Research consistently shows that most strategies fail during implementation, not during design.

A widely cited global survey by Harvard Business Review and the Brightline Initiative found that only about 20% of strategic targets set by organizations are actually realized. The remaining 80% fail due to poor planning, limited resources, and weak execution.

In other words:

Organizations are often very good at designing strategies but far less capable of making them happen.

This is the classic “wise organization” problem.

Leaders and executives spend months crafting strategic plans, conducting market analyses, and producing impressive strategy decks.

But once the plan is announced, daily operations take over.

Projects drift.

Priorities change.

Initiatives lose momentum.

And the strategy quietly fades away.

The problem is rarely intelligence or insight.

The problem is translation: turning strategy into daily action.

The Execution Gap

Management researchers often describe this challenge as the execution gap.

Even the best strategies fail when organizations cannot align:

• people

• priorities

• incentives

• processes

• decision-making

around the strategy.

Research published in Harvard Business Review suggests that organizations frequently underestimate how difficult execution actually is. Strategy is often treated as an analytical exercise, while execution is treated as an operational detail.

In reality, execution is the real strategy.

A brilliant plan that is never implemented has zero value.

A good plan that is consistently executed can transform an organization.

This is why leadership thinker Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Honeywell and co-author of the book Execution, famously said:

“Strategies most often fail because they aren’t executed well.”

Execution requires:

• clarity of priorities

• disciplined follow-through

• aligned leadership behavior

• feedback loops that allow learning and adjustment

Without these elements, strategy becomes aspiration rather than reality.

When Organizations Become “Busy but Lost”

At the other extreme, some organizations fall into the opposite trap.

They execute constantly.

Teams launch initiatives, projects, pilots, and experiments.

The organization becomes extremely active.

But without strategic alignment, activity can become noise.

Harvard Business School research has shown that organizations often suffer from initiative overload, where too many projects compete for attention and resources.

Employees become overwhelmed.

Leaders struggle to track progress.

And the organization ends up doing many things, but not necessarily the right things.

This is the “smart but not wise” organization.

They move fast.

But they do not always move in the right direction.

The Organizations That Win

The organizations that consistently succeed combine strategic clarity with disciplined execution.

They are both:

Wiser

• They understand their environment

• They learn continuously

• They refine their strategy

Smarter

• They execute consistently

• They test ideas in practice

• They learn through action

Strategy becomes a living system, not a static document.

Execution becomes learning in motion, not blind activity.

This is where the knowing–doing gap finally begins to close.

The 20 / 80 Balance: Becoming Wiser and Smarter

One way to understand this balance is through the Pareto principle.

A healthy organization might invest roughly:

20% of its energy in becoming wiser

• strategic thinking

• learning

• reflection

• sensing the environment

And 80% of its energy in becoming smarter

• execution

• experimentation

• delivering value

• learning through action

This balance ensures that organizations:

• move with direction

• act with purpose

• adapt continuously

The Leadership Role: Bridging Thinking and Doing

Closing the knowing–doing gap is not just a process issue.

It is a leadership challenge.

Leaders must design organizations where:

• insight turns into decisions

• decisions turn into experiments

• experiments generate learning

This requires leaders who:

• value reflection

• encourage action

• tolerate intelligent failure

• connect strategy with execution

In other words, leaders must cultivate organizations that are both wiser and smarter over time.

The Role of Facilitation in Strategy Execution

One of the most underestimated leadership capabilities in bridging this gap is facilitation.

Strategy often fails not because the idea is wrong, but because people were not involved in making sense of it together.

Facilitation helps organizations:

• turn strategy into shared understanding

• align teams around priorities

• design actionable commitments

• create feedback loops that sustain learning

Instead of strategy being something leaders announce, it becomes something teams co-create and continuously refine.

And that is where the real power lies.

Want Your Organization to Become Both Wiser and Smarter?

Many organizations already know what they should do.

But knowing is not enough.

The real challenge is turning insight into action, aligning teams around a clear direction, and creating the conditions where strategy actually becomes reality.

This is where facilitation and leadership development can make a powerful difference.

