Author: Jay Gordon Cone

I put a little daylight between people and their assumptions.

Dear Strategy Consultants: Stop Annoying Your Clients with Irrelevant Questions

on By 1 Comment

My dissertation explored the questions organizations ask when setting strategy. I wanted to develop an approach to strategic thinking that produced better insights and more options. Ironically, while I scrutinized the influence of leaders’ mental models on the strategy questions they ask, I failed to notice the mental model driving my own research. Why should there be a generic approach to strategic thinking?

Not every chess player analyzes the board the same way. Doctors don’t recommend a one-size-fits-all strategy for an individual’s health. As I age, I want to continue running for exercise, but I’m also happy to take “run a marathon” off the table.

Organizations want to thrive and grow, but they don’t all share the same appetite for growth. Organizations are also constrained by their situations and choices, but not to the same degree. Strategy questions should match the logic of how a given organization actually makes choices. To help me continue running as I age, my doctor shouldn’t focus on shaving time off my pace, she should help me think about stretching.

Contrasting what an organization wants to do with what an organization won’t consider doing creates a simple, powerful, and customized approach to planning.

Appetite for Growth versus Degrees of Freedom

Understanding how an organization’s appetite for growth intersects with its degrees of freedom creates four distinct strategy settings. I’ve labeled each quadrant with a persona that captures the motivations and constraints shaping that organization’s strategic logic.

The Surfer: High degrees of freedom and low appetite for growth

Surfers value agility, mission, and meaningful work over aggressive growth. They read the environment carefully, pursue opportunities that align with their purpose, and adapt quickly without getting locked into rigid structures. Like a chef-run restaurant with a seasonal menu or a nonprofit that shifts programs as community needs evolve, Surfer organizations maintain a high degree of freedom so they can do the work they believe in. Their strategy is sensing, choosing, responding, and releasing—not scaling.

Strategy question for Surfers:

What useful lessons have you harvested about the work that lights you up?

The Watchmaker: Low degrees of freedom and low appetite for growth

Watchmakers value reliability, precision, and consistency. They prioritize longevity and mastery over growth. Some Watchmaker organizations are constrained by regulation and risk, think hospitals or nuclear plants. Others are constrained by self-imposed ideals like heritage and craftsmanship, luxury brands or artisan workshops. Rather than catching the next wave, Watchmakers want to perfect what is already in motion. Reliability comes from doing fewer things exceptionally well.

Strategy question for Watchmakers:

How will you ensure that the next generation of stakeholders continues to experience the ideal value of your offering?

The Industrialist: Low degrees of freedom and high appetite for growth

Industrialists value volume, standardization, and leverage. They prefer optimizing what already exists to inventing what doesn’t. They scale by acquiring undervalued assets and extracting hidden value. Private equity firms and conglomerates are classic Industrialists. Sometimes their constraints come from regulation, other times they impose constraints through strict acquisition and divestiture criteria. Industrialist organizations create power through accumulation, not invention.

Strategy question for Industrialists:

How will you sense and respond to emerging environmental trends that could alter the calculus of your growth strategy?

The Inventor: High degrees of freedom and high appetite for growth

Inventors value innovation and discovery. Because they combine creativity with the resources to scale big ideas, Inventor organizations don’t spend time trying to predict the future, they cultivate it. Inventors take risks with prototypes and minimally viable products. They release solutions quickly, learn from users, and iterate. Thomas Edison personifies the Inventor mindset, Henry Ford personifies the Industrialist.

Strategy question for Inventors:

What unarticulated human needs are hiding behind the world’s status-quo assumptions about constraints?

The sooner we stop insisting that every organization needs the same strategy process, the sooner strategy will feel less like ritual and more like relevance. When leaders understand their authentic strategic posture, they give themselves permission to work in ways that feel natural, energizing, and aligned. Strategy becomes less about chasing someone else’s version of success and more about manifesting the conditions under which the organization, and the people in it, will flourish.

Leadership Begins with Managing Performance and Matures into Manifesting Purpose

on By

For decades, organizations have defined “good leadership” through the language of competencies. They build models that specify what leaders should know, say, and do – how to give feedback, how to manage conflict, how to make decisions. These models create consistency and a sense of fairness. They make it possible to assess, promote, and design training programs.

But competency models also do something else, something unintended. They imply there’s a single, correct way to lead. They teach people to manage leadership rather than to manifest it.

