it feels like learning something valuable.

It isn’t. Not usually.

Consuming that content is, and I’ll be direct about this, a lot like swapping real sex for porn. You get the dopamine hit. You feel like something happened. But it’s a highlight reel; frictionless, consequence-free, completely disconnected from how things actually work when a real buyer is sitting across the table from you and doesn’t give the faintest f&ck about your MVP story or your presentation.

Real startup life, especially the commercial side, is messy, awkward, sometimes genuinely demoralising, and almost always better when there’s actual communication and actual effort.

Ah, but no guru is filming that version. Nobody’s getting ten thousand likes for posting about the deal that fell apart at procurement stage four months in, or the salesperson who could sell ice in January but couldn’t document a discovery call to save his life.

So the polished version becomes the reference point & true north And then people like me have it quoted back as almost irrefutable evidence.

The authority of the LinkedIn expert is worth looking at for a second.

They built something once, maybe. Raised a round, possibly. Got lucky with timing, almost certainly (not that timing gets mentioned much in the retrospective posts.) Their wisdom is marinated in survivorship bias & audience validation. Everyone claps because they’re the person at the top of the room. That’s not the same as being right…..not even close.

And when I ask, as I do now, every time, whether they’ve actually run the plays they’re prescribing, the answers get creative. “That’s not really my role anymore.” or “My value is the bigger picture.” or “Enterprise sales is table stakes.”

Which are just sophisticated ways of saying “no”.

The gap between giving commercial advice and actually closing under pressure, navigating procurement red tape, holding price and knowing how to negotiate , well that gap is enormous. Most LinkedIn wisdom never gets near it.

Here’s a phrase to mull over: revenue market fit.

Product market fit gets all the attention. The market loves your product, users engage, the feedback is super and feels great. Founders plant a flag there and feel like something significant has been achieved. And yeah, sometimes it has.

But revenue market fit is the country-cousin nobody introduces at the party. It’s the difference between the market saying this is valuable and the market saying this is valuable and here is our money in a way that makes your business model actually work. No BS. just repeatable and profitable. Without the founder personally closing every deal or the economics quietly falling asunder behind the scenes.

So many startups close the gap on product market fit and then run out of road chasing the revenue side that was supposed to follow. We all know it…they buy customers and/or they discount, heavily. They rely on founder-led heroics that don’t scale and can’t be documented. So, the engine looks like it’s running but it’s running on fumes and personal force.

The LinkedIn content, almost without exception, lives entirely on the product market fit side of that line. The revenue side, the part where someone has to hand over money before you run out of time, doesn’t support content that performs well. It’s messy and too specific and too uncomfortable. And certainly doesn’t offer enough universal wisdom to extract.

And that’s exactly why it’s the part that actually matters.

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By the way, I’m not saying stop reading. I’m not saying the people producing this content are frauds, every single one of them. Some of it is useful. Some of those people have done the real thing and have something worth hearing.

But go talk to five real prospects this week instead of five thought leaders. Build the muscle that actually produces revenue instead of the one that makes you feel like you’re learning about producing revenue. The real commercial life of a startup is harder, slower, and infinitely less Instagrammable or LinkedInable

It’s also the only thing that gets you off the ground.

A question to finish. How much of what you believe about selling e.g. about what works, what buyers respond to, what a good commercial function actually looks like, came from someone who’s genuinely done it?

Not presented it. Not written about it. Done it.

Hi again,

Welcome to Edition #100 of Fine Lines! Many thanks for sticking with me and welcome to my newest subscribers.

I asked a sports tech start-up founder about 9 months ago how much time she spent preparing her team to perform versus actually performing alongside them.

She thought about it. For more time than I expected…and told me something in itself.

Then she said: “We don’t really have time for that kind of thing right now.”

Not confidently. Almost apologetically. Kinda like it was a luxury she’d get around to eventually, once things settled down. I didn’t push it. I just wrote something down.

9 months later and very little has moved. Same team but, if anything, working harder. The activity is impressive. Everyone is busy. But results aren’t following the busyness.

She’s not doing anything wrong, as such. She’s just living entirely inside one stage of a ‘performance loop’ that needs all four to work.

My ‘Performance Continuum Loop’ goes like this.

he was living almost exclusively in stage three. Performing to win — closing, shipping, firefighting, responding. And yes that’s all necessary and the part that gets things done. But without stage two feeding it, and stage four following it, stage three becomes a treadmill eventually i.e. Impressive movement but your ceiling stays exactly where it is.

Stage Two is the one that gets skipped. Almost universally in growth-stage companies, and almost always for the same reasons.

The founders I work with are, without exception, good at doing things. That’s how they got here. The first product, the first customers, the early revenue, all of it came from an almost obsessive bias toward action. However, the brain that’s wired for that doesn’t naturally stop and prepare. It just does. Every closed deal, every shipped feature, every fixed problem delivers something immediate and tangible. Preparation delivers eventually. Maybe. The return is delayed and uncertain and it requires trusting other people to carry what the founder has always carried themselves.

Then there’s control. Stepping back to prepare the team means letting go of the one area where the founder still feels most competent. Someone else might run the process differently. Building playbooks means admitting the current approach isn’t a playbook but just what worked last time.

So the preparation stage gets perpetually deferred. There’s always a launch or a board meeting or a customer who needs something now. And around the founder, in whatever accelerator group or peer network they’re in, everyone else is running the same way. Which makes it feel normal. Smart, even.

It’s not. It’s just common.

Here’s a quick story about problems you can’t see. In 1854, Florence Nightingale watched soldiers die in a Crimean military hospital at rates that should have been preventable. Everyone knew the mortality was too high. Nobody could see why; or more precisely, nobody had made the data visible in a way that made the question impossible to avoid. She did. A single diagram, mapping the real causes of death across time, turned something invisible into something undeniable. The deaths hadn’t increased when her diagram appeared….the pattern had always been there.

It just needed a picture.

The Prepare to Perform stage is like that. It’s not absent from most growth-stage companies. It’s invisible.

Sadly, what stays invisible stays optional.

The cost of skipping it compounds quietly. The founder becomes the ceiling in the way that every decision routes through them, every crisis requires their direct involvement, and the team learns without anyone meaning to teach them that waiting for the founder is easier than acting without one.

Execution becomes improvised rather than optimised and the same mistakes get made with more urgency and less curiosity.

You know yourself, running fast down the wrong road still feels fast.

The company doesn’t just grow slower. It grows fragile.

The founders who break this pattern don’t suddenly become less decisive. If anything they get more done, with the same team, in less time, not because they worked harder at stage three but because they actually engaged with and in stage two. They protect preparation time as fiercely as they protect execution. The loop runs fully. Something in the business starts to move that wasn’t moving before.

She’s actually getting there as we speak. But it’s not me explaining the loop but from her beginning to see the gap between where her team was and where this stage of the company needs them to be. The data makes it visible; and once it became visible she couldn’t look away.

The question worth mulling over with your coffee isn’t whether you have time to prepare your team.

It’s what the last nine months would look like if you had.

In 1847, a Viennese physician named Ignaz Semmelweis discovered why women were dying in his maternity ward at a rate that should have been impossible to ignore.

The answer? Handwashing.

Specifically, the absence of it. Doctors were moving directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies and the data Semmelweis gathered was unambiguous; wards where handwashing was introduced saw mortality rates drop from ten percent to near zero.

He had the answer & the evidence. He presented both.

His colleagues weren’t persuaded. Hard to reconcile now that it wasn’t the data they had a problem with, but what the data required of them. Accepting it meant accepting that their own hands had been killing their patients.