Through workshops, leadership sessions, and coaching, I help teams and organizations:

• Turn strategy into shared understanding

• Align teams around clear priorities

• Design effective meetings and decision processes

• Close the knowing–doing gap

• Move from ideas to real impact

If this resonates with you and your organization, I would love to support you.

Reach out if you’d like help designing better conversations, stronger alignment, and smarter execution in your organization.

Because the organizations that succeed are not just smart.

They continuously become wiser and smarter.

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

Most people think “design” is about how things look.

This sketch tells a very different story.

At the center, there’s a human. Around that human: insight, research, prototyping. And surrounding all of it: strategy, processes, and technology.

That’s service design.

Not decoration. Orchestrating value.

A service designer works in the messy middle between idea and reality.

Role?
To make sure we’re solving the right problem before we rush into solutions.

Responsibilities?
– Turn complexity into clarity
– Make the invisible visible (journeys, pain points, systems)
– Facilitate alignment across silos
– Bring users into the room (through research & insight)
– Prototype before committing
– Connect strategy → processes → technology

But the real job?
To move teams from “we think” → “we know” → “we tested” → “we deliver value.”

What I love about this drawing is the tension it captures:

👉 Strategy gives direction
👉 Processes create movement
👉 Technology enables
👉 But people + insight sit at the core

And in between?

That’s where service designers operate:
facilitating, orchestrating, translating.

Because in the end, service design is not about deliverables.

It’s about outcomes:

– Better decisions
– Faster learning
– Less waste
– Real alignment
– Services that actually work for people

If you remove service design, you don’t remove design.

You remove clarity, alignment, and intentional value creation.

And you usually feel it… too late.

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

In my previous post, I wrote about the idea of the leader as a gardener.

Not the one who pulls harder.
Not the one who shouts louder.
But the one who creates the right conditions for things to grow.

Because growth doesn’t come from pressure.
It comes from environment.

That idea isn’t just poetic—it’s deeply practical. In fact, many modern leadership perspectives point in the same direction: leaders don’t “drive performance” directly—they shape the conditions where people can thrive.

But here’s the thing:

If you are a gardener…
you need to observe, listen, and understand your plants.

And in leadership, that starts with better questions.

Not more tools.
Not more frameworks.
Better questions.

Here are three I keep coming back to.

1) “What are you good at… and what do you love doing?”

Most leaders ask about performance.

Very few ask about energy.

But the real leverage sits in the intersection between:

• What people are good at

• And what they love doing (even if they’re not great at it yet)

Because that’s where growth happens.

Research on motivation consistently shows that people thrive when they can develop mastery and have some level of autonomy in what they do.

But here’s what we often miss:

• If someone is good at something but hates it → they burn out

• If someone loves something but never gets to do it → they disengage

• If someone gets to grow in something they care about → they come alive

As a leader, your job is not to optimize for efficiency.

It’s to design for motivation + mastery over time.

Sometimes that means:

• Giving people more of what they’re already great at

• And sometimes… giving them space to grow into what they care about

That’s how you grow capability.
And that’s how you grow people.

2) “How are you feeling?”

Simple question.

Often avoided.

Because it opens something we can’t fully control.

But here’s the truth:

People don’t show up to work as “roles.”
They show up as humans in a moment.

And that moment changes everything:

• Energy

• Focus

• Creativity

• Collaboration

You can have the best plan in the world…

…but if someone is overwhelmed, distracted, or struggling,
they are not operating at the level you think they are.

A gardener doesn’t treat every plant the same every day.

They look at:

• The weather

• The soil

• The season

Leadership is no different.

Some days your role is to push.
Some days your role is to support.
Some days your role is simply to not add more pressure.

This question is not about being “soft.”

It’s about being accurate.

3) “What is getting in your way—and how can I help?”

This might be the most important one.

Because this is where leadership becomes real.

If you think about it, a gardener doesn’t “grow” plants.

They remove what blocks growth:

• Bad soil

• Lack of water

• Too much shade

• External threats

The same applies in organizations.