Early in a leader’s journey, managing is essential. New leaders need guidance, structure, and standards. They need to understand how to set expectations, how to hold people accountable, how to ensure that work gets done safely and ethically. Managing performance is the foundation of effective leadership.

As leaders mature, they discover that management alone doesn’t inspire excellence or adaptation. When environments change, when uncertainty rises, when teams face complex and ambiguous challenges, leaders can’t rely on checklists. The competencies that once provided confidence start to feel confining.

This is the turning point where leadership matures, when it shifts from managing performance to manifesting purpose. When early-career leaders focus on managing performance, they tend to emulate their role models. When leaders mature, they need to connect who they are to how they lead, that might mean reframing competencies as foundational, not aspirational.

From Competencies to Conditions

Manifesting purpose means creating the conditions in which people and organizations can thrive. It’s not about whether leaders have mastered the right behaviors; it’s about whether their leadership is producing the right organizational climate.

Think of leadership outcomes not as what leaders do, but as what people experience when leadership is working as intended.

  • Do people understand how their work connects to a larger purpose?
  • Do they feel safe to raise concerns, take risks, and innovate?
  • Do they see decisions being made transparently and collaboratively?
  • Do they believe their contributions matter?

If those conditions exist, leadership is functioning. If they don’t, it isn’t – regardless of how well a leader performs against a competency checklist.

And who is best positioned to determine whether those conditions exist? Not the leader’s manager. Not an HR algorithm. The people being led. The most direct way to know whether leadership outcomes are being achieved is to ask the people impacted by them.

There’s No One Right Way to Lead

Every organization’s strategy calls for different conditions. Every team’s context is unique. And every leader’s personality, history, and strengths shape how they bring those conditions to life.

Organizations exert control by establishing structures. Yet when it comes to professional development, there’s no one right way to lead. If we’re not careful, we can end up treating leaders like widgets on an assembly line. Competency models turn into quality assurance standards, and facilitating leadership workshops feels like teaching to the test.

What organizations really need are leaders who can translate purpose into experience. Some will do that through storytelling and inspiration. Others will do it through systems and structure. Still others through empathy, inquiry, or relentless problem-solving. What matters isn’t the method, it’s what the method manifests.

Rethinking Leadership Development

If organizations want leaders who manifest purpose rather than just manage performance, their development practices need to evolve. That means shifting from competency-based instruction to outcome-based reflection.

Instead of asking:

“Has this leader demonstrated effective communication?”

Ask:

“Do people on this leader’s team feel informed, heard, and aligned?”

Instead of designing programs to improve discrete skills, design experiences that help leaders experiment with new ways of creating the conditions their teams need. Replace competency assessments with outcome conversations. Replace one-size-fits-all workshops with real-time reflection, feedback, and coaching tied to strategic outcomes.

The question isn’t whether leaders know what good leadership looks like. It’s whether people around them can feel it.

Lane Changes

on By 2 Comments

My wife and I moved to Dallas from Los Angeles. Among the many stark contrasts, we were most struck by the difference in driving habits. In Los Angeles, driving is a cultural phenomenon. In Dallas, driving feels competitive. When meeting friends and colleagues in L.A., you talk about freeways. In Dallas, you talk about sports.

When I lead workshops that cover topics like the Ladder of Inference or confirmation bias, I often use driving behavior to illustrate how our beliefs shape what we notice. I’ll claim that Dallas drivers don’t use their turn signals. And because of that belief, I see endless “evidence” that I’m right: cars weaving across lanes without signaling. My daughters, aware of my bias, like to call out counterexamples: “Look, Dad, that green car just signaled.” They see what I filter out. I’ll even reinterpret their evidence to fit my belief: “That driver must not be from Dallas.”

Our brains love shortcuts. We cling to assumptions because they feel efficient. But those shortcuts can blind us to signals and to each other.

Turn signals are a form of communication. A signal might be a polite, “May I move over?” or a warning, “Heads up!” Most often, it’s simply, “Here’s what I’m about to do.” At its core, signaling is an acknowledgment that other people’s needs matter.

At its core, signaling is an acknowledgment that other people’s needs matter.

Cars obscure the body language we rely on to interpret intentions. And life is full of invisible “vehicles”—schedules, inboxes, calendars—that make it hard for others to see where we’re headed. Without signals, people are left guessing.