That’s a different kind of knowing entirely. The kind your brain will work very hard to route around.

Semmelweis died in an asylum in 1865, still unvindicated. The medical establishment adopted handwashing seventeen years later.

I’ve been doing this long enough now to know when a business founder already has the answer.

You can tell within twenty minutes. They describe the commercial change required with a clarity that would embarrass most consultants. New pricing model laid out on a spreadsheet or in Tableau. They name the partners they should be chasing instead of the ones they’re comfortable with. They rationalise why the current sales motion is burning cash and killing velocity. All explained with the kind of precision that only comes from someone who’s been sitting with the truth for a while.

And then you wait for what comes next.

Maybe new meetings booked. Or different conversations and approaches. Something different happening at meetings.

But no, it doesn’t come.

What comes instead are reasons. “Ah, the timing isn’t right.”, “The team isn’t ready.” “The next product development will make the conversation easier.” “The investors would be nervous about a pricing change.” Or my favourite “Sports is relationship-driven so you have to be patient.”

Good reasons, all of them, in the sense of sounding plausible & Responsible. And in my experience, almost never the real ones.

The real reasons tend to live somewhere deep within.

The first one is identity. In sports tech especially, the founder usually is the product i.e. a former athlete or obsessive engineer who saw a flaw in how the sports-tech game was being played out and built something around that vision. Changing the commercial model, shifting from build-it-and-they’ll-come to ruthless outbound, or ditching beloved features that don’t move the needle doesn’t feel like a strategic decision.

It feels like a public admission that the original genius wasn’t enough.

And so the founder steps out of the visionary seat and into something more exposed. The person who gets told no thirty times a week. Intellectually, they agree the change is necessary. Emotionally, however, it registers as self-betrayal. Examine that and you’ll see the distance is more painful than most people acknowledge.

The second reason is subtler and in some ways more insidious i.e. the commercial change requires giving up control in the one area where they still feel like the smartest person in the room.

Delegating sales ownership to someone who’ll run it differently. Changing price or packaging and risking customer upset. Walking away from the comfortable stealth zone into customer ‘buying committees’ where outsiders judge their baby in real time and don’t particularly care about its origin story. The status quo, even when it’s slowly suffocating the business, still gives the illusion of control. And most founders, if I’m honest about what I’ve watched, would rather slowly run out of runway than feel that specific kind of exposure.

They’d rather look good and lose than look bad and win.

What makes this really hard to address is how elegant the defence mechanism is.

There’s an intellectual bypass at work. That is, the founder achieves perfect clarity, can articulate the change with conviction, and that articulation creates a feeling of progress without any actual movement or risk. Describing the solution keeps them in the safe, respected strategist seat. Doing it would make them the salesperson who might fail in public.

And so the company’s commercial potential bleeds away quietly in the background while the founder stays psychologically intact and the original identity remains untouched.

The question I eventually have to put to them, and it’s never the first or second conversation, it tends to be later, when the trust is there, goes something like this.

“...You don’t have a strategy problem anymore. You have an identity & control problem. And until you decide which one you’re more willing to lose - the company, or the version of yourself that built it - you’re going to keep describing the solution with perfect clarity and doing absolutely fu&k all about it.”

And, after some soul-searching, that’s when the real work starts.

Not sales training or a new go-to-market deck.

Are they willing to become the kind of founder who actually does it?

On the morning of January 28th 1986, engineers at Morton Thiokol had already said what needed to be said.

The O-rings on the Space Shuttle Challenger would fail in cold temperatures. They had the data and had made the case. The night before the launch they had recommended, formally, that it be delayed.

By morning that recommendation was gone. The data hadn’t changed but pressure from above had and it didn’t leave room for the answer the engineers were sitting on. So the people who knew said something different. Or said nothing at all. And the shuttle launched into 28-degree air. And then, as history shows, a catastrophe.

What happened in that room the night before wasn’t a failure of knowledge or competence but something quieter and harder to name. And if you’ve ever sat through a sales/pipeline meeting where everyone in the room knew the real number and nobody said it, then you already know what it was.

There is a pattern you might be familiar with in growth-stage companies and it’s worth some focus precisely because it almost never gets named at all.

It starts with investor pressure arriving from the top. Which is fine because that’s the deal when you take investment. What’s less fine is what happens as that pressure filters downward through the business. It doesn’t stay at founder level. It travels. And by the time it reaches the commercial team it has changed the nature of every conversation happening inside the business.

The sales team reads the pressure before anyone articulates it. They’re good at that; commercial people are, by necessity, readers of rooms and situations. They understand, quickly & without being told, what kind of answer is going to land well upstairs and what kind isn’t. So they start to curate. Not dishonestly or maliciously. Simply just sensibly given what the environment is rewarding.

The meeting stops being a diagnostic exercise and turns into a performance. Everyone still talks. Numbers still get reported. The meeting still happens on schedule etc. But the information moving through it has been quietly edited in the sense that it’s now shaped to manage the pressure rather than to reflect reality.

I sat in one of those rooms not long ago.

The founder was sharp, prepared, genuinely trying to understand why the numbers weren’t moving. The commercial lead gave a confident account of the pipeline and solid enough reasons for every slipped deal. There were reasonable timelines on everything live. All ok and nothing that didn’t make sense on the surface.

Afterwards, one of the sales team caught me in the corridor. Took about thirty seconds to tell me what the meeting hadn’t. Three deals that weren’t coming back. One rep having hassle at home and who’d already mentally checked out. A customer conversation from the previous week that everyone in the room had decided, without discussing it, not to bring up.

During that meeting (or performance?) nobody lied. That’s the part I remember most.

When a sales team is optimising primarily to defend decisions upward, they stop optimising for the customer in front of them. The focus shifts from being genuinely useful in a sales conversation to being defensible in the next internal one. Efficiency gets prioritised over effectiveness because efficiency produces cleaner numbers and effectiveness is harder to explain when the pressure is on.

Salespeople, at their core, are problem solvers. Give them clear heads, clear direction, and genuine space to operate and they’ll find a way. Chain them to a reporting structure that rewards curated information over honest assessment, and guess what happens to the quality of thinking in the room over time?

There’s a question I sometimes put to founders who are deep in this pattern….it tends to land uncomfortably. Should you still be calling yourself Chief Executive Officer? Or have you actually become Chief Experience Officer without noticing? But not for the customers, for the investor(s). It becomes more and more obvious that they’re managing the experience of the numbers rather than the reality underneath them. Obvious to me but not them.

So should we be asking how to manage governance pressure more effectively? I don’t think so because that question accepts the problem as fixed and works around it.

Is this a better question? What would need to be true about the commercial function for the honest conversation to feel safe enough to have?

My rationale is this; when that conversation is happening i.e. when the pipeline review is actually diagnostic, when the sales team trusts that the real number leads somewhere useful rather than somewhere dangerous, then something specific changes. The investor conversation changes with it. Confidence built on genuine commercial clarity leads those conversations rather than surviving them.

There is a version of managing upward that doesn’t feel like managing upward at all. It’s what happens when the fundamentals are solid enough, and the people executing them are trusted enough to the point where the numbers speak without anyone needing to adjust them first.

The O-ring data was there the whole time.

There is a type of commercial leader who is, genuinely, impressive with data.

Fast, precise, prepared. Pull the numbers up on a Monday morning and they’ve already read them. Ask them what’s happening in the pipeline and they’ll tell you - accurately, specifically, with a clear view on what needs to happen next.

They are also, in many cases, almost completely unaware of what is happening in the room.

Not occasionally. Not under unusual pressure. Routinely. As if it’s a default operating mode.

