Leadership in Chaos: 39th edition.
hard coaching, systems, mind gyms.
“It dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns…that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale…that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.”
Bob Dylan
Leadership: hard coaching.
During a recent US college basketball game, a Maryland player, Oluchi Okananwa, made a string of mistakes. Then, caught on camera in front of an audience of 23 million people, her coach, Brenda Frese, gave her the hairdryer treatment. It seemed harsh. There was an intake of breath. But, it turns out what she said to her was, “I believe in you. But you’ve got to want this moment. This is not my story.” What Sunny Bonnell shared afterwards was the back story. The context. Okananwa is an elite competitor. She grew up a gymnast with Olympic ambitions, but ended up too tall for the bars. In her first conversation with her coach in Maryland, she said, “Don’t tell me what I want to hear. I want to be coached hard. I want to be elite.” And after that game said, “Coach understands I’m a competitor at heart. I’ve told her this before and I’ll keep on telling her…..I love to be coached hard, and that’s what she does with me every single day”. Though they lost the game. But Okananwa finished up with 21 points.
A thought for leaders: Okananwa’s coach, Brenda Frese, said afterwards that “the best of the best, the elite of the elite want to be coached hard”. And went on to say, “We do have to have those tough conversations. You can’t have them without a relationship. I kind of wanted to implore just how much belief I had in her.” And that is the essence of coaching. Some people need coddling. Some you need to leave alone. Others need in your face coaching. It’s not that you need to scream in someone’s face; it’s that good coaches and leaders know which method to use, with whom, and when.
Performance: systems.
Systems Thinking is a great way to understand organisations. This talk from 1994 with the late Dr Russell Ackoff is a nice reminder of that. Two-thirds of managers, at the time, claimed quality improvement programs failed (nothing’s changed) because they were anti-systemic applications. A system, he clarifies, is a whole consisting of parts, each of which can affect its behaviour or properties. For each part to have an effect, it’s dependent on another part of the system. So a system consists of interdependent parts that can’t be divided into independent parts. The defining properties of a system are properties of the whole. Which none of its independent parts have. A car, for example, can carry you from place to place. No car part can do that. You can see, your eye can’t. You can think, your brain can’t. A system isn’t the sum of its parts; it’s a product of its interactions. So if a system improvement program tackles a part, but not the whole, it will fail. A system isn’t optimised by simply getting the best parts. Because the performance of a system depends on how the parts fit together. Not how they act separately.
A thought for leaders: It’s easy to think of a company in parts. The bigger the business, the easier it becomes. This division, this team, this group. But a company isn’t the sum of its parts, as Ackoff describes. The value is in the whole. Not the sum. We only have to look at the latest Gallup State of the Global Workforce report to see this in action. While 65% of workers report personal productivity gains from AI, only 12% say it has transformed how work gets done, and 89% of leaders report no productivity impact at the organisational level. AI is boosting individuals, but not organisations. When the system doesn’t change, nothing really changes.
Culture: mind gyms.
Imagine we treated our thinking the same way we treated our exercise habits and diets? What would that look like? This is the central argument in Cal Newport’s (author of Deep Work, Slow Productivity and Digital Minimalism) New York Times piece about mental fitness and concentration. In the 1950s, US President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack at the age of 63. It became the spark for a rapid transformation (with awareness and education) of global health and fitness. In the 50’s, there were around 100,000 runners in the US. Exercise was elite. But change snowballed. Now, exercise and diet are dominant forces in our lives. Which brings us to today’s cognition, attention, and critical thinking crisis. It’s easy to see this is an inevitable side effect of technological progress, but as Cal writes, just like health and fitness, “a similarly rapid revolution is possible in how we respond to our diminishing ability to think”.
A thought for leaders: Thinking is an engine. It drives great teams and great businesses. In the knowledge economy, the quality of our thinking remains a key engine for growth. If your business were built on physical human strength, weightlifting would probably be part of the working day. Why, then, don’t we spend the requisite time on thinking? We all invest too much time feeding our minds with junk. Which is leaving us distracted, unfocused, and cognitively weaker. As a leader, maybe it’s time to start thinking about building a culture that protects and nourishes our thinking habits. Maybe in 2026, you start to build a mind gym for your people?
Podcast: EP 76 – Leadership Manifesto: Principle #19 – Schedule What’s Important
This episode explores a simple but often neglected leadership discipline: making time for what actually matters.
In a world of constant distraction and reactive work, this feels particularly relevant to this month’s theme of mind gyms. Because if thinking is an engine, then time is the fuel that sustains it.
It reflects on why leaders must move beyond good intentions and deliberately schedule what’s important, not just what’s urgent. Because without that discipline, the space required for focus, reflection and high-quality thinking simply disappears.
A timely reminder that performance isn’t just about doing more, it’s about creating the conditions to think better.
You can listen to it here.
Enjoy revisiting or newly discovering it 😊
You can follow Flow Group on LinkedIn here.
Hope you enjoyed, and please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
P.S. This month’s featured artist is Houston-based Argentinian artist Karen Navarro. She is of Mapuche, Guaraní, and European descent, and her work across photography, collage, and sculpture examines the intersections of identity, race, representation, and belonging through the lenses of migration, indigenous identity, and the enduring legacies of colonisation. Through processes of fragmentation, reconstruction, and circulation, she approaches images as unstable sites of meaning, tracing how visual and material cultures are shaped by—and reproduce—structures of power.