We travel through the world in these bodies, much like cars: enclosed, private, and easy to forget there’s someone else behind every windshield. We work across distances and time zones. We make plans, change plans, and often assume others will just “figure it out.” When we fail to signal, it’s not always selfishness, it’s often habit, distraction, or the illusion that others can see what we see.

Compassion starts with simply acknowledging that other people exist and have needs too. Compassion isn’t just empathy; it’s action. To communicate compassionately is to anticipate others’ need for clarity before they’re left reacting to unexpected changes.

Travel compassionately by signaling your intentions:

  • A quick update. Send the “I might be late” text before someone starts worrying.
  • A small heads-up. Share a draft early so your colleague doesn’t feel ambushed later.
  • A sign of respect. Tell a teammate when you’ve changed course instead of assuming they’ll notice.
  • A kindness. Ask, “Is this still a good time?” before diving into a heavy topic.

Signals don’t need to be elaborate. A quick message, a note in a shared calendar, a sentence of context—these are all turn signals for life.

Signaling helps you, too. When we pause to share our intentions, we slow down, reflect, and notice others. We interrupt autopilot. We shift from competition to cooperation. We strengthen our attention agility, the ability to quickly and easily shift one’s focus in response to dynamic conditions.

The habit of signaling reminds us we’re not driving alone. We’re part of a complex flow of people, each carrying their own invisible cargo of worries, hopes, and deadlines.

So, when you feel rushed, overwhelmed, or ready to change lanes in life, ask yourself: Who needs to know what I’m about to do? Then, use your indicator.

Work Awake!

on By

Is taking leaders away from their work and putting them in a classroom really the best way to help them improve?

Classroom training has its benefits, but often not the ones we advertise. It promotes social connection and peer learning through shared experience. At a time when social isolation and loneliness are being described as a public health crisis, any opportunity to bring people together feels important. Sometimes, we ask leaders to attend a training session simply to signal that a topic warrants their full attention.

The classroom is an artificial environment. We simulate reality with case studies, role-plays, and structured activities. But what if we flipped the script? Instead of making the classroom feel more like the real world, what if we made the real world feel more like a classroom? Learning opportunities are everywhere—we just need to help leaders notice them and extract the relevant lessons.

Instead of making the classroom feel more like the real world, what if we made the real world feel more like a classroom? Learning opportunities are everywhere—we just need to help leaders notice them and extract the relevant lessons.

Learning in Context

The good news: readily available artificial intelligence (AI) tools make learning in the flow of work more accessible than ever. Leaders no longer have to wait for a weekly coaching session to process a challenging situation. They don’t have to flip through a long-forgotten participant manual to recall a useful framework.

That’s why we created Work Awake—a systematic approach to in-the-moment development for leaders.

Working awake means maintaining real-time awareness of your mindsets, behaviors, and impacts so that skill development becomes a deliberate part of your leadership practice.

Meet Your Work-Awake Coach

At the center of our strategy is a customized AI coach: the Work-Awake Coach. You can interact with our prototype here. We’d love to hear what you think.

Unlike general-purpose tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, the Work-Awake Coach is purpose-built. It’s trained on your organization’s leadership philosophy, values, and frameworks. Whether you want to reinforce concepts like emotional intelligence, growth mindset, or navigating adaptive challenges, the coach helps leaders become fluent in your organization’s leadership language.

Want your leaders to use the GROW model to coach others? The Work-Awake Coach helps them prepare coaching conversations using that very model.

This is what we mean by a learning integration strategy—embedding what you teach into how your leaders think and act every day.

The Hidden Agenda of Working Awake

Yes, the Work-Awake Coach is practical. It offers just-in-time support for tricky conversations and complex decisions.

But it also nurtures something more profound: attention agility.

Attention agility is the ability to shift your focus and perspective when conditions change. It’s what helps us spot insights and generate options we would have missed by relying on our usual habits of thought and familiar social connections.

Sleepwalking through your day—mindlessly following routines—limits what you notice. Working awake means reclaiming your attention. And that changes everything.

In a volatile and uncertain world, adaptation is non-negotiable. But we can’t adapt unless we notice we’re stuck. And when we’re stuck, we need someone to ask provocative, perspective-shifting questions.

Even better if that “someone” understands your communication style, never forgets a conversation, is always available, and puts your growth first.

Listen for Underlying Influences; Helping Your Colleagues Get Unstuck

on By

Be present, get curious, listen with empathy, listen actively, set aside your own opinions and reactions. All good advice for developing your listening skills.