And the commercial cost of that specific blindspot is one of the quieter, more expensive things I have watched happen across many years in commercial teams.

The most dangerous version of this leader is not the one who ignores people. At least that’s visible!

The most dangerous version is the one who genuinely believes they are paying attention. They ask questions. They listen to the answers. They note things down and move on.

But what they miss is the temperature.

Now, I don’t mean the content of what’s being said, but the quality of it. The particular way someone says “making progress” when they mean something else entirely. The moment a room goes quiet in a way that has learned to look comfortable, because that’s what the environment rewards.

There’s a distinction I keep coming back to. A bit left-field but stick with me.

Sherlock Holmes doesn’t develop an opinion and then gather evidence to support it. He gathers everything first i.e. the detail, the anomaly, the thing that doesn’t quite fit, and only then allows a conclusion to form.

Now contrast that with most commercial leaders. Under pressure they do the opposite. They see a number, feel something about it, and the meeting becomes a search for confirmation rather than truth.

In that scenario your field of vision narrows under pressure. Then everything else fades away.

What fills that narrowed field is the data. Clean, legible, apparently objective. What disappears from view is the person generating it.

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Salespeople and commercial staff are a particular combination. They’re harder than most people give them credit for; genuinely resilient, outcome-focused, able to carry rejection in a way that would floor most people. They’re also more sensitive than almost anyone acknowledges. They want to know that somebody has their back. They want to feel that the person across the table is trying to understand & not just trying to account for them.

When the entire vocabulary of a commercial relationship is numerical, something specific happens. People stop telling the truth in pipeline reviews. It’s not that they’re dishonest but more that honesty stopped feeling like it had anywhere to land.

They say “making progress.” They bank a deal to next quarter that could close this one Why? Because stretching stopped feeling worth it. They sit in the weekly review, take their medicine, head for home and replay what they didn’t say as they sit in traffic.

Meanwhile, the leader leaves the meeting thinking it went fine.

The damage that unfolds from this is accumulates quietly. You never get upstream of the problem. You morph into a version of Pavlov’s Dog; always responding to the number on the page and never asking what conditions, what ingredients in the recipe produced that outcome…..

“Why is it like this?”, “What needs to be different next week?”, “What do you need me to do to help you?”

Those questions require a room where people feel safe enough to answer honestly. That room doesn’t build itself. It gets built (or doesn’t) in the hundred small moments when a leader could have looked up and away from the report.

Numbers & data are not good or bad. They just are.

They carry only the meaning you attach to them. What determines whether a room produces honest data or curated data is not the CRM, not the reporting structure and not the target-setting process.

It is whether the people in the room feel genuinely understood by the person asking the questions.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that none of this requires a new system. No CRM upgrade or restructured reporting line or off-site team-building day.

We’re back to my Performance Equation:

C x A = P [Capability x Ability = Performance]

Through that lens connection is not a soft add-on but the mechanism by which capability gets built and sustained.

And without it, you don’t have a commercial team.

You’ll just have a reporting system with people attached; and those people, eventually, will find somewhere else to report to.

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That’s how long it takes.

One question without a clean answer, and the person who was leaning forward, listening, asking good questions is…..gone.

What replaces him pushes back in his chair, tips his head to the ceiling, and starts talking at the room. Not to it or with it.

The team doesn’t react. They look down at whatever is in front of them and wait.

They’ve seen this all before.

A thirty-year veteran coach said something in my MSc research that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since.

“It’s very easy to have values when there’s no pressure.”

I was studying how coaches behave under competitive pressure, stakeholder opposition, political dynamics etc inside governing bodies. What I found was consistent and uncomfortable: the coaches who articulated the clearest values in calm conditions were not reliably the same people who held those values when the ground shifted.

​
It transfers directly. I’ve seen it in commercial settings more times than I can count.

​
I call it ‘Authenticity Collapse Under Pressure’ and it’s a predictable, measurable gap. Not to be confused with a character flaw. The specific finding that rings true: trust doesn’t erode most sharply when leaders fail. It erodes most sharply when they fail inconsistently.

For example, a start-up/company founder who is always difficult is manageable. A team learns to work around that.

But a man or woman who is sometimes excellent and sometimes unrecognisable creates something worse; a team that can never fully relax and never be fully honest because they don’t know which version is walking in today.

This is what capability looks like when it fails. Again, it’s not incompetence; the founder in this story is often genuinely talented. But talent operating through a collapsed capability ceiling produces something that looks, from the outside, nothing like what it could.

Remember my PQ (Performance Quotient) equation - C x A = P - from a couple of editions ago?

Authenticity under pressure is not a soft skill sitting outside the commercial equation. It’s actually inside the multiplier.

January. The culture is real and there’s a sense of solidarity.

The founder asks good questions and waits for the answers. The team brings problems to the surface because experience has told them it’s safe to do so. There’s genuine trust in the room - the kind that takes months to build and, when present, is a genuine commercial advantage.

By August the number is shaky. Not terminal but enough to rise heart rates a little. Enough that the gap between where they said they’d be and where they are has become something everyone in the room is quietly aware of.

The question that breaks it is an impossible one: What’s the one thing at the root of all of these bad numbers?

There is no one thing. There never is.

But the founder doesn’t hear that. What they hear is hesitation. And the person hesitating is the newest hire - six months in, still calibrating the room.T

he body language goes first. Chair back. Head up. Eyes to the ceiling. The tone that follows is passive aggressive in a way that is almost considered; measured enough to be deniable, sharp enough that nobody in the room misses it.
​

The ‘veterans’ don’t look up. You can see it in how they hold themselves…kind of like a quiet recalibration. “Oh, here we go again.” They’ve filed this. They know now that the version of this founder they trusted in January is a fair-weather performance. The real version is what’s sitting at the head of the table right now.

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What the founder cannot see is that they are not solving a pipeline problem. They are protecting themselves. The passion that built the company, genuine, real & valuable by the way, has curdled into fear.

Fear that the number reflects on them.

Fear that control is slipping.

Fear of being seen as the reason it’s gone wrong.

So they do something utterly predictable and make someone else the answer. It looks like accountability. It’s the polar opposite.

And to be fair to the guy it’s an easy place to end up. The adrenaline of reacting feels like urgency. It feels like leadership. The body generates it precisely because it wants to protect something. Understanding that doesn’t excuse it. But most founders who’ve done this once have done it more than once without ever doing the work to identify & name what happened.

In summary…..

When a founder’s/leader’s behaviour under pressure cannot be trusted, the whole system quietly degrades.

The next pipeline review will be cleaner on paper than it was in reality; all because the team has just learned what happens when the honest answer is the wrong answer. Deal reviews lose candour and the difficult ones stop being surfaced. Decision-making slows, because nobody wants to be holding the problem when the mood shifts.

The founder who collapses under pressure in pursuit of honest answers is the precise reason honest answers stop being given.

Trust erodes faster than the pipeline. But unlike the pipeline, it doesn’t show up on any dashboard.

Time now for an honest inward look.

In your last difficult period were you responding or reacting?

When the performance was shaky, did you create more safety in the room or less?

If the newest person on your team was asked to describe how you behave under pressure, would their answer match how you see yourself?

Your values are not the ones you articulate in the good months. They are the ones visible when times are difficult and challenging, when someone in front of you doesn’t have a clean answer and the target is already behind you.

Then which version shows up?

Worth repeating….Authenticity under pressure is not a personality trait.

Be under no illusion that it’s a skill. And like any skill it’s buildable. But only by someone who is willing to watch themselves honestly - in both the calm and the difficult moments - and close the gap between the two.