People are often not underperforming because of lack of talent…

…but because of:

• Unclear priorities

• Broken processes

• Too many dependencies

• Organizational friction

Your job is not to “fix the person.”

It’s to fix the system around them.

Or at least… improve it.

Great leaders spend less time asking:
“Why aren’t they performing?”

And more time asking:
“What is making it hard for them to perform?”

And then:

“How can I remove that?”

Bringing it together

If you step back, these three questions are not random.

They map something deeper:

• Strengths + passion → Mastery

• Emotional state → Capacity

• Constraints → Environment

And when those three align…

performance stops being something you chase.

It becomes something that emerges.

A final thought

Leadership is often framed as having answers.

But in reality, it’s much closer to gardening:

You don’t control growth.
You create the conditions for it.

And the quality of those conditions
depends on the quality of the questions you ask.

If this resonates, you might enjoy the original piece:
👉 https://www.facilistation.com/p/the-gardener-leader

And I’m curious:

Which of these three questions do you ask most often—and which one do you avoid?

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

Modern life encourages us to live at one constant speed.
Produce. Improve. Push. Repeat.

Nature, however, doesn’t work that way.

Everything alive moves in cycles—expansion and contraction, action and rest, growth and decay. When we ignore these rhythms, life starts to feel heavy. When we align with them, effort becomes lighter and more sustainable.

Living seasonally isn’t about doing less.
It’s about doing the right things at the right time.

Below is a practical, reflective guide to living and working in tune with the four natural seasons.

Spring — Awakening, Curiosity & New Beginnings

Nature’s message: Life is stirring again.

Spring is the season of emergence. Seeds crack open. Energy rises. Possibility returns after stillness.

What to focus on

• New ideas and experiments

• Learning and exploration

• Reconnecting with curiosity

• Light planning without heavy commitment

What to do

• Start projects in “beta mode”

• Ask big, open questions

• Network gently and reconnect with people

• Move your body in playful ways

• Clean, declutter, and refresh your environment

Mindset:

“What wants to grow now?”

Spring isn’t about certainty—it’s about potential.

Summer — Expansion, Visibility & Contribution

Nature’s message: Now is the time to grow outward.

Summer carries confidence, warmth, and momentum. Energy is abundant, and visibility feels easier.

What to focus on

• Execution and delivery

• Collaboration and relationships

• Sharing your work publicly

• Enjoyment and celebration

What to do

• Launch initiatives

• Facilitate, teach, lead, present

• Say yes more often

• Spend time with people who energize you

• Allow joy to be part of productivity

Mindset:

“Let myself be seen.”

Summer reminds us that contribution thrives when paired with connection and joy.

Autumn — Harvest, Clarity & Letting Go

Nature’s message: Take stock. What truly matters?

Autumn invites honesty. The energy turns inward—not to stop, but to refine.

What to focus on

• Evaluation and learning

• Completing cycles

• Making clear decisions

• Simplifying and prioritizing

What to do

• Review what worked and what didn’t

• Harvest insights and results

• Close projects that have run their course

• Have the conversations you’ve postponed

• Reduce noise and complexity

Mindset:

“What is no longer needed?”

Autumn is powerful because it frees energy by letting go.

Winter — Rest, Integration & Inner Work

Nature’s message: Stillness is not failure—it’s preparation.

Winter is where modern culture struggles most. Yet without winter, there is no renewal.

What to focus on

• Rest and recovery

• Reflection and meaning

• Inner clarity

• Deep thinking

What to do

• Slow down without guilt

• Journal, walk, reflect

• Read and contemplate

• Reduce commitments

• Protect energy and attention

Mindset:

“Nothing is wrong. This is part of the cycle.”

Winter teaches us that wisdom emerges when the mind settles.

Living Seasonally in a Non-Seasonal World

You don’t need to wait for the calendar to change.

You may be:

• In a Spring phase of your career

• A Summer phase in a relationship

• An Autumn phase in a project

• Or a Winter phase personally

The key question isn’t “How do I push through?”
It’s:

“What season am I in—and how can I cooperate with it?”