For over 30 years, I’ve been teaching listening skills workshops to organizational leaders. A few workshop participants get a lot better. Most improve in the classroom and then revert to their familiar communication habits when they get back to work – some are hopeless.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Those of us who teach leaders how to listen, secretly want to use the skill as a trojan horse for creating more humane workplaces. These noble intentions, however, can undermine the effectiveness of listening skills training. We place too much emphasis on behavior and mindset: how to be a better listener. We don’t place enough emphasis on what to listen for, becoming a more strategic listener.

Those of us who teach leaders how to listen, secretly want to use the skill as a trojan horse for creating more humane workplaces.

I can anticipate the reaction of purists who would warn against polluting one’s mind with listening filters. You wouldn’t choose bait without knowing what’s swimming below. When training therapists, coaches, or social workers I stand with the purists. Empty your mind, open your heart. When training leaders – busy, time-starved, results-oriented leaders – we need easy-to-adopt guidance so they can experience a noticeable improvement.

Got a Minute?

Some conversations are about career development, some are about establishing and maintaining relationship. Let’s focus on how to strategically listen when someone with a problem to share approaches a leader with the deceptively casual, “Hi, got a minute?”

As David Straus, the founder of Interaction Associates, pointed out in “How to Make Collaboration Work,” a problem is a situation someone wants to change.

Most problems brought to leaders at work are situations that the person raising the issue wants to change. The key to being a better strategic listener is to explore the nature of the situation and the nature of the change.

When a person feels stuck, it is likely that there are underlying or hidden influences missing from their thinking. The SCAN model from Unstuck Minds can help reveal what we might be missing when trying to make sense of the situations we want to change. Here’s a quick explainer video about SCAN.

When interacting with someone feeling stuck, a leader should listen for information from each of the SCAN dimensions:

  • Ask about structures: What existing systems, routines, or processes are resisting the change you want to make?
  • Ask about context: What environmental factors outside your control pose threats or opportunities?
  • Ask about assumptions: Name underlying beliefs you hold about the situation? What underlying organizational beliefs maintain the status quo?
  • Ask about needs: Who matters to the situation, what do they each care about? Whose perspective is missing from your understanding of the situation?

Without a framework like SCAN, we are all tempted to seek the kind of information we like best. Our favorite sources of information are like our preset music stations or playlists. We get a steady diet of what the channel provides, but a breakthrough might require a conscious effort to hear something unexpected.

If you’d like to learn which of the SCAN dimensions you’re most attracted to, you can take a free assessment and download a report.

Five Cut-and-Paste Chatbot Hacks for Overwhelmed Decision Makers

on By

Imagine having a whip-smart, creative summer intern who only fetches coffee while managers solve all the problems. That’s how many organizations employ AI assistants today.

To help you get more from this underutilized resource literally at your fingertips, here are five hacks to elevate your chatbot responses.

1. Ask Me Questions

Chatbots can do much more than provide responses to your queries. At the end of a chatbot prompt, include a sentence like this: “Feel free to ask me questions to clarify this request and ensure your response is not constrained by the way I framed my question.”

This simple invitation transforms a one-way interaction into a collaborative dialogue. Instead of accepting a potentially limited response, you’re opening the door to deeper, more nuanced insights.

2. Play Devil’s Advocate

Chatbots are unfailingly polite and supportive. But sometimes, you need a thought partner to pressure test your thinking or identify potential pitfalls.

Instead of posing a straightforward question, try this approach: Enter your conclusion or plan of action, then invite opposition. Use a prompt like: “Please play ‘devil’s advocate’ in response to what I’ve shared. I’m interested in what I might be missing and what flaws you detect in my reasoning.”

3. What Would (Insert Expert Here) Do?

Chatbots can adopt personas based on their extensive training data about well-known experts. Want to brainstorm with Thomas Edison or get Indra Nooyi’s take on a thorny investment option? Here’s a powerful prompt:

“I’m trying to figure out X. I would like you to coach and advise me as if you were [expert]. Please use what you know about [expert] to inform the questions you ask and the perspectives you share.”

4. Role-Play a Difficult Conversation

Remember those awkward role-play exercises in training workshops? Now you can practice challenging interactions in private. Start by providing the chatbot with relevant information about the person and situation. Include any anticipated challenging behaviors.

