The woman next to me — Alexandra, I think — laughed out loud.

The room was warm enough for this not to feel like a threat or a judgement. She said she would never in a million years think to declare her superpowers to a group of strangers. I said: well, you should. And then I told the story.

That morning did something I did not fully anticipate. Saying it out loud — in a room of people I respected, in a context where it mattered — forced me to own it. And owning that one led to others. I started to draw red lines: these are the things I do, and these are the things I do not do. These are the environments where what I bring is seen as an asset. These are the ones where it will be treated as a threat. And rather than naming a next role or a specific business, I got clear on something more useful: how I want my work to feel, what I want to double down on, what I am actually building towards. That breakfast was more than a networking event, it turned out to be a reckoning.

Most senior professionals I know can list their titles, their track records, their years in role. But the specific, wired-in things that make them effective? Those stay private, approximate, or unexamined. There is a particular kind of professional silence around naming what you are actually good at. And that silence has a cost.

Part of the problem is one of visibility. David Foster Wallace gave a lecture that opens with two fish swimming along. An older fish passes and says: morning boys, how’s the water? The two fish swim on, and eventually one looks at the other and says: what is water?

When you are entirely surrounded by something, it is remarkably difficult to name it.

I spent my mid-twenties as the right hand to the CTO at Barclays. I was getting consistent feedback on my presentations — the clarity of the structure, the precision of the language, the way a slide could carry an argument without the words “therefore” or “however,” which add nothing on a page and signal that the logic hasn’t been built into the architecture itself. I remember looking around thinking: doesn’t everyone know how to do this?

They did not. What I had was the product of three years at a strategy consultancy where ideas were the thing we sold, and where feedback was detailed enough to debate whether a comma or a full stop served the sentence better. I had been swimming in that water so long it had stopped looking like water.

Jim Collins wrote Good to Great decades ago, and since then we have all absorbed the idea of getting the right people on the bus. It became shorthand for fit — the right organisation, the right mission, the right team. But Collins sat down with Adam Grant recently and reflected on how his thinking has evolved. It is not enough to have the right people on the bus. You need to be in the right seat. The seat that maps to how your brain is actually wired. The seat where your encodings — the things that come naturally, that put you into flow — are exactly what the role demands.

Collins calls these encodings the things you are uniquely capable of, that map to the particular wiring of your brain and your personality. They can theoretically be taught, but what characterises them is that when they are embedded, when they are encodings or superpowers (whatever term you choose) you reach a state of flow very quickly. The challenge is not doing them. It is spotting them and naming them.

That is what started to shift for me when I began naming mine. It became easier to select the bus. And I got crystal clear on where I needed to be sitting to be most effective — and where I did not.

What is one thing you do naturally that other people consistently find more useful than you expected? I would love to hear whether it was visible to you from the start — or whether it took someone else's reaction to show you what you had.

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Finding your superpowers

Finding your superpowers takes deliberate effort. Here are three ways I have found to do it.

One - What is obvious to you and surprising to others?

The first is expanding the range of environments you operate in. Staying within one professional context is the equivalent of staying in the fish tank — everything looks the same. Move across industries, have cross functional conversations, expand your networking circles, and the moments where your natural way of working lands differently start to reveal themselves.

A colleague came to me once asking how to mobilise people. I said: tell the story. He said: I did tell the story. And he had — by his own definition. He had laid out what they would do first, second, third. A clear sequence, a logical plan. I said: that is a process map. You are standing at the bottom of the valley describing the route. But people do not climb mountains because the route is well-marked. They climb because someone has made them feel what it will be like at the top — what will be different there, what they will be able to see, why it matters that they make the effort at all. The route comes after you have convinced them to go. He had been in an environment where this kind of structured sequencing was what counted as a story. His fish tank looked like mine. It just had completely different water. Explaining the difference surprised him. That it needed explaining surprised me. And surprise was the signal to my storytelling superpower.

Two - Where do you most frequently find your flow?

The second is paying attention to the questions people bring to you — from mentees, colleagues, friends. The ones you answer easily, and to which the response is “that was really helpful” or “I hadn’t thought about it like that,” are not random. They reveal the shape of how your thinking is organised. Most leaders treat the questions they are asked as interruptions. The discipline is to treat them as data. John Wooden mentored Don Yaeger for twenty years and noted that the wisdom moved in both directions — he gained as much as he shared. That is not false modesty. It is what happens when you pay attention to what keeps coming back to you. Over time a theme emerges in the questions, and in what your answers are teaching you about yourself. That theme is telling you something specific: where your brain goes naturally, what kind of problems you are wired to solve, and therefore where you are likely to do your best work. Ignore it and you are leaving the clearest signal you have about your own encoding sitting unread on the table.

Third - What did you learn, how did you grow?

The third is what I call a closure report. After a difficult project, a hard relationship, or a significant chapter that has ended, I write. Not a formal document — on my last day at one organisation I opened a note on my phone and called it “the gift of Company X.” Two wines in, the words and a few Taylor Swift lyrics came out together. It was not perfect. It was reference-able. That is the only requirement. Long runs have served the same purpose. So have honest conversations with a small group of trusted people who will tell me the truth. The questions are always the same: what did I learn, what will I not repeat, where was I at my best, and where was I working against my own grain? The closure report is how I identify not just what my encodings are, but what kind of water allows them to work. Knowing your superpowers only matters if you are also selecting for the environments that amplify them. Someone else, with different wiring, needs to take the role where yours would be a constant uphill effort.

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The unspoken career impact

There is also a professional case for all of this that does not get made clearly enough.

A friend of mine was recently approached for a senior role. The job description felt too technical, too financially weighted — not her background. She went through two rounds of interviews, then was called back for a private conversation with the CEO and the Director of Finance. She reiterated her concerns. The Director of Finance told her this would be the first time she had ever reported to someone who was not an accountant. My friend did not try to close the gap or apologise for it. She named her encoding instead: here is how I make decisions around a P&L. Here are the questions I ask. Here is what I prioritise in a people-led business. An hour after the meeting, she got the call.

She got the role because she knew what she was. She did not claim to be something she wasn’t, and she did not let the gap become the story. She named her superpower clearly enough that the people across the table could see exactly where she would add value — and decided that was what they needed.

A hiring manager is trying to understand fit. A mentor is trying to direct energy. If you walk into either conversation with a vague approximation of your capabilities, you are making their job harder and your own case weaker. Clarity here is a form of respect — for your own time and for theirs.

Alexandra said she would never declare her superpowers to a group of strangers. I understand the instinct. It can feel like boasting, or like setting yourself up to be tested. But there is a real difference between boasting and clarity. Boasting is claiming to be exceptional without evidence. Clarity is knowing what you are wired for well enough to name it — and then naming it, without apology, when the moment calls for it.

Naming mine gave me more than confidence. It gave me a framework for every decision that followed. What I will and will not do. Where I will and will not go. What I am looking for in the next chapter — not a title or a sector, but a feeling, a set of conditions, a place where what I bring is genuinely needed. That is what self-knowledge at this level actually unlocks. And it is one of the most underused career tools in any room.

It took me a while to understand what those private thank yous actually meant. The team already knew what was happening in those rooms. They were grateful not despite the friction but because of it. What they couldn’t do — wouldn’t do — was provide it themselves.

I have come to believe that a leader who needs someone else to supply that function hasn’t built a team capable of challenging itself. He found a workaround. The proof was what happened when I moved on. (I’ve written about the demands of the right hand role in more depth [link].)

These meetings were called to make a difficult decision — a prioritisation, a strategic choice, a hard conversation about what wasn’t working. They opened with twenty minutes on the mechanics of the data: who submitted it, whether the figures were current, what each column meant. Then close to an hour on what would happen after the decision: sign-off, governance, communications. The actual decision sat in the middle, untouched.

What the research tells us

Two forces operate simultaneously when a group retreats into process. The first is cognitive. Daniel Kahneman’s research on how the brain manages effort shows that questions with objectively correct answers feel fundamentally different from questions requiring genuine judgment under uncertainty. The brain moves toward what it can resolve, and in a room facing a hard decision, process questions feel tractable in a way the real conversation does not. The second force is social, and in peer groups it is often the stronger of the two. The moment a meeting moves from process to the actual decision, someone’s work gets cut and someone sitting at that table put it there. Process debate gives everyone somewhere to look that is not each other’s faces.

What you are watching in that meeting is rational people responding to the conditions they have been given. The failure sits in the system. The behaviour makes complete sense given the system that produced it. At senior level this sits uncomfortably — the people in the room often have the authority to change those conditions and haven’t. The harder question is what has never been built for them — and who holds responsibility for building it.

Jerry Harvey named this “the Abilence Paradox”. His research showed that groups fail not because they struggle to manage conflict, but because they cannot manage agreement. Each person self-censors, assuming their view differs from the group’s, so nobody raises it. There is no visible coercion — just a very busy conversation about columns filling the space where the real one should be. He titled one of his books How Come Every Time I Get Stabbed in the Back My Fingerprints Are on the Knife? — the title alone tells you everything about his method.

But underneath both forces sits trust. A team operating from genuine trust can afford the hard conversation — “I think your project should stop” is uncomfortable but survivable when the relationship can hold it. When trust is low, nobody can afford that risk, and the team migrates to the zone where there are correct answers and nobody’s judgment is exposed. I have watched teams with years of shared history freeze in a prioritisation meeting because the trust that existed socially had never been tested under real stakes.

I’ve written about how trust accrues and erodes in leadership teams below

A strategic dimension sits underneath all of this. Roger Martin’s Playing to Win framework makes a simple argument: strategy requires explicit choices about what to pursue and what to stop. A team that fills a prioritisation meeting with process debate is, by that definition, failing to do strategy. It is playing not to lose — protecting what already exists rather than actively choosing what to pursue. The meeting reveals the team’s strategic posture, not just its meeting habits. The same failure sits at the heart of the OKR trap I wrote about back in January — the framework substituting for the choice.

I wrote about how to use Playing to Win in your leadership practice here

I wrote about one of my biggest bug-bears, the OKR trap here

What the signs look like

The signs are consistent once you know what to look for. The meeting opens by interrogating the container rather than the question — the format, the source of the data, the structure of the document. Energy migrates to the edges: what happens after the decision, who signs off, how it gets communicated. The actual question stays quiet. People agree readily on everything adjacent to the choice. The clock moves faster than it should.