You’ve just met that gap and learned its name. It’s the first of five....the others to follow in the coming weeks.

He was mid-forties. Three years into a tech company he had built from nothing, with funding that had seemed substantial until it started disappearing the way funding does - not in one dramatic moment but in the slow, ordinary arithmetic of a business that costs more to run than it produces.

He was a product guy. Genuinely brilliant at what he had built. And that was part of the problem; he had confused his passion for the product with the ability to sell it, and the two things are not even close to the same.

I had been working alongside him in my fractional role for a few months when I realised something that I probably should have named sooner. The five people in his sales team were doing just enough. Not enough to grow and certainly not enough to close the gap between what the business needed and what the pipeline was producing. Just enough to keep him from looking directly at them as the source of the problem. They had learned - correctly, rationally, and from direct experience - that keeping the founder mildly satisfied was safer than performing in a way that invited scrutiny.

He, however, could not see it. He was in the eye of his own storm. He had a busyness bias and reminded me of a man running around inside a barrel looking for the corner.

What he could see was symptoms. And every time a symptom appeared, he reached for money. More training. Another product iteration. A new process. His instinct in every difficult moment was to spend his way toward a solution, which would have been fine if spending was the problem.

It was not the problem and I knew what the root cause was.

The performance of the sales team had been on a gradual slide downward across every month I had been there. Gradual enough to be explained away each time. Gradual enough that no single month triggered the honest conversation that every month was building toward.

It was time for that conversation. But I had to make a decision first…could this man handle raw honesty, or did I need to come at it from the side?

Straight at him and he would react. The culture he had built was one of reaction. He got frustrated easily and his frustration had become normal, which meant his team had become reactive too. They responded to his emotional temperature rather than to commercial reality.

I decided to tell him a story…about a farmer.

Picture a farmer who wants a crop in the autumn. He plants his seed in the spring. Good seed — seed with genuine potential. Does he walk away?

Of course he does not. He makes sure the soil is right. He fertilises it, waters it, protects it against the things that would destroy it before it matures. He does not plant the seed and then come back in six months wondering why the yield is disappointing.

And yet.

We hire people with genuine potential - real ability, real talent - and we hand them a process, set a target, and leave them at it. When the yield disappoints, we change the process. Or the target. Or we bring in a consultant to tell us the process needs redesigning. And the cycle repeats.

Here is what you’ll rarely hear: potential is not performance. And talent is not yield. You have to work for the yield; person by person, day by day.

He went quiet, and not the quiet of someone who is about to push back. The quiet of someone who recognises something in a story that they could not see directly.

There is an equation I have been working from for the better part of twenty years.

C x A = P

Capability multiplied by Ability equals Performance.

Ability is your potential. Your natural talent and all your competencies, your training and your experiences combined and compounded. Think of it like the ceiling of what you could produce at your very best. Most development work in organisations targets Ability. More training, better process, sharper technique. All Ability-side interventions.

Important but half the equation.

Capability is different. Capability is the ability to access that Ability. It is the force multiplier - or the governor - on everything the Ability side produces. It does not matter how talented your people are. If their capability is running at five or six out-of-ten, that is the ceiling on what they will consistently produce. Not occasionally. Consistently.

And here is the thing that makes it dangerous: capability is subject to creep. It moves gradually; upward when the conditions are right, downward when they are not, and the movement is almost imperceptible in the short term.

A sales team does not collapse in one bad month. It drifts. Slowly enough that each individual decline can be explained. Quickly enough that six months later you are running around inside a barrel looking for a corner that does not exist.

His team had not failed. They had drifted, rationally and predictably, to the level that the environment had made available to them. His frustration had set a tone. The tone had become a culture. The culture had taught five people that doing just enough was the optimal strategy.

And he had spent months trying to fix everything except that.

The Commercial Thread

The training budget, the new CRM, the process iteration, all of it addresses the Ability side of C x A = P.

None of it touches Capability.

Capability is built through something slower and less measurable: the deliberate development of people in an environment that makes genuine performance feel both possible and safe.

That is not a soft idea.

It is the specific variable that determines whether the Ability you hired for ever shows up in results. The question is not whether your team has enough talent. It is whether you have built the conditions in which that talent can be accessed. Consistently, not just in the months when everything is going right.

When did you last examine the capability level of your sales team? Not their skills, not their pipeline, not their activity metrics, but their actual capacity to access what they have?

If capability has been drifting - gradually, almost imperceptibly - for the last six months, what would that drift look like in your numbers right now?

And I’ll leave you to sit with this. It’s one that takes longest to answer: what has the culture you have built been teaching your people about the optimal level of performance? That is, the level where they are safe, rather than the level where they are genuinely stretching?

The farmer planted good seed. The question was never the seed.

She knows this deal inside-out. The customer relationship, the procurement timeline, the competitive risk that surfaced three weeks ago. She has a view on the next move. A clear one.

Then she pauses.

Not to think. To see what you think.

You have been in this conversation a hundred times. This is the first time you have understood what it actually is.

Research into scaling organisations shares something founders find specifically uncomfortable when they encounter it directly: teams do not plateau at their natural capability ceiling but just below the point where the leader stops intervening.

The mechanism is precise. Every intervention e.g. every deal the founder joins, every complex negotiation they take over, every customer conversation that runs through them, sets a threshold. The team does not build capability to exceed that threshold. They build it to approach it, because approaching it is where their work ends and the founder’s begins, and that boundary has been drawn clearly enough by experience that crossing it carries a cost nobody has ever articulated out loud.

The team is not underperforming, just exactly as the system has trained them to.

Fourteen months after a €3.8M Series A (I mentioned them in last week’s edition), the founder has seven people in her sales team. Five account executives, a sales manager hired ten months ago, and an SDR who is six weeks from his first close. On paper the function looks tight; the pipeline is moving and win rate is holding.

She is personally named on four deals above €75K.

However that’s not because she originated the relationships but owing to the fact that at some point in each deal’s life, something complicated surfaced and she stepped in.

Temporarily. Yes, she was very clear with herself that it was temporary.

Eight months later she is still in all four.

Her sales manager is very good. Twelve years in B2B SaaS, two successful exits on his CV, exactly the profile the role required. He has learned the boundary without anyone drawing it for him. Below €40K, his call. Above it, he schedules a catch-up to keep the founder in the loop. He does not experience this as dependency, simply good communication.

Three months ago they went to market for a second sales manager. The process was thorough. The best candidate (the one the recruiter flagged as the closest match they had seen in months of searching) declined the offer at the final stage.

Her reason? She said the role looked like a senior AE position with a management title attached.

Sadly, she wasn’t wrong.

The Commercial Thread

Every deal the founder closes personally is a deal the team did not learn to close. Every customer relationship that runs through the founder is a relationship the business does not own. Every intervention above a certain deal size confirms the threshold; and the team builds its capability to just below it, because that is the rational place to build it. The ceiling is not the market or the product or the people. It’s the system the founder built without realising they were building it. The first question is not when the team will be ready but whether the role as it currently exists would attract the person who could actually run it.

When did you last let a deal above your average contract value run through your team without your name on the account?

If you were genuinely unavailable for the next four weeks i.e. not checking in, not copied on emails, not on the end of a WhatsApp at 11pm, then which deals would stall?

Before we go, sit with this: if you wrote your head of sales’ job description to reflect what the role actually requires day to day, rather than what it says it requires, would the person you need apply for it?

The right question has a way of still being there on Wednesday morning, whether you answer it on Tuesday or not.

Hi, how have you been?

I was presenting a new sales strategy to a sales team I was employed to temporarily lead & work with.

I included all the usual content; a fresh approach, significant change, resources being allocated etc and, to be fair, considerable work had gone into it.