You can even explain your goals and have the chatbot ask you questions to help realistically portray the other person. It’s like having a personal communication coach available 24/7.

5. Get the Image You Want

AI image generation can be frustratingly hit-or-miss. While it feels magical to create images with a few words, getting exactly what you want can be challenging.

If you’re unhappy with the initial image, get the chatbot to help you craft a better prompt. Try this approach: “Looking at the image you’ve generated, here are a few things I want to change. Before regenerating an image, I’ll list the changes. Then, I want you to provide a complete prompt that will generate a new, improved image.”

These hacks aren’t about replacing human creativity and decision-making. They’re about amplifying your capabilities, providing new perspectives, and helping you work smarter, not harder.

How Leaders Turn Thinking Into Action: Lessons From Five Years of Data

on By 1 Comment

Organizations develop unique patterns in how they navigate complexity and uncertainty. After five years of assessing how leaders approach challenging situations, we’ve discovered that different organizational cultures rely on markedly different information sources to make decisions – insights that challenge our traditional one-size-fits-all approach to leadership development.

I don’t think anyone would be surprised to learn that a group of leaders in a government auditing function would process information differently than a group of technology company sales leaders. Why then, do we offer both groups the same advice about aligning stakeholders, influencing senior leaders, and managing change?

The SCAN Framework

To help leaders identify hidden influences and unseen barriers in complex environments, we developed the SCAN framework. This tool assesses four critical data sources that inform leadership thinking: Structures (organizational systems and norms), Context (environmental factors), Assumptions (underlying beliefs), and Needs (stakeholder motivations and desires). SCAN scores allow us to visualize how different leaders prioritize these information sources when moving from thinking to action.

Our analysis reveals that functional groups and organizations develop distinct thinking-to-action cultures – consistent patterns in how they process information when setting direction, making decisions, or solving problems under uncertainty.

Three Distinct Thinking-to-Action Cultures

The bar graph compares three different groups of leaders from three different organizations and functions. Bar heights represent percentile scores for each dimension of the SCAN framework. The black dashed line represents the average score for each dimension based on total database responses from groups working in the same functions and organizations (n=1528).

Leading Change

Let’s consider what the SCAN profiles in the above graph suggest about how each group of leaders might design a large-scale change effort and the pitfalls they might encounter during implementation.

Government Audit Managers

These leaders demonstrate a strong focus on existing systems and norms, scoring notably higher than average in the Structures dimension. Their systematic approach brings stability and consistency, but also creates specific challenges in change management. They tend to overlook environmental factors outside their direct control (low Context) and rarely question established systems (low Assumptions).

When leading change initiatives, these leaders excel at working within established frameworks but need to strengthen their ability to:

  • Connect change efforts to broader strategic objectives
  • Respond to shifting external factors
  • Challenge procedures that no longer serve their purpose

Technology Company Sales Leaders

These leaders excel at reading market signals and external trends, with significantly higher Context scores than average. This market sensitivity creates agility but can lead to implementation challenges. Their attention to market dynamics often comes at the expense of understanding internal systems and processes (low Structures), while established organizational beliefs remain largely unexamined (low Assumptions).

Their change initiatives benefit from strong market alignment but require additional focus on:

  • Analyzing how new priorities interact with existing systems
  • Building sustainable processes amid market volatility
  • Balancing quick responses with structural considerations

Software Engineering Leaders

This group stands out for their strategic and innovative mindset, showing exceptionally high scores in both Context and Assumptions. They readily embrace new trends and willingly challenge status quo operations. However, their significantly lower Needs scores suggest that they do not seek inspiration for innovation by attending to the desires and motivations of people.

Their change leadership strengths lie in driving innovation, but success requires:

  • Balancing innovation with operational stability
  • Maintaining quality standards while pursuing new ideas
  • Increasing focus on stakeholder impact and adoption

Implications for influencing, aligning, and deciding

Identifying distinct thinking-to-action patterns help us support rather than overwhelm decision makers when they deal with multiple complex, uncertain, and high-stakes situations. We can start by supplying information that’s easy to digest given a leadership team’s SCAN preferences. Next, we can make information from overlooked sources easier to digest so that leaders don’t run the risk of missing something important.

Understanding your organization’s thinking-to-action culture provides a foundation for more effective leadership development and organizational change. It allows you to leverage your cultural strengths while systematically addressing potential blind spots.