What you do about it depends on whose meeting it is.

If you're in the room

As a participant, the most effective move is a quiet redirect. Naming the customer or the underlying purpose breaks the cycle without requiring anyone to acknowledge they were avoiding something. “What would the customer want us to decide here?” or “I think we’d be better served focusing on the why” shifts the frame without creating a face-saving problem for anyone in the room.

If it’s your meeting

When it is your meeting, the fix is structural and has to happen before the room gets a chance to drift. I open every difficult meeting the same way: I state why we are here, why it matters, and — this is the part that changes the dynamic — what decisions or actions this conversation is currently blocking downstream. Then I name what success looks like specifically in the next hour. Once that is laid out as fact rather than invitation, the agenda has a spine. And then I manage it without apology — when process starts pulling focus, I return to the question.

These moves address the meeting. They do not address what the meeting is pointing at.

What the meeting is actually revealing

What they do not address is what the meeting is pointing at. Culture reveals itself in the smallest signals — long before anyone gets to a conference room. The relief on someone’s face when you ask what they actually think. The surprise when you change your mind publicly on the back of evidence, or say out loud “you are right, I had not thought of that.” When those moments feel remarkable rather than ordinary, that is the tell.

I walked into one organisation where the board told me they wanted a more commercial, agile, start-up mindset. Every large organisation wants that — it was not the first or last time I’d been asked. By the end of the first month I went back and told them the problem was that we spoke so little about how we made money that if an alien walked into our building, they wouldn’t know if we made ball bearings or ice cream. In every commercial business I had worked in, five minutes with any team told you what they made and how they sold it. The problem was a culture that had quietly decided being commercial was something to be embarrassed about. The process-heavy meetings were a symptom. The cause ran deeper.

Fixing the meeting is manageable. What the meeting is pointing at is a different and harder project — one I am still learning how to approach. I am fairly certain the first step is being willing to name what is actually missing. The culture around a team determines whether the meeting ever gets to the point. Acknowledging that is where the real work begins.

I’d genuinely like to know — what tells you, before you even get into a room, that the culture is the issue? What signals do you notice first?

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I knew exactly what the team meant.

I have spent years using music loudly. Not as background but as intervention. In the living room of our old house, in the years when my daughters were small and everything felt simultaneously full and compressed, I started doing what I can only call dancing it out — full volume, full body, whatever it took to shift the state I was in. Channeling my first Christina and Meredith (IYKYK) while my girls watched. Then they started doing it themselves. I didn’t teach it to them but they absorbed it the way children absorb the things you actually believe, rather than the things you say.

Six years at NeuroFocus, surrounded by neuroscientists, gave me the language for something I'd been doing by instinct long before I could explain it. When you jump — when you really move, with weight and intention — your proprioceptive system engages. That engagement stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the mechanism behind the shift you actually feel: the body settling, the noise dropping, the sense of being back in yourself. The body tells the brain where it is in space. That feedback loop between muscles, joints, and nervous system gives your brain what it needs to calibrate — you are here, solid, real.

I have found that dancing matters more in the in-between-times than at almost any other. When you are between jobs, between identities, between the person you’ve been and whoever comes next — the mind has very little to hold onto but the body always has the floor.

Florence and the Machine’s Free, in the Blessed Madonna remix, is currently doing a lot of work in our house. 4 and a half minutes of permission to take up space. Not because it’s distracting me from what’s hard, but because it puts me back in the room with it.

Change is afoot (more next week). The music is on.

I sat with it longer than I expected to. There are numbers I’m proud of — turnarounds delivered, companies built, teams that went from fractured to functional across industries I had to learn fast and lead faster. But the answer I kept returning to wasn’t a number. It was the trust that has survived, and kept producing, long after the work that created it ended.

I immediately thought of Thurdip, a CFO I worked with for three years and never met in person. We spoke multiple times a week: monthly stock control reports, month end reviews, board reports, import and export issues that needed resolving across time zones neither of us controlled. Over those calls, across those problems, we built a real relationship and yet I have no idea how tall she is. I only know her from the waist up. And yet we still talk — three years since our last month end call. I thought of a client in Japan who trusted me in 2006 in one scale up and then trusted me again in 2011 when I was working for a different one. She went on to recommend me for a C-suite role in 2022, and has since become a close friend. The conditions in both cases were not ideal. The distance and time difference was tricky. The pressure was genuine. The conversations that mattered most happened without the luxury of being in the same room, in the same timezone.

I am so incredibly proud of this. Genuinely. The relationships that have kept producing across decades are the most valuable thing my career has generated — and they did not happen by accident.

describes trust as a jar filled with marbles. Every small act of follow-through, every moment of honesty, every time you show up as promised — adds one marble. The jar fills slowly, over many ordinary moments. It does not fill in a single dramatic gesture. Paul Zak’s neuroscience research explains precisely why: trust is a neurochemical process. Consistent acts of recognition, follow-through and genuine human connection release oxytocin, the brain’s trust hormone. Over time, these repeated small moments condition the people around you to extend trust as a reflex rather than a deliberate calculation. Being on time, delivering before the deadline, calling something out when it would be easier to let it pass — each of those moments adds a marble.

This is where most thinking about leadership trust gets it wrong. The assumption is that trust is forged in the dramatic moments — the difficult decision, the public commitment, the bold call under pressure. Those matter. But the architecture of trust is built in the ordinary moments. Promising and delivering, consistently, across the unremarkable weeks. That is what creates the foundation that holds when things become genuinely difficult.

Trust does not respond to titles. A senior position creates authority — the ability to direct, to resource, to decide. It does not create trust. The people around you do not trust you because of what it says on your email signature. They trust you because of who you are and how you show up in their world. In the month end call at 7am. In the corridor conversation before the difficult meeting. In the moment where you could have protected yourself and chose not to. I wrote a piece on character earlier this year because I believe it is the most undervalued leadership asset in circulation — and trust is where character either proves itself or quietly reveals its absence.

How do you build trust?

The Trust Equation, developed by Maister, Green and Galford, clarifies the mechanics of how to build trust. Trust is the sum of credibility, reliability and intimacy — divided by self-orientation.

• Credibility is whether people believe you know what you are talking about.

• Reliability is whether you do what you say you will do.

• Intimacy is whether people feel genuinely safe in your hands. Most leaders focus their energy on the first two.

• The denominator is where trust actually lives or dies. Self-orientation — the degree to which a leader is focused on their own reputation, comfort or need to avoid a difficult moment — cancels everything above the line. A single moment where someone feels you have prioritised your own ease over their reality can remove marbles from the jar faster than months of consistency put them in.

For anyone leading a team right now

STEP 1: Start with reliability — track your own commitments for a month. Every promise made, every deadline set, every meeting attended on time. When I started doing this deliberately, the pattern I found was uncomfortable. It’s because most of the gaps were small: a reply that came a day late, a follow-up I had said I would send and hadn’t. The reliability gap almost never shows up in the big commitments — it lives in the ones you treated as incidental.

STEP 2: Follow reliability with intimacy — create enough safety that the people around you surface what is actually happening rather than what they think you want to hear.

STEP 3: Then audit your self-orientation honestly. Which conversations are you currently managing around? Whose discomfort are you absorbing into yourself to avoid a difficult exchange?

I’ve learned through experience that the cost of high self-orientation is not abstract. Early in my career, I joined a team with energy and ideas, only to find myself in a meeting where two senior people were visibly not speaking to each other. I raised it directly with the CEO in our first one-to-one. He described it as a minor misalignment they were working through. Five months later, one of those two people had left. Three years later — with both of them long gone — that unresolved hostility still loomed over the team. It shaped what people raised, what they assumed about the intentions of those around them, how much of themselves they were willing to invest in the work. A new CEO eventually came in and addressed what needed addressing. Three years. That is what one moment of self-orientation cost — a leader choosing his own comfort over a conversation that needed to happen.

What mistrust looks like

When trust erodes, teams revert. People drift back towards old ways of working quietly, without announcement. They start to wait you out — watching to see whether you will hold the course, whether you will notice that they have gradually begun doing something different. Ideas stop being offered. Mistakes go underground. What surfaces instead is disengagement, and eventually turnover. By the time people are leaving, the trust had been leaving for considerably longer.

The jar empties faster than it fills. And that asymmetry is the most important thing to understand about trust as a leadership asset.

What trust looks like

Empathy, clear limits, showing up the same way regardless of the stakes — that is the operating system. In the ordinary weeks and in the difficult ones. In the month end call across time zones, and in the conversation you would rather not have. The consistency across all of it is what builds into something that keeps producing for decades.

The most impressive thing in my career is the calls that still come in, years later, from people who were there when things were hard. A woman I have only ever seen from the waist up. A client who came back sixteen years later.

That is the asset worth building — and the one most worth protecting.

I’d like to hear what trust-building looks like in practice for you — whether it’s a standard you hold yourself to, a habit you’ve built deliberately, or a moment that changed your understanding of what it costs. Reply here or find me in the Notes.

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That’s when I noticed: this is what it feels like to be in your body when it’s calm. The kind of ease that leaks out sideways — in the car, in traffic, when nobody’s watching and nothing’s required.

I’d been trying to find the right word for it. I came across the idea of glimmers in ’s piece about transitions in interior design: when you move from one room to another, there should be something that catches your eye and draws you forward. A pull, rather than a push. I think we need the same thing in life.

For my life, it looks like singing in the car when you thought you were too tired to feel anything, the first coffee before anyone else is awake, a conversation that ends and leaves you fuller than when it started. Small and involuntary — the kind you can’t arrange in advance.

Last week in Athens, my husband and oldest took a surfboard — how our favourite midsized board found itself there is a story for another time — and we took it to the local beach in the Athenian Riviera. As he was pushing her onto the whitewater she was squealing with delight, body boarding, ecstatic, surrounded by sun sparks where the light hit the sea. I caught a photo of her joyous face and sent it to myself in postcard form with one line: more of this. I found slipped between a stack of bills and flyers when we got home. Another glimmer, but now a permanent reminder of what I'm chasing safely tucked away in my notepad.