When you stop fighting the cycle, life becomes less exhausting and more intelligent.

Sometimes the most productive move isn’t doing more— but moving in rhythm.

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

Over the past decade, working across some of the most capable organizations I know, I’ve noticed something consistent. The ones that hold up under pressure, that make better decisions, adapt faster, and don’t fall apart when complexity compounds, aren’t necessarily the ones with the smartest people. They’re the ones that have built something specific: the capacity to reason together.

That’s harder to build than it sounds, and rarer than most leaders realize.

Human-centered design

Human-centered design has been one of the most reliable levers I’ve seen for developing this capacity. HCD is a set of practices rooted in deep observation of how people actually work, iterative problem-solving, and collaborative sense-making. Most people associate it with product design.

But in the organizations I’ve worked with, its real power shows up elsewhere: in how teams frame problems, surface assumptions, and make decisions together under uncertainty. In this sense, HCD is really a normalized way of aligning teams on how to solve problems together.

Change management

Classic change management models tell you what needs to happen at a high level. HCD gives you the ground-level methodology for how behavior actually changes, group by group, team by team, in ways that earn adoption rather than demanding it.

Large organizations don’t transform as a monolith. They transform subculture by subculture, each with its own starting point and resistance. HCD, applied to organizational change, is how you navigate that. It isn’t a diet pill, it’s a fitness program. Consider some of these examples.

At Autodesk, HCD methods spread across the organization not because leadership mandated them but because they worked. When software architects used them to tackle the re-architecture of AutoCAD for cloud computing, one of the company’s most technically complex projects, even the engineers were convinced. The methods eventually reached sales, marketing, finance, and senior leadership. By 2016, 90 percent of Autodesk’s participatory research projects were conducted collaboratively with customers, nearly double the rate just a few years earlier.

At Cox Enterprises, a program that started with a single designer teaching stakeholders his process eventually reached 55,000 employees across a $24 billion company. Today Cox has 800 certified practitioners managed by a core team of three, and more than 100 people apply each year for 15 instructor spots. It became self-sustaining not because it was mandated but because teams experienced what it felt like to reason together more effectively.

At Intuit, “Design for Delight” wasn’t really about design. It trained thousands of employees in deep customer empathy, rapid experimentation, and iterative learning. The goal was changing how teams thought together about problems that didn’t have obvious solutions. Having worked with teams across the organization, I’ve seen firsthand how this shifts the way people reason together, not just how they design.

Different industries, different entry points, same result: teams that could think together under pressure, not just execute under direction.

The obvious objection is that this works in small teams but can’t survive contact with a large organization. IBM’s transformation starting in 2012 trained more than 150,000 employees in structured collaborative practices, not as a training event but as a sustained shift in how teams worked. I observed that transformation firsthand.

Practices like “playbacks,” structured critique sessions where teams present work-in-progress for candid feedback, gave those employees a common operating system for how to think together. The result was measurable: across dozens of account teams, design thinking maturity increased 42 percent on average, with voluntary enrollment above 90 percent. The program spread because it worked, not because it was required.

This matters more now than it ever has.

AI in the mix

AI dramatically increases what individuals can produce. But organizations don’t succeed because individuals are productive. They succeed because people can think, decide, and act together. And AI doesn’t automatically help with that. In fact, recent research from the Wharton School found that when people use AI that gives confident but wrong answers, they adopt those wrong answers roughly 80 percent of the time, and report feeling more certain than if they’d had no AI at all. Speed without collective judgment doesn’t produce better decisions. It produces faster misalignment.

The organizations I’ve described didn’t stumble into this capability. They designed for it, invested in it, and treated it as strategic work rather than a training program or a culture initiative.

That’s the pattern worth recognizing. In an era when AI is raising the ceiling on individual output while quietly making team reasoning harder, collective judgment is the capability that separates the organizations that adapt from the ones that just accelerate in the wrong direction.

The question isn’t whether your teams are using AI. It’s whether they’ve built the capacity to question it. HCD is how.

