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Stop Trying to Create Perfect Stability
When I first read Thriving on Chaos years ago, what remained as a foundational thought, was not any particular model or management technique. It was the challenge buried inside the title itself. Most people spend an enormous amount of energy trying to create conditions that feel permanent. Businesses do it. Leaders do it. Entire industries…
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The fog of war does not only exist on battlefields
The fog of war is a phrase that originally belonged to military strategy…those moments where commanders were forced to make decisions while visibility remained partial, communication fractured, and information arrived distorted through fear, delay, assumption, ego, or incomplete observation. From a distance, war often looks like movement directed by certainty. Inside it, however, people are…
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“More than physical pain, I fear humiliation…”
The title of today’s post is the line spoken by Duncan, the insecure CEO of an up-and-coming data-mining company called Hypergnosis, during a therapy session with Joanne in the AMC series Audacity. While the darkly comedic drama eventually reveals other fractures moving beneath his life…an unraveling marriage, unresolved father wounds, mounting emotional instability…the statement itself…
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What Apollo 13 Understood about Leadership Under Pressure
“Houston, we have a problem” has survived all these years partly because of the way it was delivered. The sentence itself carried no drama. There was no attempt to inflate the moment emotionally even though an oxygen tank had exploded in space and three men were suddenly inside a situation that could very realistically kill…
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What Happens when your Business is Operationally Efficient but Emotionally Flat?
I was listening today to a conversation around relevance and customer experience and I started to think about just how many businesses have become incredibly efficient at producing transactions while slowly losing their ability to produce feeling? There are businesses where everything technically works and yet the entire experience feels emotionally flat. Then there are…
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Most Leaders Never Get to Practice
How strange it is that we expect business leaders to perform at extraordinarily high levels while structuring their lives in ways that would completely dismantle almost every other performance discipline we admire. If you watch elite athletes closely, or musicians at the highest level, most of what they do is not performance itself. Most of…
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Don’t Volunteer yourself into Future Anxiety
In other words, don’t emotionally solve problems you think may occur in the future. We have all done this at one time or another. Something happens. We anticipate the problem. We immediately start solving. A problem becomes a prediction. What makes this difficult is that entrepreneurship does require anticipation. You cannot operate responsibly without thinking…
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Which is worse: ignoring symptoms or treating them as root cause
Organizational exhaustion comes from repeatedly solving problems that never fully go away. The names change. The people involved may change. The location where the strain appears may shift slightly. But underneath it all, there is often the uncomfortable feeling that the issue itself is somehow still alive, simply moving through different forms. A business misses…
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How to Go Down the Wrong Path Effectively
The interesting thing about a lot of businesses is that by the time someone external is brought in, the organization often already believes it knows what the problem is. The conversation may sound exploratory on the surface, but underneath it there is frequently an assumption that has already solidified emotionally, operationally, and sometimes politically long…
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What Does it Cost to Exist in the Wrong Environment
One of the quieter tragedies in life is how long human beings can survive in environments that are fundamentally wrong for them. Just survive…and survival is deceptive because from the outside it can still look functional. The person still shows up. Still produces. Still responds to emails. Still performs competence. Still keeps the business moving.…
Clarity BEFORE Execution. Structure BEFORE Speed
If you could better understand one thing about your business right now….
Most costly decisions begin with
an inaccurate understanding of the situation.
I help leaders understand what is actually happening before major decisions are made or
resources are invested in solving the wrong problem.
Giselle Hudson | Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor | Sensemaking for high-stakes business decisions 