What I’m learning is that glimmers matter most in their absence. When they go quiet — when I can’t find them with ease — that’s the signal. The choices that brought me to that moment in the car are the ones worth doubling down on; and when the glimmers disappear, I need to remember what they felt like and ask honestly what I’ve stopped doing.

Your body reads the small moments the same way it reads the big ones. The dishes. The weekend taxi run. The lunchboxes. The weekly shop. The glimmer doesn’t wait for the right conditions. It finds you in the middle of the ordinary.

So I’m holding this one. Writing it down so I don’t lose it. Forty-minute drive to a birthday party that should have taken fifteen. Singing my heart out.

What are your glimmers? What does it feel like to be in your body when you’re calm — when you’re not carrying someone else’s emergency?

for my Greek readers, those born in the 80s, put this song on and try not to sing along

Good thinking requires two things: time and friction. It needs to be stress-tested and nurtured. The problem is that productive friction is harder to find than it sounds. You might be operating in a low-trust environment where people simply will not challenge you — the room agrees because agreement feels safer than dissent. You might be operating in an environment where you do not trust the motivations behind the challenges you do receive, which makes it impossible to know which friction is useful and which is noise. Or you might be building something genuinely new — a category, a product, an approach that does not yet exist — in which case the friction you encounter is often not informed challenge but simple ignorance of what you are trying to do. In all three cases, the room cannot give you what you need. You have to find another way to stress-test the thinking.

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I have written before about what remains with the leader as AI absorbs more of the execution layer: trust, judgement and taste. The capacity to make the call the data cannot make for you, to read the room the model cannot read, to know which direction is right when three of them look equally plausible. If those are the qualities that matter most, two questions follow. How to make and protect the time for thinking. And how to make the most of the thinking time you have. This piece deals with the second. Next week I will come back to the first.

I have always found sport one of the clearest lenses for leadership. Elite athletes operate under conditions that strip away everything comfortable: the performance is visible, the feedback is immediate, and the gap between preparation and execution is ruthlessly exposed. The Olympics, in particular, tend to produce moments of unusual clarity about what separates people at the top of their field both in terms of physical and mental prowess.

At the 2026 Winter Olympics, Eileen Gu was asked by a reporter whether she thinks before she speaks. Her answer described something most leaders never quite get to: spending significant time in her own head, breaking down her thought processes, applying an analytical lens to her own thinking and then modifying it — treating her mind the way she treats her craft, as something to be studied, tested and improved. Brené Brown reflected on that exchange recently, landing on the idea that thinking is a skill that can be deliberately practised and improved. Most of us accept the quality of our thinking as a given. It is a variable.

Here is how I have started to approach it differently — and where AI has changed what is actually possible. These are entry points, practical and available to anyone. Think of them as concentric circles — starting with something tangible and specific, then expanding outward.

The inner circle: the document

When I was preparing to present our 2026/27 plan and budget to the board for approval, I had reached the point where I knew the business inside out, had a clear sense of where pushback would come from and from whom, and had developed a narrative flow in the board paper that worked for me. The problem that arrives at that stage is a different one: you lose the wood for the trees. The question is how your reasoning actually holds up under scrutiny, and how to use the finite time in the room to best land what you need in order to get the approval. I knew one board member would challenge the performance of a specific product based on their own experience of it. Had I done enough to explain where we were and what the path forward looked like? What were the three or four questions I needed to prepare for? That is where AI can genuinely help — not by doing the thinking, but by interrogating the thinking that is already there.

Gather your draft paper, the supporting materials that would sit in the wider pack, and the minutes from the previous twelve months of that same forum. Feed all of it into the AI tool your company approves and uses — do not feed confidential information into an unapproved tool. Then use a prompt along these lines:

The result was a tight, timely conversation, an approved budget, and strong feedback on the structure, analysis and completeness of what was presented.

The middle circle: the room

You can take this further. Before a document exists in its final form — while the thinking is still developing — AI can help you understand the room you are walking into well enough to shape both your argument and your approach.

Feed in the transcripts and minutes from the past year of that forum. Not just the formal minutes but the full record of conversations — what actually gets said, not just what gets written up. Ask AI to surface the patterns: what this group gravitates toward in discussion, what it consistently avoids, what keeps appearing in conversation but never makes it onto a formal agenda. A good AI analysis will tell you that a topic was raised in January and never returned to, or that revenue keeps surfacing in discussion despite never being a standing agenda item. That is the metacognition of the group — its collective habits, tendencies and blind spots — and it shapes every room, every decision, every conversation whether anyone names it or not.

Use a prompt along these lines:

The insights this surfaces belong to the AI. What you do with them belongs to the leader.

The outer circle: the mirror

The third application moves furthest from any specific document or meeting. Here the question is not how a piece of work holds up, or how a room behaves — but how you show up. Your own patterns of behaviour and communication, examined honestly.

I took a detailed article on hedging by The Strategic Linguist — the linguistic patterns that can quietly undermine authority — and asked our work AI to use that framework as a filter against my own behaviour. The prompt was straightforward:

A note before using this: it works as written if your company AI tool has native access to your meeting recordings and emails. If it does not, paste your transcripts directly into the prompt before running it.

What I learned is that my hedging levels were extremely low which is what many leaders have been tought - be decisive, be clear, speak with authority. But what AI rightly point out is that in high-stakes strategic conversations, I tend to close the loop before others have finished, moving the group toward my framing quickly. What reads as decisiveness can, in certain moments, flatten the dissent I actually need to hear. The mirror showed me a pattern I could not see from the inside and one I would not have found by asking the people in the room or in 360 feedback.

The principle transfers to almost anything. Someone in my network has built a Stoic bot on ChatGPT — feed it a situation you are navigating and it returns a relevant quote from the canon, followed by a short analysis of how that specific principle applies to what you are describing. It is a framework, rigorously applied to a specific moment. You could build the same thing around any body of thinking you find useful — any leadership model, any philosophical tradition, any set of principles you keep returning to. The starting point is always the same: find the framework that matters to you, and use it to close the gap between who you intend to be and what the evidence of your behaviour actually shows.

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The practice

What connects these three circles is not the technology. It is the intention behind it. I collect prompts — Mia Kiraki is generous in sharing the systems and approaches she uses, and others in my network do the same — and I save them as files. Depending on what I am working on, I give an instruction to use a particular prompt. The result is a deliberate practice: reaching for AI with a specific purpose rather than when it happens to be convenient, building the infrastructure for structured reflection that accrues over time.

This is what Eileen Gu was describing, and what I keep returning to from sport more broadly: the best performers treat their own capabilities as trainable. Their mind, their communication, their patterns under pressure — all of it available for examination and improvement. The AI does not do the thinking. It creates the conditions under which the thinking can be honest — which, when the morning started with cereal on the floor and tears at the school gates and you have a board member at nine, is often exactly what is missing.

The most useful things I have found in building this practice have come from other people’s generosity with what actually works for them. If you have a prompt, a framework, or an approach that has shown you something unexpected about how you think — I’d genuinely like to hear it. Share in the comments or reply directly.

My aunt’s version of just us is thirty people people. Family, cousins, kids running through every room, teenagers self isolating in a corner away from the ‘embarassing’ relatives, the second cousin who wasn’t expected, the neighbour and friend of thirty years who didn’t fancy organising anything this Easter. “We’ve got enough food — come over whenever suits.” When do you want us? “Oh, noon... whenever suits.”

We stayed until ten.

I carried our sleepy girls home with my stomach full in the way only a proper Greek Easter, a 12 hour slow eating and drinking marathon, makes possible. Our doggie bag (if you can call 5 massive tapperware a ‘doggie bag’) rested on my mum’s lap as my husband pushed the wheelchair down a sleepy street. My dad grew up in this part of Athens — a city neighbourhood that held on to a unique village feel. Where everyone knows everyone, where you bump into people constantly: people you grew up with, people who were friends with your parents and distant relatives over thirty years, teenage kids of friends. Of course ‘just us’ ends up being 30 people.

The ancient Greeks had a word for what happened around my aunt’s table: συμπόσιο. The symposium. Literally, drinking together — though the concept stretches further than the cup. It names the gathering itself, the act of showing up around food and conversation with no agenda beyond being present with one another. Plato wrote his most searching dialogues in this form. The real thinking happened at the table, among the people, not in the lecture hall.

Dionysis Savvopoulos, in a song I keep humming at home but struggle to translate, wrote something I keep returning to:

Να μας έχει ο Θεός γερούς πάντα ν’ ανταμώνουμε και να ξεφαντώνουμε βρε με χορούς κυκλωτικούς κι άλλο τόσο ελεύθερους σαν ποταμούς

May God keep us well, so we always find each other — and celebrate, with dances in circles, as free as rivers.

Circular. Free-flowing. No beginning or end. That is exactly what the best gatherings feel like.

My husband and I have been working out how to bring this to our UK life — we are still not entirely sure whether that is culture or simply the reality of not yet having the thirty years of history that makes a come over whenever feel effortless rather than organised. Probably both?

When we were house hunting, we kept returning to a question that had nothing to do with school catchments or commute times. Could this space hold twenty people if we moved all the furniture? That was the test even though we did not have 20 close people at the time. We weren’t looking for a house, we were looking for somewhere that could become that table.

I want our girls to grow up inside this. The circular dance. The room that holds everyone because someone decided it would. The sense that there is always enough — enough food, enough space, enough time — even when none of that is technically true.

The margins of a full life include this too. The places where nothing is required of you except to show up.

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Then Elena Verna published a visceral and honest perspective on the impact AI has in the tech industry. And the conversations started again.

Where Tom outlined an intellectual frame, Elena provided the feeling. The particular disorientation of a real industry shift happening while you’re still expected to perform as if nothing has changed. She talks about decades spent building excellence in a craft, then watching a 22-year-old produce a credible version of it in fourteen minutes. No mourning period, no pause, just constant movement when the ground is still moving.

She named the underlying feeling precisely: behind. Not “I should probably try that new tool” behind. “Am I already operating on an outdated mental model?” behind.

So I sat down to think it through properly.