About the author

Jim Kalbach is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in innovation, design, and the future of work. He is currently Chief Evangelist at Mural, the leading online whiteboard.

Jim is the author of several books: Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007), Mapping Experiences, 2nd Ed. (O’Reilly, 2020), and The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (Rosenfeld, 2020). In 2023 he co-authored Collaborative Intelligence (Wiley, 2023) with Mariano Battan. Jim is also the Co-founder and Principal at the JTBD Toolkit, an online resource with learning, trainings, and content.

Leadership is often portrayed as direction, authority, or control.

But the world we live in today—complex, interconnected, and constantly evolving—requires a different kind of leadership.

Not the leader as a commander.
Not the leader as the hero.

But the leader as a gardener.

Leadership Is About Cultivating the Conditions for Growth

A gardener does not pull plants to make them grow faster.

A gardener focuses on the conditions that allow life to flourish:

• Soil

• Water

• Sunlight

• Space

• Care

In organizations, these conditions translate into the systems leaders create:

• Processes

• Technology

• Culture

• Structures

• Meetings

• Decision-making environments

• Psychological safety

These are the garden beds of the organization. When they are healthy, people grow.

Conscious leadership is therefore less about managing people and more about cultivating the environment where people can do their best work.

Every Tree Is Different

A good gardener also knows something essential:

Every tree and plant is different.

Some trees are just beginning to appear from the ground.
Some are growing strong trunks and expanding their branches.
Some are mature and starting to bear fruit.

Each one requires something slightly different.

• A young tree needs protection and support.

• A growing tree needs space and nutrients.

• A mature tree needs care so it can keep producing fruit.

The gardener pays attention.
Observes.
Adjusts.

Leadership works the same way.

Conscious leaders understand that people develop at different speeds, with different needs, motivations, and strengths. They take the time to care for each person individually, creating the conditions that allow them to grow into their potential.

Not by forcing growth.

But by nurturing it.

The Leader Makes the Invisible Visible

Another important role of the gardener leader is helping people see what they cannot easily see.

In organizations, many forces shape what happens:

• Hidden assumptions

• Unspoken tensions

• Structural barriers

• Cultural habits

• Misaligned incentives

• Invisible dependencies between teams

Most people are too busy doing their work to notice these dynamics.

A conscious leader helps make the invisible visible.

They help teams see:

• What is really happening

• What patterns are shaping their work

• What obstacles are slowing them down

• What opportunities are emerging

Once people see it, something powerful happens.

They can take responsibility.

And most importantly:
they can do something about it.

Making the Complex Simple Enough to Act

Modern organizations are incredibly complex systems.

Too complex, sometimes.

When complexity becomes overwhelming, people freeze.
They disengage.
They assume change is impossible.

The gardener leader does something crucial.

They make the complex simple enough to act on.

Not by oversimplifying reality, but by:

• Clarifying priorities

• Breaking big challenges into manageable steps

• Creating shared understanding

• Designing good conversations

• Facilitating alignment

When people understand the situation clearly enough, something changes.

They begin to believe:

“Maybe we can actually do something about this.”

And belief is the beginning of action.

Facilitation: The Core Skill of Modern Leadership

This is why leadership today increasingly looks like facilitation.

The leader is not the person with all the answers.

The leader is the person who creates the space where the best answers can emerge collectively.

Just like a gardener does not create the plant—but creates the conditions where growth becomes inevitable.

Facilitating leaders:

• Ask powerful questions

• Design meaningful conversations

• Create psychological safety

• Align perspectives

• Enable collective intelligence

They help the garden organize itself toward growth.

The Garden Is Never Finished

A garden is never “done”.

It is always evolving.

Seasons change.
New plants appear.
Old ones fade.
The ecosystem continuously adapts.

Organizations are the same.

Conscious leadership is therefore not about reaching a perfect state.

It is about continuous care, attention, and cultivation.

Observing.
Learning.
Adjusting.

Helping the garden keep growing.

The Leadership the World Needs Now

The challenges we face today—organizational, societal, environmental—cannot be solved by command-and-control leadership.