I finished the 15-minute presentation and then asked something that visibly surprised them (maybe it was more shock than surprise actually).

“Get into two groups of three. The presentation is in your inbox. I want you to take ninety minutes and then come back and tell me why my strategy won’t work.”

The room went quiet.

You know that quiet, the one here you think nobody is actually breathing?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

Amy Edmondson, who’s spent decades researching why employees stay silent about problems they can see, puts it plainly:

“No one ever got fired for silence. That’s your problem.”

Note, your problem. Not their problem.

You see, when your people aren’t telling you what’s broken, what won’t work, what they’re worried about, then you’ve built something. Sadly, it’s just not what you think you’ve built.

You probably think you’ve built a high-performance team.

Sorry, you’ve actually built a compliance culture where people have learned it’s safer to watch things fail than to speak up before they do.

The worst part is that you probably did this without meaning to.

Research from organisational behavior studies found something that should terrify every business founder: 85% of employees report feeling unable to raise concerns with leadership.

However, here’s the part that stings like a nettle: in 70% of major organisational failures, post-mortems revealed that multiple team members had identified the critical problems months before collapse but stayed silent.

If you read no more of this newsletter today then this alone is worth it….your team can probably see what’s about to break but they’re sitting there just calculating whether telling you is worth the risk.

Unsettling isn’t it?

I’ve used Canva for years but I only properly understood their culture recently.

Melanie Perkins built Canva from a university dorm room idea into a $40 billion company by doing something most founders struggle with — she made it safe to fail publicly.

Early in Canva’s growth, the team invested heavily in a collaboration feature they were convinced would be transformative. Months of engineering resources. Leadership fully committed. Then someone, and in psychologically safe cultures it’s always someone who wouldn’t have spoken in a different room, said what needed saying:

“I don’t think anyone will use this the way we think they will.”

They were right. The feature launched and…..silence. Six months of development time and considerable opportunity cost on features users actually wanted, gone.

What matters here is not the failed feature but what Perkins did with the moment. She made the challenge 100% visible instead of just tolerating it. She signalled explicitly that speaking up, even against leadership’s most cherished assumptions, was exactly what the culture required.

Now Canva has a Fail Wall where team members share failures and lessons publicly & regularly, without blame. Perkins herself shares the stories of the 100+ investors who rejected her. Her pitches that bombed and her assumptions that proved wrong.

Of course that’s not a policy, just a leader going first.

When you’re scaling from thousands of users to over 100 million you can’t afford to repeat expensive mistakes. You need people finding problems early, speaking up about concerns, challenging assumptions before they become catastrophes. That goes for a growth-stage company every bit as much as a $40 billion one.

And that only happens if speaking up feels safer than staying quiet.

I had the opportunity to work with a founder a while back. They’re Series A funded, €3.2M raised, eighteen months to hit Series B metrics or face a down round.

Regularly I’d hear her asking the team: “Why didn’t anyone flag this earlier?”

The background detail here is that it was three months into the year, they were tracking at 43% of revenue target. Sales cycles that were forecast at 45 days were averaging 87 days. Enterprise deals kept stalling at legal review. Monthly churn had crept from 3.1% to 6.8%.

So she had a valid question but the wrong frame.

Three people had actually flagged it. In different ways and at different times.

The Sales director mentioned it in a January conversation. Something to the effect of “I’m concerned these enterprise timelines are twice what we modeled.” The response: “We need to push harder, can’t afford to miss targets.”

The Head of Customer Success then raised it in February. Not verbatim but to the tune of “The assumptions in our retention forecast might be optimistic given what I’m seeing.” The response: “Let’s stay focused on execution, we’ll review metrics at quarter end.”

There were other similar examples. Nobody got punished & nobody got fired. Nobody even got criticised.

But nobody got heard either.

So they all stopped trying. Things became performative and they watched the numbers deteriorate. They knew the Series B metrics were becoming impossible but they stayed quiet because speaking up had proven pointless. Could you blame them?

When the founder finally acknowledged the problem in May, she’d burned five months of runway on a strategy her team had been trying to tell her was broken since January.

Every action has a consequence and the cost here could well be the difference between a Series B and a down round.

I know from a long career in sports performance leadership that a really rewarding and profitable coaching philosophy can centre on one just thing: building and maintaining trust.

How did you engineer that?

One core element is relentlessly honest feedback.

Most founders & leaders think they want honest feedback. In my experience, what they actually want is validating feedback delivered gently.

Because real honesty is uncomfortable and it stings. Most of the time for both people.

Say someone telling you your strategy has holes or your pricing is wrong or your best & most favoured salesperson is destroying team morale. Or that your growth projections are fantasy.

Your response in that moment, not what you say but what people feel after saying it, determines whether anyone tells you anything useful again. They remember how you made them feel.

You probably think you’re approachable, open and the kind of leader people can be honest with.

But maybe your people are reading different signals?

Maybe they’re reading the times you said “I hear you” then didn’t change anything. The times you asked for input then reacted immediately and defended your position for twenty minutes. The times someone raised a concern and you jumped in to explain why it wasn’t actually a problem.

Each one of those moments taught them something: around here honesty is tolerated but not valued. Speaking up creates work for them and annoyance for you. In the end, smiling, nodding and staying quiet is easier.

And you’re confused why nobody tells you things until it’s too late to fix them?

There’s this phrase that gets thrown around a lot about creating “psychological safety” and I’m wary of it because it’s become jargon that people nod at without understanding what it actually requires.

Edmondson’s research found we’re hardwired to worry about impression-making in hierarchies. This simply means your people are constantly calculating: “Will saying this make me look stupid? Negative? Not a team player?”

If the calculation comes up “yes” or even “maybe,” they stay quiet.

You can’t just go along with the usual No.1 bullshit and declare “we have psychological safety here”....and expect people to just believe it. You build it, and earn it, through repeated evidence that speaking up doesn’t have costs.

It’s hard work and there’s a tricky bit worth flagging. It’s not about creating a soft environment that doesn’t demand high standards. That’s not safety, that’s lowered expectations.

Real safety is being able to say “I think we’re wrong about this” in a culture that still demands excellence. Those two things have to coexist. That’s high-performance.

The founder I mentioned above? Once she understood the pattern, she changed one thing.

At the next team meeting, she asked: “What am I not seeing that you are?”

Then she actually went quiet and waited. She sat nervously through the properly uncomfortable silence and waited some more. Of course, nobody wanted to go first.

Finally, her sales director, the guy who’d raised concerns in January, said: “Our enterprise deals are stalling because we’re not addressing procurement and legal concerns early enough. We’re treating them as sales blockers instead of building them into the process from the first conversation.”

Her response would determine everything.

She could have said “Oh, we addressed this in the sales playbook” or “That’s why we have the legal template” or “Let’s take this offline.”....or some other jingoistic piece of jargon.

What she actually said was, “Fair enough, you tried telling me this in January and I didn’t listen to it. Tell me specifically what you think we need to change.”

Next a twenty-minute conversation revealed their entire enterprise motion was structured wrong. They were running a transactional sales process for deals that required consensus-building across procurement, legal, IT, and end users.

So they rebuilt the approach within a few weeks. Enterprise cycle times dropped from 87 days to 52 days and in the next quarter they hit 91% of revenue target instead of 43%.

The cost of not asking that question in January instead of April was three months of time burned, around €400K in deals that stalled, and Series B metrics that went from aggressive to fantasy.

As always, let’s end with the beginnings of a solution to address this issue in your own environment.

When was the last time someone on your team raised a concern about your strategy, your decision or your plan?

