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Are you comfortable being challenged as a leader?
Most leaders would answer yes. The better question is whether the people around them believe it. Leadership requires making decisions in the absence of complete information. Every day, leaders form conclusions about customers, employees, competitors, market conditions, priorities, and risk. Those conclusions become assumptions, and assumptions become the foundation upon which decisions are made. There…
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What causes talented people, strong teams and successful organizations to lose their way?
I’m currently reading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, former President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation. In his introduction he shares: What makes Pixar special is that we acknowledge we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making…
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Have You Ever Asked a Doctor for a Refund?
It’s perhaps a strange question to ask but I am curious. A doctor diagnoses a condition, explains what is happening, recommends a course of treatment, and sends us on our way. We may follow the advice diligently. We may follow some of it. We may ignore it entirely. Yet if our condition fails to improve…
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A Blank on the Map: The Cost of Premature Certainty
In Blank on the Map, explorer and mountaineer Eric Shipton describes an expedition into a region of the Karakoram where the maps contained large areas marked simply by what was not known. There were mountains, valleys, rivers, and glaciers already there, but they had not yet been explored or accurately recorded. The blank existed on…
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Human Beings are Messy Data Sets
This is one of the reasons alignment is so difficult, whether in families, teams, businesses, or entire organizations. Systems are relatively straightforward. A process follows a sequence. A policy establishes boundaries. A workflow defines how something should move from one stage to the next. If something goes wrong, you can often trace the breakdown, identify…
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No One Tells a Cardiologist, “It’s OK…I’ll Watch YouTube.”
One of the things that has always fascinated me about medicine is how readily we accept the idea that expertise matters. If someone experiences chest pain, persistent fatigue, an irregular heartbeat, or a concerning test result, very few people respond by saying, “You know, before you spend money on a cardiologist, have you tried Googling…
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Conversion of Knowledge of Acquaintance into Knowledge About Is a Risky Exercise
My WHY, according to the WHY Institute, is Make Sense. When I first encountered the WHY.os framework, I remember feeling a strange sense of recognition. The WHY Institute describes a WHY as the fundamental motivation that drives a person’s behavior, decisions, and way of seeing the world. In their model, the WHY is expressed through…
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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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Is this Decision Asymmetrical?
Asking “Is this decision asymmetrical?” is a vital mental model for risk management and strategy. Before discussing strategy, before discussing execution, before discussing budgets, restructuring, hiring, expansion, partnerships, marketing campaigns, software purchases, or new opportunities, the question to ask is: Is this decision asymmetrical? Most leaders spend considerable time trying to determine whether a decision…
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 