They require leaders who can:

• See systems

• Care for people

• Enable collaboration

• Facilitate collective intelligence

• Cultivate sustainable environments where people thrive

In other words:

The world needs more gardener leaders.

Leaders who understand that their job is not to control the forest…

but to cultivate the conditions where the forest can flourish.

A Final Reflection

If leadership is a garden…

What kind of garden are you cultivating?

What conditions are you creating for the people around you to grow?

And what might become possible if your role as a leader was not to push harder…

but to cultivate better soil?

If you would like support designing leadership environments, workshops, or facilitation processes that help teams grow, align and flourish, feel free to reach out.

That is exactly the kind of garden I love helping organizations cultivate.

In hundreds of workshops I’ve facilitated over the years—across municipalities, corporations, and innovation labs—I’ve tested dozens of icebreakers.

Most of them are… fine.

Some are entertaining.

But one stands above the rest in terms of depth, connection, and immediate impact on group dynamics.

It’s simple:

Ask participants to share:

1. Something they are really proud of in their personal life and why

2. A fun fact about themselves that most people in the room probably don’t know

That’s it.

No complicated instructions.
No props.
No forced creativity.

Yet the effect on the group is extraordinary.

Why This Icebreaker Works So Well

1. It Humanizes the Room Immediately

In most workshops, people enter the room wearing their professional armor:

• Job titles

• Expertise

• Organizational roles

• Power dynamics

When someone shares something they are proud of in their personal life, something shifts.

People suddenly see:

• The parent

• The musician

• The marathon runner

• The person who overcame a challenge

• The volunteer

• The hobbyist

The room stops being a collection of job titles and becomes a group of humans.

That shift is foundational for good collaboration.

2. Pride Creates Positive Energy

The prompt focuses on something they are proud of.

This matters.

Pride triggers:

• Positive emotions

• Confidence

• Energy

• Authentic storytelling

Instead of awkward introductions, participants share moments that matter to them.

And when people talk about things that matter to them, the room naturally becomes more attentive and engaged.

You can literally feel the energy change.

3. The “Why” Creates Meaning

The most important part of the exercise is actually the “why.”

Not just:

“I ran a marathon.”

But:

“I ran a marathon after recovering from a serious injury, and finishing it reminded me that I’m stronger than I thought.”

That context creates emotional resonance.

People start to listen differently.

4. The Fun Fact Adds Playfulness

The second part of the icebreaker introduces lightness and surprise.

Examples I’ve heard in workshops:

• Someone was once a professional magician

• Someone can solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute

• Someone used to work on a fishing boat in Alaska

• Someone has climbed Kilimanjaro

• Someone can imitate 20 different accents

Suddenly the group learns things they would never discover in normal meetings.

It creates curiosity and laughter.

And laughter is a powerful accelerator for group trust.

What Happens Next in the Workshop

After this icebreaker, something remarkable happens.

The group dynamics change in three important ways.

1. Psychological Safety Increases

When people reveal a small part of themselves, they unconsciously signal:

“It’s safe to be human here.”

This makes participants more willing to:

• Speak up

• Share ideas

• Ask questions

• Challenge assumptions

Which is exactly what you need in a productive workshop.

2. People Listen More Deeply

Once participants have heard personal stories from each other, they stop seeing each other as strangers.

Instead they think:

“Oh, that’s the person who ran the marathon.”
“That’s the one who builds guitars.”
“That’s the person who lived in five countries.”

People begin to listen with curiosity rather than judgment.

3. Collaboration Becomes Easier

Trust and connection are the invisible infrastructure of collaboration.

Without them, workshops feel stiff and transactional.

With them, conversations become:

• More open

• More creative

• More honest

And that’s when the real work can begin.

Why This Icebreaker Works Better Than Most

Many icebreakers fail because they are either:

Too superficial

“Say your name and favorite color.”

or

Too uncomfortable

“Share your biggest failure.”

This one sits in the perfect middle.

It is:

• Personal but safe

• Positive but meaningful

• Playful but authentic

It invites people to show a piece of themselves without forcing vulnerability.