What did you say? More to the point, what do you think they heard?

Did they walk away thinking “Great, that was heard and valued” or “Oh, that’s just being filed away again in the ‘for info’ file”

Because I know they’re making that calculation constantly and every time they think about speaking up, they’re weighing: “Is this even worth the risk?”

If the answer keeps coming up “not really,” you’ve built a team that watches problems compound while staying quiet about them.

Canva didn’t become a $40 billion company because they never made mistakes. They made loads. Don’t we all. The collaboration feature nobody used was one expensive lesson. But they made it visible, took the learning and, in the future, moved faster & more agile because of it.

Your team already knows what’s broken. They know which assumptions are wrong. They know where execution is failing. They’re living in that world daily.

The concern at hand is whether they think telling you is safe enough to bother.

You signal the answer to their question in every interaction, whether you realise it or not.

The Commercial Thread:

Revenue forecasts live or die on whether your sales team tells you what they’re actually seeing in deals versus what you want to hear. If your reps have learned it’s safer to be optimistic than honest about pipeline quality, deal timelines, or customer objections, your forecast is fantasy. The “tell me why this won’t work” question applies directly here: when did you last explicitly ask your commercial team to challenge your assumptions about what’s driving or blocking revenue? And what did they hear when they answered?

#SalesLeadership #FounderGrowth #GrowthStage #CommercialPerformance #FractionalSalesDirector

What if the person you dismissed as “naive” was actually handing you the breakthrough?

📽️ Leaders in sport and business: you’re protecting the wrong thing.Watch to see why letting uncomfortable questions live is your real job.

#Leadership #Innovation #creativity

In 1975, Steven Sasson invented the digital camera.

He was an engineer at Kodak; THE camera company.

His bosses looked at it and said something along the lines of:

“That’s great…but don’t tell anyone about it.”

Their underpinning assumption was that Kodak’s profits would always come from film and printing. Digital photography was interesting but clearly irrelevant to their business model.

That assumption felt safe. Reasonable even, given that it was based on decades of market dominance and customer behavior.

We now know they were very wrong.

And the cost of being wrong? Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012, having destroyed $30 billion in market value.

Their failure wasn’t grounded in a lack of innovation but it had its root in not being able to question an assumption that had become their identity.

See where I’m going with this?

Adam Grant puts it plainly:

“Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong.”

But that’s terribly uncomfortable, so we don’t do it.

We make a decision based on an assumption. The assumption hardens into belief. The belief becomes “just how things are.” And years later you’re watching competitors eat your lunch because questioning that belief felt more dangerous than just maintaining the status quo. Kinda embarrassing, right?

But here’s another Grant quote that hits home:

“Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.”

Read it again, in these times of tightly held opinions, it’s bloody important to grasp.

That’s why smart people, people who “know better”, still don’t challenge their assumptions. Are they just stubborn? I don’t think so, I just think that their assumptions have become part of who they are.

For example, Kodak wasn’t just a film company. Their leaders were “film people”. Their identity was wrapped up in chemistry, in the magic of the darkroom, in the physical product. So, digital photography didn’t just threaten their business model but the essence of who they were.

With that as a driver, first they buried it and then they buried themselves.

The military figured this out the expensive way. Catastrophically expensive.

Micah Zenko’s research on Red Teams found something that should terrify every organisation:

“The costs of not subjecting a military operation to such a rigorous evaluation by an empowered and semi-independent red team can be catastrophic.”

Catastrophic. Not “suboptimal” or “inefficient.” Catastrophic.

Because when you don’t deliberately challenge your assumptions, you don’t just make small mistakes. You make the kind that costs lives. It’s less dramatic in business but still the kind that destroys billion-dollar companies.

Retired Army Colonel Kevin Benson, who’s been teaching Red Team thinking since 2007, describes what actually works:

“Red teams as an integral part of the design and decision-making process give commanders and staff members the opportunity to think the unthinkable, ask ‘what if?’, and challenge assumptions and facts.”

“Think the unthinkable”, it’s not dramatic language, is it?. Perhaps it should be in everyone’s job description?

But most leadership teams don’t think the unthinkable do they? No, they think the comfortable. The familiar. The things that confirm what they already believe.

Rolf Dobelli calls this the confirmation bias, and his solution is brutal in its simplicity:

“Try writing down your beliefs - whether in terms of worldview, investments, marriage, healthcare, diet or career strategies - and set out to find disconfirming evidence.”

Find disconfirming evidence. Not confirming. Disconfirming.

You’ve got to use inverse logic and actively hunt for reasons you might be wrong.

Makes you feel a little uncomfortable doesn’t it? It goes against every instinct. Your brain wants to find evidence you’re right. It’s designed to confirm your existing beliefs, strengthen your identity, and make the world predictable.

Dobelli again:

“Axing beliefs that feel like old friends is hard work, but imperative.”

Old friends. Yes, that’s way more what they feel like. You’ve had this belief for years. It’s served you well. It’s comfortable, familiar…..and it might be completely wrong now even though it was completely right then.

A live working example is a hotel group that believed they knew their customer base.They believed they had done for fifteen years and built their entire service model around assumptions about what luxury travelers wanted.

Then somebody, a new management hire who didn’t know their culture yet, asked a “stupid” question: “How do we actually know this is what they want?”

After some puerile answers it turned out that they didn’t really. They’d surveyed customers once in 2009. Of course 16 years later the market had shifted and customer expectations had evolved. But their entire service model was optimised for assumptions that were fifteen years out of date.

I don’t believe it was them being lazy or incompetent. It was just that those assumptions had comfortably become their business identity and they earnestly viewed themselves as “the hotel group that understands luxury travelers”

Questioning that belief felt like questioning who they were. So nobody did. Until the new hire who didn’t know better asked the stupid question that just might save them from becoming another Kodak.

Back to Adam Grant. He says rethinking is both a skill set and a mindset. I think that’s the key bit people miss.

It’s not just about being open-minded or curious in some abstract way. It’s about deliberately building structures that force you to challenge your own thinking.

Red teams. Pre-mortems. Devil’s advocates who are actually empowered, not just performing disagreement to tick a box. The method is not important as long as it’s mostly about hunting disconfirming evidence before it hunts you.

I’ve seen this approach work well so in your world it might be worth a go.

Pick one major decision you’re working on right now. One where you’re pretty confident you know the right answer.

Now ask:

What would have to be true for my assumption to be wrong?

Who disagrees with me and why haven’t I seriously engaged with their reasoning?

What evidence am I ignoring because it doesn’t fit my preferred conclusion?

If I knew this decision would fail, what would be the most likely reason?

Most leaders can’t answer those questions honestly. They’re more than smart enough but their identity is wrapped up in being right.

Kodak had the invention, the technology and, clearly, the talent.

What they didn’t have was the willingness to question an assumption that had worked brilliantly for a hundred years.

A single question would have worked: “What if film isn’t forever?”

But I’m sure that question felt dangerous. It would have threatened everything they believed about their business, their customers, their identity.

So they didn’t ask it. And, eventually, thirty billion dollars vanished because an assumption felt safer than a question.

What’s the assumption you’re not questioning right now because it’s become part of how you see yourself?

There’s at least one thing you believe deeply enough that challenging it feels like losing part of your identity.

And I’ll bet it’s costing you more than you think. Ok, maybe not thirty billion, but something.

It’s not whether you have blind spots. We all do. The question is whether you’ve built systems to find them before they find you.

Because the world’s happy to teach you which assumptions were wrong.

It just depends whether you want to learn before or after the catastrophe.