I am not in tech. Elena writes from inside the industry doing the disrupting. I am watching from the industries being disrupted: analytics, market research, media, communications, digital strategy. I know what annihilation looks like because I have watched it happen to work I built and spent years perfecting. Code that once required a team of five and several weeks (Python, semantic indexes, paid and organic search strategies built from scratch) now takes minutes. The feeling Elena describes is not exclusive to tech, it is arriving everywhere, just with less fanfare and fewer headlines about it.

If you’re being honest with yourself, you probably recognise that feeling even if your version is quieter, more contained, held closer because you’ve learned not to let uncertainty show at the level you’re operating at. Tasks that once required a team and several weeks now require a sentence and minutes.

Elena is right that a great deal of what many senior people spent the last decade building is losing leverage. Research, synthesis, analysis, writing, the structured logic of a well-built strategy deck; the cognitive execution layer of knowledge work is collapsing.

Where I part from Elena is on what that actually means for the people who built the expertise.

AI is absorbing execution — the doing of the work. What it cannot produce is the judgement about whether the work is any good. Tom calls this taste. He uses Rubin as the example — the man whose value is entirely the what, the conviction about what something should feel like and the authority to hold that standard until it’s met.

I keep referring to it as the conductor of an orchestra.

Same sheet music. Same notes. Same orchestra. Entirely different sound. Different conductors will have different views on tempo and rhythm, balance sound levels, the emotion a piece is meant to convey. The conductor’s value is interpretation, the decision about what this piece means, how it should land, what it asks of the people in the room. That authority is earned through years of studying the music from the inside.

I spent days, real, unglamorous days, on PowerPoint decks. A senior consultant would hand back print-outs covered in red marks. Some of the corrections pertained to the design, most were about the thinking. Why does this slide exist? What decision does it drive? What objection does it pre-empt before the person in the room even knows they’re going to raise it? During those long nights I was not learning to build presentations, I was learning to read a room before I was in it, to trace the emotional blocker back to its source, to build a narrative across two slides that moved a business forward and disarmed the resistance before it surfaced. AI produces a polished deck in seconds. It has no idea what the CFO is afraid of, or what the board needs to hear before they can say yes, or where the real decision in the meeting actually lives. That knowledge builds slowly, through red marks and discomfort and getting it wrong in rooms where it costs you something.

The execution went. But what the execution was teaching you stayed.

This is not the first time in history technology has threaten to disrupt the way we work. In the mid 1980s almost 20% of the US workforce identified as clerical and secretarial workers. The secretarial profession has been decimated since the 1980s. And yet we haven’t ended up with mass unemployment. That time and those skills went elsewhere. But where?

So what does that mean for us?

The more useful exercise right now — harder and less comfortable than adding AI to your workflow and moving faster — is to map where you are genuinely irreplaceable, and where you have been mistaking busyness for contribution.

Start with this: in the last twelve months, where did you add value that required you specifically? Your read of a situation when the data ran out. Your instinct that a direction was wrong before anyone had evidence. Your willingness to hold a standard when the room was tired and wanted to ship something adequate. Your call on a person, a partnership, a pivot that no framework would have surfaced. These are the moments worth mapping because they tell you what you actually bring to the table, and they are the foundation of what to build further.

Then move to the harder side: where were you doing work that a well-prompted model could now produce competently? Analysis run because it was expected. Documents written to demonstrate rigour rather than generate insight. Meetings attended to signal involvement rather than contribute judgement. These instanced are not a failing but an example of instances where knowledge work has calcified. These are the hours AI should be absorbing — and the space they free up is where the real work can finally go.

Which leads us to the final question. What to do with that time? Elena correctly warns that “Productivity gains get absorbed immediately by the system, which is very on-brand for tech.” AI makes you faster and the system absorbs the speed immediately.

We need to protect against the gravitational pull of productivity and follow the path of orchestra conductors (Or Rick Rubin, Richard Feynman and the Bhagavaat Gita as per Tom’s piece): we need to develop taste and judgement. The real question is: what is your standard? Your actual, personal, developed standard for what good looks like in your domain. A standard held and applied consistently is the most durable form of professional authority there is, because when execution is handled, someone still has to decide whether what got produced is worth anything.

The answer is to use the space that opens up to develop what execution was always covering — your point of view, your clarity about what is actually worth building, your willingness to lead with that rather than reach for more process.

The score is in front of you. You know how it should sound.

Elena called hers confessions. I’m curious what yours would be — the version of this feeling you carry but don’t usually say out loud. And if you have a red marks story of your own, I’d genuinely like to hear it. Reply and tell me. The most useful conversations I have about this happen well away from the confidence theatre.

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Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker

CA Education Learning Lab

To Build AI Literacy, Return to the Humanities

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8 months ago · 19 likes · 1 comment · CA Education Learning Lab

Slow AI

The Humanities Are the Moat

The ability to evaluate what AI produces was never a technical skill. It was a humanities education…

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a month ago · 60 likes · 6 comments · Dr Sam Illingworth

You work harder than required, deliver beyond what was asked, keep your head down and your standards high — and then watch the system fail to notice. The belief underneath all of that effort is that someone, somewhere, will see it and respond accordingly. That good work speaks for itself. That visibility is earned through delivery alone.

The system responds to what is communicated, signalled, stated. Hard work that is never articulated is, in professional terms, largely invisible. I watched this play out up close when I was working at the headquarters of a major UK bank. There was a senior leader who had a habit of walking the floor with a stack of papers under his arm. He would knock on office doors, ask for five minutes, and stay for thirty. It took me a while to understand what he was actually doing. He was building consensus before he ever walked into a board meeting. He was using the collective knowledge of the floor to refine his thinking, stress-test his arguments, fill the gaps. Then he walked into the room and presented it as his own and in the way organisations work, it largely was. He received the accolades, the bonus, and two promotions in three years. The floor that had fed his thinking received none of it.

I use this story a lot when I work with female leaders. The instinct is to be angry at the man with the papers (and believe you me, I understand that instinct). But the more useful frame is the old adage: don’t hate the player, hate the game. He understood how the game worked and played it well. The question worth sitting with is whether you do too. The “good girl” education runs deep, the conditioning that says work hard, stay quiet, and trust that merit will be recognised.1 Organisations rarely honour that particular faith.

Setting limits at work is the corrective. And I want to offer a framework for thinking about this, because professional boundaries are genuinely misunderstood, often treated as walls when they are actually closer to definitions. Brené Brown argues that authenticity requires boundaries — that you cannot show up as yourself in any meaningful sense without first knowing and honouring what you will and will not accept.2 What I have found, both in my own career and in the work I do with senior women, is that naming your limits does not constrain you. It returns you to yourself. To paraphrase Brené, negotiating who you are with someone will enable you to fit in but you will no longer belong to yourself.

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Needs and values operate differently.

Needs are practical, and they are more universal than we tend to think what differs is how we prioritise them and how well they are being met.3 The most useful thing I have learned about identifying a need is to look at it through the lens of emotion and body first. When a situation feels wrong, when the energy drains out of a room or out of you, something is signalling that a need is going unmet. The trap is confusing a need with a strategy. “I need a new job” sounds like a need but it is actually an assumption about what will fix the underlying one. The real need might be recognition, or creative challenge, or autonomy. Identifying that with precision matters, because a need can be met in multiple ways. A strategy that misses the actual need will leave you in exactly the same place, just with a different job title.

Values are what guide you toward meaningful ways of having those needs met. They are less about what you want and more about who you are; the commitments you have made to yourself about how you will work and what you will stand for. When your values are being honoured, you feel it: engagement, clarity, the sense that what you are doing means something. When they are being violated, you feel that too and the signals, as I have learned, are rarely subtle. The decision not to work with certain clients is a value. The refusal to let your agreed role expand into something you never signed up for is a value. Unlike needs, values do not flex in execution. They are the edge of the map.

The practice of actually setting them.

The first step is to get clear on where the limit is and what it feels like to cross it. Overwhelm, sleeplessness, the low dread before a conversation. Those are signals, not inconveniences. Bessel van der Kolk’s landmark research4 showed that the body holds and communicates experience physically, not just cognitively — that what the mind has not yet named, the body is already carrying. That signal is worth honouring.

The second step is to write them down. Psychologist James Pennebaker spent decades studying what happens when people put difficult experiences into words. His research found that writing forces you to sequence events, identify causes, and construct meaning. He also found that the people who benefited most were those who used words like “realise,” “because,” and “consider” as they wrote. Thinking tends to loop, endlessly round and round and round the thoughts go. Writing forces you to a conclusion.5 I will confess that I have a visceral reaction to the tech bro advice to spend twenty minutes every morning writing morning pages — and yet here I am, having to admit that the instinct is backed by serious research. Use it as it fits your life and your schedule, not as another item on a self-optimisation checklist. It also creates a record to return to when a situation becomes murky and you need to remember what you actually think.

From there, the practice is to watch for the physical signal, the tension, the resistance, and use it as a filter. When your body is reacting, step away from the situation before you respond. The best advice I have received about communicating in these moments is to take the affect out, don’t just manage the tone. The Strategic Linguist writes compellingly about how credibility is evaluated cognitively: our brains pattern-match narrative structure, and when emotion fragments the coherence of what you are saying, the listener registers it as evasive or uncertain, regardless of whether the facts are sound.6 What helps me is writing things down first, often drafting exactly what I want to say before I say it. The goal is precision: a clear causal structure, no hedging, no over-explanation. Precision, in these situations, is a form of credibility. And credibility is the thing you are protecting when you set the limit in the first place.

Boundaries are not rigid.

When I moved from a fully remote role to a hybrid arrangement, I committed to one day in the office each week. I kept to that even on weeks when I could comfortably have stayed home. The boundary was the promise I had made to the organisation — and one of my core values is that I keep my commitments. I say this to my daughters regularly. What you say you will do and what you actually do are meant to be the same thing.

The same principle worked in the opposite direction when a role began shifting significantly away from what had been agreed. I could have accepted the new scope. What I could not accept was what saying yes would have meant — that I was willing to compromise the professional direction I had set for myself. Crossing that line would have violated promises I had made to myself about where my career was heading, and no role is worth that.

What it costs when you don’t.