Cognitive Slack: Creating Mental Reserves for Getting Unstuck

on By

How do you help leaders and organizations adapt their thinking strategies to the challenges of a volatile business environment? Thinking tools and skills need to match the complexity of the problems we hope to solve. However, helping people develop their thinking skills by giving them something challenging to think about is a bit like teaching kids to swim by throwing them in the deep end of a pool.

At our core, we help people get unstuck. We focus on situations where individuals, groups, or organizations attempt to make changes, yet despite their best efforts, things remain the same. Through our work, we’ve discovered that hidden influences often play a major role in maintaining the status quo. By helping people notice what they’re missing, transformation becomes possible.

Learning to Float

Speaking of swimming, Lisa’s two boys learned to swim using the SwimRight method, pioneered by four-time Olympic gold medalist Lenny Krayzelburg. This method teaches the swim-float-swim technique, emphasizing confidence and safety as foundations for learning. Children first master floating on their backs, allowing them to rotate between swimming and resting while practicing strokes. This balance between effort and rest proves crucial for building both skill and confidence.

Recently, while discussing our approach to helping clients embrace uncertainty, Lisa suggested balancing “float” emphasis with “swim” emphasis according to what our clients need. At present, many of our clients face extraordinary change fatigue—it’s as if they’re treading water while watching the shoreline recede. In such moments, they need a life preserver more than lessons on developing stamina.

Here’s the challenge: When you’re already overwhelmed by complexity and uncertainty, you lack the mental bandwidth to consider—let alone adopt—new ways of thinking. As we noted in a previous post, early influences can grip our minds with uninvited ideas. For many, the prospect of loosening these habitual thought patterns feels like yet another problem to solve. Instinctively, we reach for familiar solutions—often the very approaches keeping us stuck.

Have you ever tried to improve your productivity with a new time management tool that you didn’t have time to learn how to use?

Have you ever tried to improve your productivity with a new time management tool that you didn’t have time to learn how to use?

Understanding Cognitive Slack

Our friend and colleague Linda Dunkel’s work with Credit Human, a San Antonio-based credit union, offers an illuminating parallel. Rather than focusing on the abstract concept of financial health, Credit Human emphasizes “financial slack”—maintaining a financial reserve that helps people stay ahead of expenses and feel prepared for the unexpected. Like having the confidence you’ll stay afloat when exhausted, financial slack provides crucial breathing room.

This concept translates powerfully to mental capacity. Just as financial stress creates a vicious cycle of difficult choices, cognitive stress limits our ability to form insights, build relationships, and identify creative options. When mentally overwhelmed, we tend to avoid challenging tasks and hard conversations, often seeking refuge in easy distractions.

This recognition led us to develop the concept of “cognitive slack”—a strategic mental reserve that helps us manage attention and access hidden influences when facing uncertainty and complexity.

Signs You Need Cognitive Slack

Common situations where cognitive stress compromises creativity and compassion include:

Work-Related Challenges:

– Finding your contributions regularly dismissed or ignored

– Struggling to complete tasks requiring deep concentration

– Focusing so intently on your agenda that you miss others’ input

Personal Stressors:

– Managing intrusive thoughts and emotions that affect work performance

– Processing information in a non-native language

– Grappling with problems that seem too complex to solve

Communication Barriers:

– Jumping to offer solutions instead of truly listening

– Redirecting conversations back to your priorities

– Avoiding difficult but necessary discussions

Creating Space: The Power of Mental Floating

Neuroscience reveals why our best ideas often emerge during breaks—whether in the shower, while exercising, or during other moments of mental rest. These periods activate our brain’s default mode network, essentially allowing our minds to float between periods of focused effort.

To build more cognitive slack into your day:

– Schedule regular “floating” breaks between intense work sessions

– Create deliberate transitions between meetings or tasks

– Allow time for unstructured thinking and reflection

Just as swimmers alternate between strokes and floating to build endurance, incorporating strategic mental breaks can help us navigate complexity with greater resilience and insight.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is float.

The Emotional Mismatch in Organizational Change

on By 2 Comments

If you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, and uncertain about what might be changing at work next week, take comfort: you’re not alone. The scale of organizational change is staggering. Consider this: in 2023, the management consulting industry in the U.S. grew at 7.7% — more than twice the overall U.S. GDP growth of 3%. When consulting firms generate more change strategies, leaders and employees face even more upheaval in the years ahead.