( 4-minute read..It’s worth it, go grab a coffee. ☕)

Ever had this happen to you? You know exactly what the right call is. You’ve thought it through and you’re clear on the approach.

Then pressure hits and you, well, freeze. Or worse, you do the opposite of what you know works.

Later, sitting there reviewing what happened, the frustration’s almost unbearable. Not just because it went wrong. Because you knew it would go wrong and did it anyway.

I’m of an opposite belief to most….pressure doesn’t reveal character, it reveals preparation. Or more accurately, it reveals the gap between what you know and what you’ve actually practiced.

Pressure weighs heavy on leaders.

The All Blacks long had an ability that drove opponents mad. Deep into the final quarter, when everyone’s exhausted and mistakes multiply, they somehow found another gear. Not just physically but mentally.

Gregor Paul’s research on Steve Hansen’s teams found something specific:

“They had this innate ability to stay connected under pressure, make good decisions and win the critical turnovers, penalties and little moments that made a difference.”

Innate. That word’s misleading.

It’s not innate at all. I believe it’s practiced to the point where it looks innate.

Peter Bills studied All Blacks teams across different eras and kept finding the same factors:

“Unwillingness to accept defeat, able to dig deep and stay calm in adversity, able to continue making coherent decisions while all around is chaos.”

Coherent decisions while chaos is happening. That’s what I’m talking about; the bit most leaders can’t do.

You can make coherent decisions when you’ve got time and space. But under pressure? You revert to instinct, emotion, whatever feels safest in the moment.

Which is usually wrong and lets you down.

Bill Walsh (San Francisco 49ers head-coach) spent his entire coaching career on this problem. How do you get people to execute what they know under extreme competitive pressure?

He concluded that thinking hard under pressure means you’re already behind:

“There’s only so much thinking you can isolate and focus on during that kind of extreme competitive pressure. It has to be tactical more than a conscious effort to really ‘try harder.’ You just want to function very well, up to your potential, effortlessly - do what you already know how to do.”

Effortlessly. There’s the paradox right there.

The moments that should require maximum effort actually require minimum thinking.

Tim Ferriss breaks down what creates composure into three capacities:

• “I can think” ➡️ Good rules for decision-making, good questions you can ask yourself and others.

• “I can wait” ➡️ Ability to plan long-term, play the long game, not misallocate resources.

• “I can fast” ➡️ Withstanding difficulties and disaster through trained resilience and high pain tolerance.

But these aren’t attitudes you adopt under pressure but capacities you build beforehand.

You can’t decide to “think clearly” when chaos hits. You either have pre-loaded decision rules that activate automatically, or you’re making it up as you go.

Making it up under pressure is when the collapse happens.

Performance psychology research brings up something uncomfortable: under high stress, your brain literally cannot access the same cognitive resources it uses for complex problem-solving. Blood flow shifts. Cortisol spikes. Your prefrontal cortex, where rational decisions happen, goes partially offline.

So “stay calm and think it through” doesn’t work. You can’t think it through the same way.

What you can do under pressure: Execute patterns you’ve already established. Follow rules you’ve already created. Implement decisions you’ve already made.

What you can’t do: Generate new solutions to problems you’re seeing for the first time.

Have you ever seen a team completely abandon their game plan during a crucial match? You can see they know it. Had rehearsed thoroughly. But then pressure arrives and you can see everything dissolve in front of your eyes. It’s actually palpable. Hands up, I’ve been there myself with teams.

The problem as I see it? They’d been trained & coached what to do when things went right. Not what to do when things went sideways.

So the entire preparation could and should get rebuilt around pressure scenarios. Not just “if this happens, do that” theory. Actually creating chaos in training and making them execute through it, then review and reflect and go again.

The first sessions in this vein were disasters. People couldn’t think and they made terrible decisions. Frustration and annoyance followed. Exactly what was happening in matches.

After a few weeks though the chaos became familiar. Pressure became normal. Their decision-making under stress started matching their decision-making in calm conditions.

Pressure situations became part of their practiced range. They became more comfortable being uncomfortable and knowing that performance is just, well, messy. And you’ve got to be ready and able to address the mess and clean it up.

The Stoics understood this centuries ago. Ryan Holiday points to their definition of strength:

“The ability to maintain a hold of oneself. Being the person who never gets mad, who cannot be rattled, because they are in control of their passions - rather than controlled by their passions.”

That control isn’t willpower in the moment. It’s pre-decisions about how you’ll respond before the moment arrives.

Marcus Aurelius didn’t wait until he was angry to decide how he’d handle anger. He decided in advance. He actually rehearsed it. When anger showed up, he had a pattern to follow instead of a reaction to manage.

The same principle applies for leadership under pressure.

When we look at leaders who execute under pressure versus those who collapse, the difference is they’ve already made the hard decisions.

Not “I’ll figure it out when the time comes.” But “When X happens, I will do Y”. No debate, no deliberation, just execution.

It does sound rigid but it actually creates confidence, conviction and, ultimately, freedom.

When pressure hits and your thinking narrows, you’re not trying to solve complex problems with diminished cognitive capacity. You’re following rules you established when you had full access to your brain.

So what’s next for you to bring this to life?

Try identifying your 2-3 highest-pressure scenarios. The situations where you consistently struggle to execute what you know.

For each one:

🤔 What decision could I make now that would eliminate the need to decide under pressure?

🤔 What pattern could I practice now that would become automatic when stress hits?

🤔 What rule could I establish now that I could simply follow when thinking gets hard?

Then actually practice it. Not just think about it. Create the pressure scenario and execute your pre-loaded response until it stops requiring conscious thought. Embrace the messiness of practice & thank your god that you’re doing this in a safe, forgiving space instead of when it matters most.

Take a working example. A hotel GM handling guest complaints case-by-case. Of course, every difficult guest created decision stress.

But now she has three rules:

🔋 Listen without defending until they finish.

🔋 Acknowledge their experience without arguing about facts.

🔋 Offer two solutions, not one.

Yes, it sounds simple. However, under pressure i.e. angry guest, colleagues watching, time constraints, those simple rules became the structure that prevented collapse when natural instinct was to defend or deflect.

The complaints didn’t stop, of course, that’s life in that business! But the collapse under pressure did.

Calm under pressure is almost never about the pressure. It’s about what you did before the pressure arrived i.e. practised response rather than in the moment reaction.

You can’t manufacture composure in the moment. You can only reveal the preparation you did beforehand.

The All Blacks weren’t calm in the final quarter because they were mentally tougher. They’re calm because they’ve practiced those exact moments hundreds of times. The chaos is familiar. The pressure is expected. The decisions are pre-made.

When it arrives, they’re not solving new problems. They’re executing established & trusted patterns.

For sure it looks like an innate ability from outside. From inside, though, it’s just practiced preparation doing what it does.

Footnote: This issue is a widespread concern in the worlds of sport and business. Yet it occurs so often that it’s become normalised. If it’s something that’s been eating away at you then drop me a DM and we can chat about my half-day in-house workshop designed to coach people through what I’ve squeezed into a 4-minute read here.

(3-minute read..but it’s worth it 😊)

Have you ever been in a conversation or presentation with someone explaining their “change management strategy.”?

They’ll have a detailed plan, Clear phases, Communication frameworks. It’s normally all very organised.

But then they’re hit with a bolt from the blue where a business suffers an unexpected drop or a sports team lose two of their best players.

So that strategy is now kinda useless. Because it was designed for planned change, not actual change. And actual change doesn’t care about your plans and it doesn’t send advance warning.

We keep hearing leaders talk about “managing change” like it’s this discrete event that happens occasionally and needs containing.

Except that’s backwards.

Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl winner, puts it differently:

“Your organisation is adaptive and dynamic in facing unstable ‘weather.’ It is a state of mind.”

Not a program, not a strategy, but a state of mind.

Which means the question isn’t how to manage change when it arrives. It’s how to build minds that expect instability as the default.

Adam Grant makes this point in “Think Again”: adapting to changing environment isn’t something a company does. It’s something people do in the multitude of decisions they make every day.

That’s the bit most leadership development misses entirely.

We build change management programs when what we need are people who make dozens of micro-adaptations daily without needing a program to tell them how.

So when things get particularly chaotic and every plan you made gets disrupted you just respond and…..adjust. No waiting for new plans or asking permission to pivot. See what shifts and moved accordingly.

Because the alternative is to become paralysed waiting for clarity that’s not coming.

And the difference isn’t training or experience. It whether you treat change as deviation from normal or as normal itself.

Here’s an interesting quote from podcaster, angel investor and author Timothy Ferriss:

“How to thrive in an unknowable future? Choose the plan with the most options.”

Note he doesn’t say the best plan. He focuses on the plan with the most options.

This goes against everything we’re taught about strategic planning. We’re supposed to analyse, decide, commit. Make the brave choice and stick to it.

But that only works if the future cooperates. And the future’s not particularly cooperative lately.

So what if instead of planning for the most likely scenario, we planned for maximum flexibility?

What if the metric wasn’t “is this the optimal choice?” but “how many options does this preserve?”

For example, I know one company who restructured their entire business model around this question. Instead of committing to one market strategy, they built three parallel approaches they could scale up or down based on what emerged.

Yes, at first glance it looks and sounds inefficient. But if you think about it, it actually gives them the ability to pivot when their direct competitors are probably locked into paths that have stopped working.

That said, it can get uncomfortable.

Most leaders say they value adaptability. Then they reward consistency. They punish course corrections and they foster cultures where changing your mind looks like weakness.

Ben Lyttleton’s research on what creates “Edge” in elite sport found that adaptability, resilience, and composure under pressure matter more than technical skills. But how many performance reviews actually measure adaptability?

We measure outcomes. Which means people get punished for adapting if the adaptation doesn’t immediately produce results. So, surprise surprise, they stop adapting.

Golf performance coach, Bob Rotella, studied champion athletes and found something that should change how we think about resilience:

“What’s important is not avoiding adversity, but how an individual responds to it.”

But you can’t develop that response pattern during the adversity. You develop it beforehand by deliberately practicing flexible thinking when stakes are low.

I saw it work well with a rugby performance director who started doing this with his coaching staff. Every strategy meeting, they’d present their plan then immediately discuss what would make them abandon it. Importantly, it wasn’t a devil’s advocate exercise but a genuine pre-planning for when reality diverges from prediction.

That type of approach is so left-field that it does make people uncomfortable initially, and feel like they’re undermining their own ideas.

But when things inevitably shift at some point of the season, they’ve already rehearsed pivoting. They’ve created the mental pathway so all that’s left is to follow it.

Think about one of your last major decisions. Did you choose the option with the best projected outcome? Or the option that gave you the most ways to adjust if projections proved wrong?

Most leaders optimise for scenario A. Very few optimise for having options B and C ready when A doesn’t cut it anymore.

Research from organisational psychology backs this up: it shows that teams given permission to modify plans in real-time outperform teams given detailed plans they’re expected to follow. It’s not that the plans are worse but because reality’s messier than any plan accounts for.

But giving people permission to modify requires trusting their judgment. Which means you can’t micromanage. You can’t require approval for every deviation. You can’t punish course corrections.

You have to actually mean it when you say “adaptability matters”.

I’m increasingly convinced of one thing: the sports clubs, companies & organisations that navigate change well aren’t doing it through better change management but through people who don’t experience normal operations and change as different states.

They expect things to shift and build slack into systems so there’s room to adjust. So they’re all the time making decisions that preserve options rather than burning them.

And when change arrives, which it always does, they don’t trigger crisis mode. They just continue operating with slightly different parameters.

In your world it might look like this:

1. Check your calendar for next week.

2. How much of it would survive contact with unexpected reality?

If the answer’s something like “most of it has to happen exactly as scheduled,” you’ve built rigidity and called it planning.

Real planning accounts for the fact that up to half your week will get disrupted by things you can’t predict. So that means building a buffer creating options and, ultimately, preserving flexibility.

When you read it first it might sound less efficient but it’s actually more effective.

The question isn’t whether change will arrive. It’s whether you’ll be able to respond when it does?

Footnote: If you’re recognising that your club, company or organisation treats change as an occasional crisis rather than a constant state, or if you suspect your planning process optimises for best-case scenarios at the expense of flexibility, that’s worth examining. Maybe what you need isn’t better change management? But perhaps a fundamental shift in how you think about stability and adaptation?

Readwise is an really great piece of software. If you don’t know of it here’s the 10-second summary….Readwise imports the passages/lines you highlight in Kindle and then daily & weekly send you some random samples of same as a method of keeping your learnings fresh. The ones I receive prompt me to dream up these kind of posts.

So today’s ‘highlights’ from Readwise were a mish-mash focused on leadership and they’ve have led me to think that leadership development needs a rethink in its messaging.

John Wooden insisted you “carefully plan every minute” of every meeting with your team.

FC Barcelona’s youth academy produces players who “scarcely need a coach.”

These sound like apparent contradictions on first pass but I think they’re one and the same strategy.

Most leaders plan to be needed. They meticulously organise, strategise, and position themselves at the centre of every decision thereby ensuring their indispensability. Everything is designed to flow through them.

But let’s read Wooden’s full instruction.

“Each meeting with your managers and employees offers a unique opportunity: a chance for you and your team to get better at something, share vital information, boost team spirit, and the like. Don’t waste a moment of it; carefully plan every minute.”

He doesn’t say plan every minute of what you’ll say. He says plan every minute as “a chance for you and your team to get better at something.” The planning is in service of their capability and not your control.

Ricardo Semler also talks about leadership in “The Seven-Day Weekend” i.e. “injecting fundamental ideas and processes into the bloodstream” rather than dictating. Similarly what L. David Marquet is after with his question:

“How do we release the intellect and initiative of each member?”

The word “release” is key. You don’t release what you’re holding onto, right?

FC Barcelona discovered that treating young players as

“human beings with free intentions”

i.e. social, affective, emotional, coordinated, creative, produces better footballers precisely because they learn to make their own decisions.

The coach’s/leader’s job isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to create people who develop their own.

So if your team can’t function well without you then haven’t you’ve built a dependency instead of a team??

Top copywriter Dave Trott cuts through the noise:

“If no one makes it happen, it doesn’t happen.”

So I think the question isn’t whether YOU can make it happen. It’s whether you’ve created the conditions where THEY can make it happen when you’re not in the room.

And this is why, I increasingly believe, the leadership development ‘industry’ largely is wide of the mark.

As Stephen Bungay in “The Art of Action” observes, we’re drowning in advice about what to do, but lost on what actually matters and how to get it done. Most of that advice, even the catchy “empowering” kind, is secretly about making ‘the leader’ more essential, more brilliant, more indispensable. It’s being bought left, right and centre because it appeals to the ego.

Real leadership is the opposite.

Yes, plan meticulously, but plan for your own obsolescence. (You might feel that’s a bit of a Jerry Maguire moment! Fight it!)

Connect deeply and inject the ideas so deeply that others carry them forward without you. Build capability so thoroughly that your absence barely registers.

I’ll leave you with another paradox that has become apparent to me. The more carefully you plan for people not to need you, the more they’ll actually want you there.