For me, when I do not honour a boundary, I cannot sleep. That has consistently been the first signal — the conversations I did not finish playing on a loop in my head, the things I should have said, the things I should not have agreed to. From there, the space between stimulus and response starts eroding. I become simply reactive, and that is the opposite of who I want to be — not just as a leader, but more broadly as a person. I have children who require a full and generous response to their noise, their mess, and their energy. That requires space I cannot give if I have already spent it absorbing what should have been named and declined at work.

I know this from experience. I once worked alongside a seasoned founder who is also a close friend years of building together, genuine trust, real results. At a certain point I reached a place where I had nothing more to give to the business. Not in output, I was still delivering, but in the fuel that building and scaling actually runs on, which is passion. When that wanes, keeping the energy up becomes its own kind of labour. I did not sleep for months. My stomach sank before many a call. The signals were consistent and clear but I just was not ready to name what they were telling me.

Eventually I called him on the way to a Pilates class and said something like: “you will never fire me and I will never quit. We love working together. But right now, this is not working. Neither of us is having any fun and we both know it. For the sake of our friendship, let’s part ways. I have known you for twenty years — let’s protect that.” It was the hardest and most liberating conversation I have had in my professional life. I walked into that reformer class feeling like I was on water.

That conversation was only possible because I had finally named what my body had been telling me for months. Honouring that limit was what made it possible to walk away with the friendship intact and with something returned to myself that I had not realised I had been slowly giving away.

The cost of operating without limits is not just burnout. It is that you gradually become unrecognisable to your own instincts.

Credibility erodes as much through what you silently absorb as through any visible mistake. The people around you will take exactly as much as you offer — not out of malice, but out of efficiency. You are the one who has to name the edge.

Taylor Swift offers the better frame later on in her song: “What’s a girl got to do — a diamond has to shine.” The work is not the problem. Keeping it invisible is. A diamond does not shine in spite of its edges — it shines because of them. Each facet is a boundary, a defined surface that catches light and throws it back. Without those edges, you do not get brilliance. You get glass.

A diamond shines brightest because of its boundaries. So go on, declare yours.

Where do you draw the line between a need and a value? I'd love to hear how other women are thinking about this.

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6

Long time readers know I am a big fan of Rebecca’s work. I would start off with this post

The Strategic Linguist

Why Some People’s Stories Always Get Believed: The Linguistic Markers of Narrative Credibility

You’ve probably noticed it. The VP mentions a problem in passing, and everyone believes there’s a problem. The junior analyst raises the same concern with charts and data, and people ask clarifying questions. The director says “trust me, this will work,” and it gets approved. The manager says the same thing and faces skepticism…

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6 months ago · 28 likes · 23 comments · The Strategic Linguist

She thanked me for that. I hadn’t thought I’d done anything.

She'd spent days bracing for the version of me that takes things personally. She'd expected friction. She got none.

Setting a boundary is hard. The fear that you will disappoint someone, but that you will fail to live up to the image they have of you can be paralysing. You’ve build yourself up to be the accommodating one. The available one. The organised one. The one who always shows up. And so you say yes when you mean no, and you put yourself at the bottom of the list. Once or twice, that works but over time, it is a one-way street to resentment and frustration. You stop being generous and you start keeping score.

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I don’t know if it’s age or experience but I’ve come to realise that setting a boundary honours the real you. And the real you (to paraphrase the old adage of ‘truth will always out’) will always out. In my case it outs around 3am, when I wake up to use the bathroom and cannot get back to sleep because I am running through the things I should have said, the things I could have done, and didn't.

As a card-carrying member of the Squeezed Generation I have had to learn quickly where my own red lines lie. My husband found most of them through trial and error; a well-timed “should you go to the gym?” at 6:30am that has since become family shorthand. I am a miserable cow if I haven’t worked out in a couple of days. I spiral in mess — not dirt, mess — in a way that is completely disproportionate and yet entirely real. Knowing that about myself, and making it plain to the people around me, isn’t high maintenance. It is honesty. It is the reason the people closest to me know how to love me well.

Dr. Becky Kennedy defines a boundary in the context of parenting as something you tell your child you will do. It requires nothing of them. I think that holds everywhere.

Which means setting one says very little about the other person, and everything about you. Brené Brown puts it plainly: clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

And that is the paradox. The boundary — the thing that looks like a wall — is what creates safety. For you. For them. For the relationship. When everyone knows where the edges are, nobody has to guess. Nobody has to manage you, or tiptoe around you, or brace for the version of you that surfaces when you have said yes one too many times.

Without that clarity, you cannot find the edges. And without the edges, you can’t find and grow the margins. Without the margins, there is no space. No space to breathe, to be difficult, to pull out of things, to be loved well.

Monday’s posts are a place for experimentation and journaling. It’s a place where I can think out loud, flesh out my thinking about how I am showing up and navigating my personal life. Through these posts I hope to distill my thoughts, gain insight and perspective through feedback, comments and conversations.

There is no end, no silver lining to these posts. Just a space for reflection and connection.

Thank you for being here. I am forever grateful ❤️

Daphne

Product-market fit tells you there is something between what you’ve built and the people who need it. Founders chase it, investors demand evidence of it, and leadership teams go on a quest to find it. What nobody hands you is the how — how to clarify what you are actually trying to achieve, how you will get there, and what you will sacrifice, deprioritise, or walk away from entirely in the process. Playing to Win is what turns the destination into a method for getting there.

Previously I talked about what happens when that method is missing — the OKR meeting that becomes a list-ordering debate, and Gwendoline in Accounts making a perfectly logical decision that quietly derailed the growth strategy three layers above her. The root cause, in both cases, is the same: strategy that never got specific enough to create real guardrails. I promised you the framework I use — and this is it.

More about OKR management, here:

Playing to Win — and making it your own

Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley developed Playing to Win during Lafley’s tenure as CEO of P&G, where it underpinned one of the most significant corporate transformations of the last thirty years. The book is worth reading. It is also the framework I return to every time — in neuroscience, in pet care, in charity, in digital analytics. Across every turnaround, the context changes but the five questions do not. What they surface, reliably, is the gap between what a leadership team actually agrees on and what they merely assume they agree on. That gap is usually where the strategy falls apart.

The five questions cascade. The answers to the earlier ones constrain the answers to the later ones, which is exactly the point.

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What is our winning aspiration? This is where most leadership teams accidentally start talking about purpose and accidentally stop talking about strategy. A winning aspiration is a declaration of what the business exists to do in the world, defined in terms of the customer and the competitive context. P&G’s was unambiguous: the consumer is boss. For the pet care business I ran in Europe — after five years of losses — the aspiration was equally specific: to become the most trusted clinical brand in the European companion animal market. The most trusted, in a precise category, with a precise end-user relationship.

Where will we play? This is the question most businesses answer too broadly and too late. Geography, channel, customer segment, category adjacencies — each is a choice, and each choice made here narrows what is possible in the questions that follow. When I joined Antinol, a brand with strong market position across Asia, the job was to determine how those answers translated to Europe — a market with a fundamentally different relationship to clinical claims, where the bar for data and pilots is materially higher and where the trust architecture of Asian positioning does not simply transplant. The “where” answer looked completely different, and that is not a failure of the original strategy — it is what happens when you apply rigorous thinking to a new context rather than assuming the context is the same.

How will we win there? Given where we have chosen to play, what gives us the right to win? This is where differentiation lives — and where Michael Porter’s research becomes essential. Porter’s enduring argument is that competitive advantage is as much about what you choose not to do as what you do. A strategy that tries to be everything in a chosen market is a wish. The most useful output of working through this question is the explicit list of approaches you are ruling out. Every time I have done this with a leadership team, the real clarity comes not from agreement on the winning move but from the first moment someone says “so we’re agreeing we’re not going to do X?” — and the room confirms that yes, we are not going to do X.

What capabilities must we have? Only once the first three questions have real answers does it become possible to have an honest conversation about capability. Most businesses run this in reverse — they assess what they have and build strategy around it. The trouble is that this produces strategy shaped by the existing organisation rather than strategy shaped by the market. The capability gap might be a hire, a partnership, or the recognition that the business cannot win in the space it has chosen without a fundamental rebuild — which is itself a strategic choice worth making explicitly.

What management systems support this? This is where OKRs live. The metrics, the meeting rhythms, the reporting structures, the incentive design: all of these should be in service of the four choices above them. When they are not — when the OKR list becomes the strategy rather than the measurement of the strategy — you are back in Gwendoline’s world. Logical decisions, wrong outcomes, and a leadership team that cannot understand why smart people keep getting it wrong.

Three watch-outs from the field

The first is false consensus. People nod at the winning aspiration and assume alignment. The real test is question two, because that is where the first genuine trade-offs appear. If you can reach agreement on where you will explicitly not compete, you have real alignment. If you cannot, you do not have a strategy yet.

The second is over-constraint. Teams sometimes use this process to narrow so aggressively that they eliminate viable growth. The discipline of “how will we win” should be a quality filter, not a reason to shrink to an unviable niche.

The third is the update cycle. Playing to Win is not a once-a-year offsite exercise. The answers to these questions should be live enough that when Gwendoline faces a real decision under pressure, the framework is accessible to the team — embedded in shared understanding rather than filed away in a document. Building that shared understanding is the actual work, and it is harder than any offsite will prepare you for.

For most of my twenties and thirties, I was chasing a very specific kind of joy. The kind that arrives when people decide you are worth their time. I wanted to be seen as smart, alluring, worthy.

A lot of that decade looked like this. Clubs where the music was too loud to hear yourself think and the conversations were fleeting — a sentence, a smile, gone. Chasing boys who were not yet men, who did not know who they were. Me, still a girl, trying to decipher who they were, who they wanted to be, and then becoming something else entirely to fit. All in the space of five minutes with the music blaring loud. I had an incredibly broad social circle. Work friends, university friends, friends of friends of friends. My Facebook is riddled with pictures of people whose names I no longer remember, faces I can’t quite place.

So I gravitated to the mean. I made myself legible to all of them. I shrank the parts that were too strange or too much or too hard to explain, and presented a flatter, cleaner version of myself to the world. It worked, in the way these things work. People liked me. I was, however, quietly exhausted.

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Then a series of decisions streamlined everything — none of them conscious, none of them premeditated. I met a tall man with a beard from Lincolnshire who, after a long courtship, decided I was worthy of the girlfriend title. Then we agreed to further tie our lives together. A marriage, two daughters, a big mortgage. Throughout all of it I tried to hold onto the version of me I’d built in my twenties and thirties. I had spent so long being that person I thought she was the real me.