The Messy Middle of Change

Given this trend, we at Unstuck Minds aren’t surprised by the recent requests for workshops about dealing with change. While most organizations want help preparing for change, many reach out when they’re already stuck in the middle of it.

While developing a change workshop, I found unexpected insight from an emergency room physician. In an October 5th New York Times opinion piece titled “I’m a Doctor. ChatGPT’s Bedside Manner is Better Than Mine,” Jonathan Reisman wrote about his training in delivering bad news to patients and families. He was initially skeptical about using scripts and techniques, believing that “compassion and empathy couldn’t be choreographed like dance steps.”

As an ER physician, Reisman regularly delivers versions of this “bad news” script. He noted, “For patients and their families, these conversations can be life-changing, yet for me it is just another day at work – a colossal mismatch in emotion.”

This concept of emotional mismatch perfectly captures a crucial challenge in organizational change.

The Change-Emotion Gap

When leaders discuss change with their teams, they face a similar emotional disconnect. While not as devastating as delivering life-altering medical news, this mismatch creates tension that can derail productive dialogue about change.

William Bridges’ famous Transitions model emphasizes that while change is situational, transition is psychological. It involves three stages:

1. Ending: People let go of the old way

2. The Neutral Zone: A period of uncertainty and confusion

3. New Beginning: Individuals embrace new identities and ways of working

The greatest emotional mismatch occurs in the “neutral zone.” Leaders, eager for results, grow impatient while their teams still mourn the loss of familiar routines.

Bridging the Gap: A Better Approach

Just as physicians learn scripts for delivering difficult news, leaders can use specific prompts when change efforts stall. Instead of selling the benefits of change, try these questions — and resist the urge to solve, fix, or judge:

– “What’s making this change hard for you?”

– “Here’s what I’m still getting used to ________. What about you?”

– “Does it feel like something you value is going away? Like what?”

When you sense the emotional gap narrowing, explore possibilities:

– “Not everything is set in stone yet. What might we be able to influence now that things are changing?”

Remember: You can’t force emotional alignment. If people don’t feel safe expressing their true feelings, they’ll find others who share their emotional state — often colleagues who reinforce resistance to change.

The key to successful change management isn’t pushing harder; it’s creating space for honest dialogue about the emotional journey.

Unclench Your Brain; Hold Thoughts Lightly

on By 1 Comment

In her 2021 bestseller, Peak Mind, professor of psychology, Amishi Jha recounts an epiphany she had about the powerful ways our worldviews grip and constrain our thinking. Dr. Jha and her family had been attending a birthday celebration for her mother. It was a milestone birthday and her mother’s house was packed with friends and relatives, many of them Indian men and women in their sixties and seventies. Dr. Jha and her sister took charge of serving food and drinks. Here’s how Dr. Jha describes what happened next.

When the time came to serve the cake, I was at a loss – my daughter was nowhere to be found, and my sister was busy cutting and plating the cake while I ran frantically back and forth with two plates, trying to get to all the guests. Finally, I felt a hand on my arm. My husband, Michael, was standing there with our son and my nephew

Can we help you?

Husband, son, and nephew jumped in and efficiently distributed the plates. Everyone enjoyed cake, problem solved.

Later, Dr. Jha reflected on the experience. Why hadn’t she asked her husband for help? Why was her first thought, “where is my daughter?” Shockingly, she realized that she had fallen under the spell of a deeply ingrained worldview: Men don’t serve food in Indian households!

As a woman, a scientist, and a psychology professor, Dr. Jha is acutely aware of the casual, implicit biases that regularly harm women. For example, it’s not unusual for her to receive emails addressed to “Sir.”

After her mother’s birthday party, she wanted to shout, “But I’m not sexist!” The reality, she came to realize is that “…if sexism exists in the world, it exists in my lived experience of the world.”

What Would it Take for you to Change your Mind?

Mental models are internal representations of external reality. They are the stories we tell ourselves to help us make sense of the world. Mental models help us process information, reason, make decisions, and make predictions. The key word in the definition is, “representation.” Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-American philosopher and mathematician pointed out that mental models are representations of reality in the same way that a map is a representation of a territory.

Mental models are useful precisely because they simplify reality. Like maps, mental models leave out a lot of detail. Also, like maps, unless a mental model is updated, new realities can make our rigidly held models less useful.