Slowly life got too full. My mum’s accident. The girls starting school. A big job, plates spinning in every direction. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I simply stopped having the energy to also edit myself down. The multitudes — the strange bits, the contradictions, the things I love that don’t fit a neat narrative — stopped being managed and started just being there.

An at that point something unexpected happened. I found my tribe. Not a tribe. Mine. The people who nod along to my stories and follow up with “I feel you” rather than “but how could this be?”

The clearest sign of the shift is how I answer a simple question. When someone asks what I do for a living, I used to describe the role. The job title. The brand — or apologise quietly for the fact that it wasn’t a recognisable one. Today I tell you about my work. My approach to a problem. The impact I try to make. The title is irrelevant. The person doing the work is not.

From there, joy followed. But this time it is very different than before.

There are two kinds of joy. The performed kind — where you are exactly where you decided you should be, doing exactly what should make you happy, smiling a smile that does not reach your eyes. Dead behind them, if you are honest. That joy does not travel. It stays exactly where it was placed, going nowhere.

Then there is the other kind. The joy that overflows like a tsunami even on the tired days, the low-energy days, the days when everything is slightly harder than it should be. The joy that oozes out of you because it has nowhere else to go. That joy is infectious. It does not need a room or an audience or the right lighting. It just arrives, slithers through the cracks of your imperfect life — because you stopped pretending, and it finally could. And when it does, you find you have something you did not have before. Capacity. Space. Margin. The room to approach life with a genuinely positive outlook — not performed optimism, but the real thing. The kind that holds even when the day is hard.1

To borrow a Taylor Swift lyric, wildly out of its original context: give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.

That’s what being understood feels like. Someone seeing the multitudes and staying. Joy choosing you every single time.

When did you stop editing yourself down? I’d love to hear.

What “building the business” actually means

I have walked into this situation three times. The most instructive was MachineVantage, founded in 2016, long before large language models were what they are today — a company applying AI and machine learning to marketing and product innovation at a moment when that combination was genuinely novel.1 Dr A.K. Pradeep, the founder, was already a twice-exited entrepreneur: NeuroFocus, acquired by Nielsen,2 and BoardVantage, acquired by Nasdaq.3 He knew how to build something that mattered. What MachineVantage needed when I arrived was someone to work out what that technology actually looks like in a marketer’s hands: when in their workflow they would reach for it, what the output would look like, how it sits alongside the methodologies they already trust — BASES and Link testing among them — how you train clients to be self-sufficient, how work gets briefed in. The commercial architecture existed in the pitch deck. Executing it was an entirely different problem.

The danger of moving fast without seeing the whole chessboard

The instinct at this stage is to move fast, and there is real wisdom in that. You need to be in the room, picking up signals, iterating constantly. But moving fast without seeing the whole chessboard is how you accidentally close doors you needed to keep open — and in an early-stage business, some of those doors do not reopen.

The specific tension we faced at MachineVantage was this. The technology could credibly go after advertising testing (helping marketers optimise creative before it reached market) or innovation ideation (helping teams generate and refine new product concepts). Both were legitimate applications, and both were also the wrong framing for the same reason: we were making a product decision when we needed to make a positioning decision first. Advertising testing looked attractive until you understood that some of our clients’ bonuses rested directly on how many ‘greens’ they achieved using their preferred, long-established testing methodology — convincing them to replace it was a political challenge dressed up as a product one. Innovation ideation looked more open until you sat in enough client meetings to understand that the innovation process inside large CPGs is fluid, iterative, and rarely has a clean endpoint, making it genuinely hard to define what ‘done’ looks like. Each path carried real consequences for how clients briefed work in, how we priced, which budget lines we drew from, and which doors we could realistically open next inside those organisations.

The vaporware problem: integral to building a business, until it isn’t

A related pressure arrives constantly in this phase. Potential clients come to you with problems for which there is no established solution and start probing whether your product might help. These conversations are electric, and the temptation is to brainstorm live — to sketch out what a version of the product might look like if it addressed exactly what they are describing. For the CTO in the room, this is a their worst nightmare: every live brainstorm is an implicit commitment, the product keeps shifting shape, and the ability to stabilise, operationalise, and build any kind of efficiency into delivery starts to look like a receding horizon.

And yet selling vaporware — an idea of a thing, convincingly enough articulated that you now have to go and build it — is an integral part of building an early-stage business. Some of the best product development starts exactly there, in a client’s half-formed problem and your half-formed response. The question is where the line sits, and that is genuinely where the art comes in. A custom build for one client’s edge case, pursued because the conversation was energising, can consume resource that belonged to the core product and leave you six months later with neither a scalable offering nor a satisfied client. Seeing the whole chessboard is what allows you to hear a vaporware opportunity and make a clear-eyed call: viable extension worth building toward, or distraction dressed up as a lead. Without that view, you are not making a product decision. You are just saying yes to the last conversation you had.

Knowing when to stop iterating and commit to a process

The other discipline this phase demands is knowing when to codify. There is a period where everything is bespoke, learned in real time, and that period is necessary. Staying in it too long means you never build the defined process clients can be briefed into, trained on, and made self-sufficient within — and without that you will not scale and you will not hold margin. The moment to say “this is our process” is earned through enough repetitions to know which parts are genuinely fixed and which you were varying because you didn’t yet know what you were doing.

The chessboard is structural and human in equal measure

Much of the chessboard is structural: market sizing, competitor mapping, understanding how decisions get made inside the organisations you are selling to. A significant part is observational. You are in client meetings watching who defers to whom, listening for the aside that tells you more than the formal briefing. The most important information — where real power sits, how budgets move, which alliances exist between teams — comes from trust and from paying close enough attention to connect dots that nobody hands you directly.

Three questions worth taking into every positioning decision at this stage:

1. Where does this leave us in six months if it works exactly as planned?

2. Which budget line does our buyer actually control?

3. And if we say yes to this, what are we making it harder to do next?

The game is longer than it looks from where you are standing, and the pitch deck will not tell you how it ends.

I would love to know where others have felt this most acutely — the pressure to move and the need to see further ahead than the immediate next step.

Ten weeks ago, on New Year’s Day, I sat with one of my closest friends in Tate Modern. Pamela lives in Atlanta. We grew up on different sides of the world — she in Peru, me in Greece — and somehow found each other in our first proper jobs in our twenties, held together by the particular glue of navigating new careers and the collapse of relationships that had to die but felt, at the time, like the end of everything. She is one of very few people who sit on the Board of Daphne MC. She knows every dark corner of my soul, all the twists and turns of my mind.

We’d forced our kids to play together and stolen a few hours for coffee and lunch. I was telling her about my plans for 2026. All of them. She listened. Then she took a deep breath, looked at me, and — with the brevity that only people who know you well and have shit to do can muster — said: “For fuck’s sake Daphne. Just stop. Do less. I don’t know anyone else who does this much.”

It landed like a slap.

I get a lot of “how do you get all this done?” and “you’re a superwoman.” I have never, in my adult life, had someone who loves me look me in the eye and mean it as a problem. Never from someone who has actually watched me build things, lose things, and keep going regardless.

On the drive home, kids snoring loudly in the back, those words kept going round and round. Do less. Do less. It felt good. So I surrendered.

Ten weeks of doing less. Saying no to play dates I didn’t want to organise. Declining dinners with people I have no real emotional connection to. Saying “I don’t want to” to my kids rather than martyring myself on the altar of good parenting optics.

I also stopped multitasking. The weekly shop is just the weekly shop now. No podcast running underneath it. One thing at a time, all the way through.

Some of it was easy to let go. But some runs deeper — things I do because I have always done them. Because somewhere along the way they became part of who I am. I am the person who organises the monthly mums get-together. I am the person who remembers. Who follows up. Who makes it happen. Commitments and habits accumulated over years, picked up at some point because it seemed like the right thing, for reasons I can no longer name, for people I’m no longer sure needed it from me. There are still bags I’m carrying that aren’t mine. Parcels I picked up somewhere in my thirties and can’t quite remember why. I’m still working through those.

Last week I took my girls to Athens on my own. Somewhere between the chaos and the sunshine I noticed something. I was calmer. My mind was quieter. The FOMO I’d been carrying for years had simply not shown up.

Ten weeks in, I am still loved. Still interested and interesting. My world is intact. My people are still there.

Adding more means less time for you. Less time for your family. Less energy to play with the kids, invent an imaginary language, make and burn a cake. Less space to notice your own mood before it becomes everyone else’s problem. Less room to be bored — and boredom is where your best ideas live. Less quiet to hear yourself think. Less patience for the long conversations your kids need at bedtime. Less energy to train well, not just get the miles done. Less time to sit with an idea long enough for it to become something.

Adding things in is easy.1 You dismantle your boundaries, make yourself smaller by folding yourself in half, squeeze your desires into a corner to make space for the new shiny thing. Taking things out requires that you build your boundaries back up, unfold and stretch yourself out, place your desires in the centre of the room with a big fat spotlight on them. This reversal is hard work. Very hard and uncomfortable work. But so, so worth it.

More means less across every thread of your life. So I choose less to get more.

If this resonates, ’s A Year of Nothing is also worth your time.

From the inside, it feels like you’re crewing an Americas Cup yacht. Constant pivots. Relentless analysis of what’s working and what isn’t. Every decision made at speed, every metric scrutinised. The energy is extraordinary — exhausting and electric in equal measure. The gap between how a turnaround looks and how it feels is one of the most disorienting things about leading one. Which is why so many leaders lose faith before the evidence arrives.

I’ve led several turnarounds and I’ve learned that the signals that actually matter are rarely the ones that show up in a board deck first.

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1. The team can clearly articulate what you do and how you win.

This sounds deceptively simple. It's not. In organisations that are struggling, there is almost always a fog around these two things — a proliferation of priorities, initiatives that contradict each other, strategies that shift with the mood of the room. When a team can tell you, clearly and without hesitation, what the organisation does and how it wins, something important has happened. They have focus. And focus in a turnaround is everything, because the work of recovery demands that you ruthlessly prioritise. A team that understands the mission can make better decisions without you in the room. That is when things start to move.