We can hold maps at arm’s length. It’s much harder to put daylight between ourselves and our mental models. Consequently, we confuse our models with reality, we accept our certainties as truth. What’s worse, because the mental model dictates how we process information, it can change the brain’s ability to notice information that’s not part of the model. Dr. Jha literally didn’t notice her husband, son, and nephew when she scanned her mother’s house looking for someone to help serve cake.

Noticing Stale Assumptions

Developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan writes about the transformational changes people experience throughout their lives. His subject-object theory of development differentiates between our internal assumptions about the way the world works (subject) and aspects of the world we can examine independently (object).

Kegan often asks, “Do you have the idea, or does the idea have you?” If you have the idea, you can examine it objectively. If the idea has you, you are unconsciously gripped by the idea.

Before her epiphany, Dr. Jha was unwittingly gripped by the idea that men don’t serve food in Indian households. After her epiphany, the idea no longer controlled what Dr. Jha could notice and think about her situation. She became cognizant of the relationship between an old story and its impact on her behavior. She can hold the thought lightly and decide how it will inform her worldview going forward.

Jay’s Story

I clearly remember how disoriented I felt after pitching my book to Steve Piersanti, founder of Berrett-Koehler Publishers. He pointed out that most people don’t read non-fiction books, they don’t even buy them. Bestselling non-fiction books are purchased in bulk and handed out during corporate events, conference key-note presentations, or as part of training programs. He didn’t care about my writing chops or my research. He wanted to know if I had a platform and a following. A lot of deeply held assumptions and a few fantasies about being an author lost their hold on me that day.
Lisa’s Story

Like many people, I was drawn into a professional role because it suited my personality and skills. I didn’t plan to work in sales leadership and account management, I discovered a knack for it. As I experienced success, I started thinking of myself as a sales professional. Unconsciously, I adopted a mental model that many of my coaching clients share: What I do is who I am.   Since co-founding Unstuck Minds, I’ve given myself permission to reinvent my role. I’ve learned to loosen my grip on how I see myself. I recently pursued an ICF coaching certification. Now I have a portfolio of capabilities to contribute.  

Loosening the Grip of Stale Assumptions

Stale assumptions don’t just grip people. Many businesses suffer from calcified assumptions about what customers want. It’s easy to imagine the proclamations below animating strategy meetings at three, once dominant companies:

  • The experience of scanning the shelves of a physical store is an irreplaceable part of what customers love about Blockbuster.
  • Quality, consistency, and value make Kodak film the best choice for all photographers and cameras.
  • Business professionals are obsessed with the Blackberry keyboard.

Noticing and potentially revising a mental model isn’t easy. Unstuck Minds has developed tools and thought exercises to help you pull back the curtain on influential thoughts. Here are two of our favorites:

Brainstorm terrible Ideas

Imagine you work for a retail clothing company that prides itself on personalized customer service. In a meeting someone suggests closing all the stores and selling your apparel through a third-party, online e-commerce site. It would be easy to picture people angrily reacting to the idea because it violates a core assumption about the company’s business model. Now that the assumption is out in the open, you can challenge it or recommit to it. Read our story about using “terrible ideas” to help a client identify assumptions and worldviews.

  • What blasphemous yet plausible idea would elicit a gasp or an eye roll in your organization?
  • What does the reaction say about your organization’s assumptions?

Consult future you

When facing decisions that will play out over time, we assume that the person who makes the decision (Present-Me) will think and feel the same way as the person who will live with the decision (Future-Me). It’s easier to recognize the fallacy when we retrospectively evaluate past decisions. When we look back on consequential choices we made in the past, it feels obvious that our current selves, faced with the same decision, might consider different criteria or make a different choice. Here’s a trivial example that might be relatable. It’s the middle of the afternoon and someone has brought a tray of rich, decadent cookies into the breakroom from a meeting that just ended. Present-You knows what it wants. How will ‘10-Minutes-From-Now-You’ feel about the decision to mindlessly devour the cookie?

In a lot of ways, a life gripped by our mental models is a bit like living in a dream-like state. We don’t question the strange logic of our dreams. The first moments of waking up feel disorienting.

If you no longer believe that a jolly bearded resident of the North Pole delivers gifts to deserving children on Christmas, you understand the experience of revising a mental model. And yes, letting go of a cherished mental model might be accompanied by a sense of loss. On the plus side, when you hold thoughts, assumptions, and conclusions lightly, you create space for surprising ideas to present themselves for your consideration.

Jha, Amishi P. Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. New York: HarperOne, 2021.