2. The leadership team can be honest with each other.

A year into one turnaround, I sat with my leadership team and asked each of them to give me a number — one to ten — for how they were doing. One of them said two. I felt a wave of relief I hadn't expected. I knew they were in a rough patch; we'd spoken about it. But the fact that they said it out loud, in front of everyone, told me something far more important than the number itself. They felt safe enough to be honest. In a turnaround, nothing goes to plan. Timelines slip, assumptions fail, the market does something unexpected. What gets you through is a team that can say out loud what's not working — and then, because of point one above, know how to prioritise their way out of it. Psychological safety is structural in a turnaround. Everything else depends on it.

3. You are building momentum — on at least one or two critical things.

Pace is infectious. Once the wheel starts turning, it picks up speed, and people want to be part of that energy. But momentum also gives you something more rigorous: data. The numbers tell you what enabled it, what can be replicated, and what to abandon.

The trap is fixating on the wrong number (Read Elena Verna’s take on a fixation on income) — or every number (I wrote about this here). I’ve watched sales teams burn out chasing revenue targets whilst product quietly fell behind the promises being made to customers. I’ve sat in rooms wallpapered with metrics where nobody could tell me what actually mattered. Too many numbers and you measure nothing. You lose the ability to prioritise because everything looks equally urgent.

Here is what I’ve learned: you can feel momentum before the numbers confirm it. You can sense harmony across the parts of the engine — whether or not you can read a financial report. Something shifts in the room. Decisions get made faster. People stop waiting to be told. The data, when it arrives, is almost a formality. I remember sitting in a board meeting, looking at quarterly forecasts, and saying — almost apologetically — that it felt like we were picking up pace. Two months later, there it was: a steady increase in income across three consecutive months, alongside margin improvement. One month is a fluke. Two is luck. Three consecutive months means something is working. I slept very well that night.

Momentum is addictive. So much so I wrote about it in detail here.

4. You have found — and fixed — your leaky bucket.

Every turnaround I've led has had one. The leaky bucket is all the places where you are haemorrhaging energy: low customer lifetime value, high churn, manual processes that eat hours, too many sign-offs, a returns rate that should embarrass you. There is so much noise around go-to-market strategies and product-market fit — and those things matter — but if your operation leaks, no amount of top-line growth will save you. Leaky bucket projects are internally focused, usually a series of small fixes, but the cumulative effect can be transformational. In one organisation, fixing the leaks — and doing nothing else for a year — took a product line from £1,000 profit to £250,000 in twelve months. We did not launch anything new, did not hire aggressively. We “just” fixed the leaks. That is what focus looks like in practice.

5. You can’t think of the next big thing that needs fixing.

This is the quietest signal, and the one most leaders miss because they're still in turnaround mode — still scanning for fires, still braced for the next crisis. But there comes a point where you sit down to write the list of what needs to happen next, and the list looks different. The problems on it are growth problems. Expansion problems. Ambition problems. The work has changed shape, even if you haven't fully registered it yet. That shift — from recovering to building — is the signal that the turnaround is over. The oil tanker has turned. You just couldn't see it happening from the deck.

Turnarounds work when you hold two things at once: the big strategic picture and the granular operational detail. The leaders I’ve seen struggle are usually brilliant at one and impatient with the other. The ones who succeed stay in both.

If you’re in the middle of one right now and wondering whether it’s working — check the signals, not the speed. The speed will come.

I’d love to hear what signals have mattered most in your experience — whether you’ve led a turnaround or lived through one from another vantage point.

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Josh Lachkovic

A few weeks ago I was faced with a difficult decision. I had been wrestling with it, turning it over, struggling to find a way forward. The answer came, as answers so often do, when I was least expecting it — halfway through a gong bath. I know. Bear with me. In that strange, still space, an image arrived unbidden: the two founders of my school, Penelope Delta and Emmanouil Benakis, philanthropists who shaped modern Greece and, inadvertently, my family. My grandfather attended Athens College. My father. My brother. And me. With that image came a clarity I hadn’t been able to reach through analysis or deliberation. I come from these people. My teachers. My parents. My friends growing up. The principles they instilled, the standards they held, what they refused to compromise. And I realised, with some force, that I was not going to betray that now.

At Athens College there is an award given to one student a year. The Homer Davis Award. It recognises the student who has best exemplified the ethos and principles of the school throughout their time there. I received it when I left — twenty-six years ago — and then, in the way that life moves fast and forward, forgot about it entirely. The gong bath gave it back to me. So — what does any of this have to do with leadership?

Everything, it turns out.

Susan Cain’s book Quiet, which I read a decade ago and have thought about regularly ever since, makes a distinction that I keep returning to. She traces how, over the last century, Western culture shifted from a culture of character to a culture of personality. The moral vocabulary changed. A good person became a fun person, an engaging person, the life of the room. University admissions, job interviews, performance reviews — all, gradually, began selecting for the quality of someone’s presence over the quality of their person. He or she is great because they make us feel good. The harder, slower question — whether they are good, whether they have an approach to life you would trust under pressure — got quietly deprioritised in favour of what shows up immediately and pleasantly.

Patrick Mouratoglou, in The Coach, gives this a practical frame. He defines behaviour as the response a person finds most appropriate in a given situation, and goes further: people adapt their behaviour by drawing on the resources at their disposal. It is a deceptively simple observation. If behaviour is adaptive — situational, chosen, responsive to context — then the question that actually matters is what resource sits underneath it. What someone reaches for when the situation is genuinely hard. When the outcome is uncertain. When executing on your stated position carries real cost.

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Aristotle answered this with precision that has not aged. Character — ethos — is a stable disposition, what he called hexis: a settled way of being, developed through repeated moral choice over time, guided by practical wisdom, and residing between the extremes of excess and deficiency. Character is built through habituation. It accumulates slowly, through thousands of small decisions, and it waits — largely invisible — until the situation demands it. Thirteen years at Athens College, I now understand, was habituation in exactly Aristotle’s sense. The Homer Davis Award was, in retrospect, a recognition of that accumulation. I just forgot I was carrying it.

The urgency of this argument has never been greater. We are living through a period in which knowledge — the thing organisations spent decades selecting, rewarding, and hoarding — has become abundant to the point of democratisation. Any person, any team, any competitor can access, synthesise and present sophisticated analysis in minutes. Knowledge is no longer scarce. The question of what actually differentiates a leader, a team, a business, has therefore shifted. And the answer, I would argue, is character.

While I was grappling with my predicament on this side of the Atlantic, Dario Amodei was grappling with a considerably larger one on the other. Anthropic's standoff with the Pentagon over the terms governing its AI models was not a communications exercise. It was a character decision — red lines stated publicly, and then executed on, under significant commercial and political pressure that escalated far beyond anything most leaders will ever face. Claude surged to the top of the App Store in the aftermath. But that outcome, welcome as it was, is not the point. Amodei's own words made the point more clearly than any result could: the threats, he said, did not change their position. That is what distinguishes a stated value from a lived one. Personality can articulate principles fluently but character is what happens when executing on those principles becomes costly.

This is the heart of authentic leadership, and it is worth being direct about what it actually requires. It is not self-expression. It is not consistency of style or warmth of manner. Authentic leadership is the alignment between who you are at the level of character — your hexis, your stable disposition, the things you will and will not do — and how you lead. It demands that you have done the inner work, that you know your hard lines before the moment arrives, and that you have the moral infrastructure to act on them when it does. One of the most reliable signals that you are approaching a hard line is a disproportionate response — a reaction that doesn’t quite match the scale of the situation. That discomfort is worth sitting with. The question to ask yourself is whether what you are feeling is a behaviour that can flex, or a value that cannot. The distinction, once you learn to read it, is usually clear.

The uncomfortable implication for anyone building a team or an organisation is that this cannot be shortcut. Personality can be assessed in an interview. Character reveals itself over time, under pressure, in the unglamorous moments when no one is watching and the outcome is unclear. Selecting for it requires patience, a different kind of attention, and a willingness to value what is slow to show itself.

I had forgotten I came from people who had built that in me. A gong bath, of all things, reminded me. I would rather that reminder had come from reflection than from necessity — but I am glad, whichever way it came, that it did.

AI is quietly dismantling the tools we built our professional reputations on. The CV is eroding. The cover letter is already barely relevant. What AI cannot touch is your network — who you know, what impression you leave, and what people remember about you when your name comes up in a room you're not in. The currency of professional life in 2026 is relational, and it always was. We just forgot while we were busy polishing our LinkedIn headlines.

To counteract all this chaos of AI slop is the quiet return of the small, curated gathering. Dinners and breakfasts for ten to fifteen people, with a deliberate guest list and a clear theme running through the whole thing. Someone has thought hard about who is in the room and why. The conversation is denser, the connections more deliberate, and the value — when you show up prepared — is genuinely different from anything the old conference circuit offered.

These gatherings work because of their constraints. A small room with an intentional guest list creates the conditions for real exchange in a way that a hundred-person networking event simply cannot. You’re not fishing in a large pond hoping to get lucky. You’re sitting across from people who were specifically placed there, and that changes everything about how the evening can unfold.

But they require a completely different approach. And for those of us who are introverts masquerading as extroverts, the preparation starts before you even walk in the door.

Almost all of these events include a thirty-minute drinks reception beforehand, which — after a full day of back-to-back meetings — can feel like one social ask too many. My social batteries are genuinely depleted by seven in the evening. My coping approach is to arrive for the last fifteen minutes. By then there’s a gentle buzz in the room, people have already found their footing, and I can slot into a couple of conversations without the pressure of a cold start. Fifteen minutes is also long enough to be present and short enough that if you end up momentarily standing to the side, it barely registers.

Whether it’s drinks or dinner, one thing matters enormously: breadth over depth, at least early on. Have a genuine exchange, then exit cleanly. Two phrases which I find do this beautifully. The first: “Who else are you hoping to meet tonight? Maybe I can make an introduction.” It’s generous, it moves both of you forward, and it leaves the other person feeling well looked after. The second is subtler: “Thank you — you’ve given me a lot to think about.” The past tense does all the work. The conversation has already been valuable. It’s a compliment and a close, simultaneously.

Arrive with questions rather than small talk. Priya Parker writes about “magical questions” — the kind that open people up rather than just fill silence1. My two favourites: What profession did you want to be when you were young, and what skill or feeling from that still shows up in your work today? And, for later in the evening when the room has warmed up: What is the low-key drama quietly consuming a surprising amount of your time right now? That second one never fails. People laugh, then they actually answer, and suddenly you’re in a real conversation.2

Before you walk in, know what you want to leave behind — the version of yourself or the narrative about your work that no longer serves you. Think about how you’ll signal that shift: through your introduction, what you choose to wear, the angle you take in your first few exchanges. And know what you’re hoping to take away — who in the room is most interesting to you, where your work touches theirs, what might be worth exploring.

Then follow up fast. Within twenty-four hours, connect on whatever thread you genuinely picked up. A note that references the actual conversation. A book you mentioned. An introduction you promised. The window where it feels natural is short — use it.

These gatherings are a different kind of investment. In my experience the return compounds, but only if you show up having done the work.

What’s your approach to these smaller, curated events? I’d love to hear how others are navigating them.

The quiet, incremental kind that happens when two people are each carrying enormous loads - work, children, ageing parents, logistics - and the relationship itself gets managed rather than tended to.

A dear friend of mine back home taught me something I’ve never forgotten. Her husband travelled every week for years. She was at home with three kids in primary school. The house, the school runs, the everything - on her. When he came home, they walked. Not a fancy dinner, no plans and bookings to be made, no getting dressed up. Just the two of them, outside, moving. That was it. That was what kept them together.

There’s something about walking side by side that removes the pressure of a face-to-face conversation. Negotiators have known this for years - research from Stanford Graduate School of Business found that people who walked together during difficult conversations came away liking each other more than those sitting across a table, where the dynamic can unconsciously prime competition. A walk puts you on the same side. Things get said that never quite make it to the dinner table. You’re not performing togetherness - you’re just in it.

Intentionality in a marriage doesn’t require a grand gesture. It requires a decision. Scheduling it in the same way you would a meeting that matters, because it does. A walk, a coffee before the children wake up, twenty minutes in the garden. The format is almost irrelevant. The showing up is everything.

My husband and I are still learning this. For us, more often than not, it’s a lunchtime walk because we both work from home. This week it was a walk to the shop to pick up milk and post a parcel. It does not need to be big. It just needs to happen. The weeks where we protect even a small pocket of time feel different to the ones where we don’t. It’s not subtle.

What does your version of the walk look like?

Like any midwife, you need to read patterns before they’re fully formed. You decipher incomplete signals, anticipate what’s needed before it’s articulated, translate instinct into action. It reminds me of the early parenting years - when your child doesn’t quite speak yet, but you know them so well you can predict every meltdown before it happens. That same capability - understanding someone’s thinking well enough to operate as an extension of their mind - is what makes this work.

I’ve worked in five scale-ups, four as a member of the leadership team, three with successful exits. The sharpest learning curve wasn’t technical complexity - it was learning to midwife someone else’s vision whilst maintaining my own judgement. I once ran the EMEA operation for two founders based in Bangkok and Sydney. We met in person exactly once - the meeting where they promoted me to managing director. Everything else was asynchronous coordination across three time zones, helping birth a multi-million pound business through screens and trust.

This only works as an actual partnership. Not the equity kind - the relationship kind. It requires mutual respect, brutal honesty, and consistent investment in the relationship over and above the business demands. You’re navigating someone else’s risk tolerance, their financial exposure, their legacy. They’re trusting you with their reputation, their client relationships, their team. Midwives don’t just show up at the birth - they build relationship throughout, understand the full context, earn trust through expertise and presence. That level of interdependence doesn’t happen automatically. It takes deliberate work.

Here’s what I’ve learned about making this partnership actually work.

Understand Their Endgame

The first question isn’t how they think - it’s why they’re bringing this business into the world at all. Are they hunting a big exit, building enterprise value for acquisition? Is this a lifestyle business funding their preferred life? Are they intellectually curious, solving problems because they can’t help themselves? Understanding their endgame changes everything about how you help. A founder chasing acquisition thinks about scale, defensibility, and market positioning. A lifestyle business founder optimises for profit margin and personal freedom. The curious founder will pivot based on interesting problems, sometimes at the expense of commercial logic. You can’t midwife effectively if you’re preparing for a rapid birth when they’re planning for something sustainable and long-term, or vice versa.

Translate Vision into Product

I’ve sat in meetings with a serial founder pitching a high six-figure project to the CEO of a PLC. They’d express interest in proceeding to the next step, and he’d point at me: “Daphne brings my ideas to life.” What that actually meant - take vaporware and make it real. Not just real - real in a way the founder would approve of, could iterate on, believed aligned to his broader strategy. Oh, and meet client expectations whilst not making us bankrupt. This is the midwifing. You’re helping something that exists in their head survive contact with reality. Vision into deliverable scope. Founder ambition into operational reality. Fast enough that momentum doesn’t stall, careful enough that what emerges is viable.

Disagree with Data, Not Emotion

Disagreement without emotion requires building different muscle. A good midwife knows when something isn’t progressing right, when intervention is needed, when the original plan needs to change. But you present options, not ultimatums. Going into a conversation with data, alternative scenarios mapped out, and a clear recommendation changes the dynamic from “I think you’re wrong” to “here’s what the numbers suggest, here’s the strategic trade-off, what am I missing in your thinking?” This takes practice. Early in my career, I’d present problems. Now I present problems with three potential solutions and a recommendation. The founder still decides, but I’ve done the cognitive work that lets them decide faster and better.

Solve Problems, Don’t Create Them

Barak Obama was once asked what his top advice to young people was. His answer was immediate: get stuff done. The same applies to working with founders (or any leader to be fair). Don’t bring complexity, bring clarity. Don’t escalate decisions that should be yours. Don’t create dependency where autonomy serves the business better. Your value isn’t staying busy - it’s removing obstacles before they become the founder’s concern. Midwives create calm in chaos, handle complications before they become emergencies, know what’s worth raising and what’s just normal difficulty.

With the Bangkok and Sydney founders, I had weekly hour-long meetings every Wednesday. First week of the month was finance, second was marketing, third was people, fourth was product and packaging. Clear cadence they could rely on. Every meeting had the same five-page deck structure: what we implemented or changed in the last month, where we are today, what we’ve learned, what we’re doing differently going forward and why, summary of decisions needed. Clear, predictable, structured. Everything else ran on Slack and email. They could trust the operation was running without constant involvement because the communication architecture removed uncertainty.

When you’re working remotely or asynchronously, this becomes critical. They can’t see you working, so your communication needs to be ruthlessly clear about what’s resolved, what needs input, and what’s coming next.

Manage the Inevitable Friction

They will piss you off. This is physics, not personality. Birth is hard work. When you’re operating at the strategic-operational interface, friction is inevitable. I once worked for a founder I didn’t particularly like as a person but deeply respected for their ability to find product-market fit. Not recommended, but it taught me that this role doesn’t require personal chemistry - it requires mutual respect for what each brings. When the standard approaches to disagreement don’t suffice, I write emails I never send. Every grievance, every frustration, fully articulated. Then I wait 48 hours. If reading it still makes my blood boil, I tone it down by 80% and send a version focused on problems and solutions. Most of the time, I delete it entirely.

Know Who Has Final Say

Most of the founders I worked with had bootstrapped their businesses. You might have heard the term a lot, but let me be clear about what that means in reality: some had borrowed money from family members to shore up cash flow. Others were funding everything themselves - if you needed £10,000 to make payroll, that came directly from the founder’s bank account. In these situations, you cannot be the final decision maker. This sounds obvious until you’re three layers deep in a strategic decision you’ve architected, the founder pivots based on instinct, and you need to execute something you’ve just argued against. The skill isn’t blind compliance - it’s understanding when to push back with data and when to redirect energy toward making their choice succeed. I’ve disagreed with founders on market entry timing, pricing strategy, team structure. Sometimes I was right. Sometimes they were. The relationship survived because I learned to separate my ego from my analysis. When someone has borrowed from family or is covering payroll from personal savings, final say isn’t about hierarchy - it’s about acknowledging what’s actually at stake. It’s their baby. You’re helping bring it to life.

These skills take real practice. You’re building parallel processing capability whilst maintaining independent judgement. You’re translating instinct into execution whilst challenging assumptions. You’re working in someone else’s strategic framework whilst bringing your own expertise to bear. You’re midwifing something into existence that isn’t yours, but that you’re deeply invested in seeing thrive.

What’s been your experience working closely with founders? I’d genuinely like to hear how others navigate this dynamic - the relationship is too complex for any single playbook.

Running a business, a household, and trying to nurture friendships across distances is its own particular kind of relentless. None of it is optional. All of it is meaningful. And yet there are seasons when the weight of holding the shape of all of it simultaneously catches up with you, and your nervous system starts sending very clear signals.

Mine sent me a fantasy. Specific, structured, non-negotiable. Days spent horizontal. Carbs, Netflix, the particular comfort of going nowhere and wanting nothing. No away trip, no wellness retreat. Just me, in my house, with my mess. No one to please or ferry to school or a party. No performance of functionality.

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Because what I really want is to get so bored in my own house that my body starts to crave doing something. For movement to become a desire rather than a demand.

Movement that propels me to tackle the daily minute micro-aggressions the mess of family life leaves behind. The notebooks piling on the girls’ desks. The collection of Ikea Allen keys that have lived on the shelf since we moved in eighteen months ago — too small to address when you’re navigating everything, too present to ignore. The physical residue of sustained full capacity. Dealing with them feels less like tidying and more like reclamation.

And then, eventually, maybe, I am compelled to interact with the world outside the front door.

Last April my cousin and I found ourselves bonding over this — this ingrained, almost animal need to just be. To stop producing, responding, navigating. We see each other maybe three times a year and somehow we arrived at exactly the same place. We gave it a name: Ceiling. Because at the start, the only requirement is to lie down and look at it.

Naming it made it real. Ceiling stopped being a vague, guilty longing and became something with edges — a legitimate need rather than a weakness to manage.

I’m writing this because today I took a Ceiling day. Still on the bus. But enjoying a short respite.

Tell me — what do you call your version of Ceiling?