That balance is why it works so consistently.

How to Facilitate It

A few practical tips.

1. Go first

Model the tone by sharing your own example.

Facilitators who go first set the psychological safety for the group.

2. Keep it short

Ask participants to limit themselves to 1–2 minutes each.

This keeps the energy high.

3. Listen actively

Encourage the group to listen without interruptions.

This signals that stories matter.

4. Capture interesting facts

Sometimes I write fun facts on a flipchart.

They often become references during the workshop:

“Let’s hear from the marathon runner.”
“What does the magician think?”

It keeps the human connection alive.

The Hidden Outcome

By the end of this exercise, something subtle but powerful has happened:

The room has moved from:

A group of professionals

to

A group of humans working together.

And that shift makes everything that follows easier.

Ideas flow more freely.

Disagreements become constructive.

And collaboration becomes natural.

For a facilitator, that’s pure gold.

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Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

This guest post is written by Marjorie Parker, an organizational development practitioner and facilitator based in Norway. Drawing on her experience working with leaders and teams, she shares how shared vision processes can help organizations move from intention to genuine engagement and action.

Facilitators are often invited into organizations at moments when something needs to change. The expectation is that a workshop or strategic planning process will generate new ideas and creative solutions. Yet even when such processes lead to clear action plans, engagement often remains limited. Participants may agree on next steps, but a deeper sense of commitment and shared direction is frequently missing.

One approach that can create stronger alignment, focus, and engagement is to involve a group in developing a shared vision around a specific organizational challenge. Rather than focusing first on problems or solutions, shared vision processes invite participants to imagine and experience a desired future together. This shift in perspective can unlock creativity, deepen commitment, and support more meaningful change.

A shared vision is the collective image of a desired future held by a group — not merely a written statement or slogan, but a vivid internal picture of how things will look and feel when change has been realized. It provides an overarching framework that guides the choices people make today, choices that gradually transform vision into reality.

Visionary Thinking

For facilitators, the task is first to clarify the organizational challenge and then to create conditions in which participants can develop and share images of a desired future. This involves helping groups engage in visionary thinking.

Visionary thinking is the process through which we activate insight and imagination, connect with our values, and form mental images of a desired future. With the help of imagination, we mentally move forward in time and allow ourselves to see what is happening around us — how people are interacting, what feels different, what is unique about this new reality.

Facilitators support this process by helping participants enter a relaxed and reflective state of mind and by posing carefully chosen questions that stimulate imagination and insight. In such conditions, people are able to draw simultaneously on analytical thinking, intuition, and imagination — and discover possibilities that might otherwise remain just outside their awareness.

While a vision directs us toward the future, it exists only in the present — in our minds, right now. If these images align with our values, stir a sense of purpose, and make sense in the marketplace, they will engage both our emotions and our intellect and create within us an urge to act.

In a shared visioning approach, the implementation and planning phase of any change process becomes a learning process, one in which perspectives must continually shift between the shared vision and the immediate actions needed to reach it. If the visioning process has been successful - meaning that employees have together created, shared, and committed to a common mental image of the desired future - then something rather notable tends to happen: people begin generating ideas for action steps almost spontaneously, pulled forward by a vision they feel is genuinely their own.

Where Shared Vision Processes Are Useful

Shared vision facilitation can be valuable across many situations. Here are four examples.

Bringing Values to Life

Organizations often communicate core values through presentations or written statements, but employees may experience these as abstract or disconnected from everyday work. In one international company, leaders wanted the organization to become more responsive to both internal and external stakeholders. Rather than defining the value, participants were invited to move two years into the future and imagine how responsiveness had become part of their everyday interactions — how decisions were being made, and how customers and partners were noticing the change. The group gradually translated an abstract value into concrete behaviors and practical initiatives.

Designing Physical Spaces

In one outpatient clinic, patients faced long waiting times in a noisy and unattractive waiting room that contradicted the clinic’s stated values. A facilitated workshop invited staff, patients, and managers to imagine the waiting room two years ahead, viewed from several different perspectives. Participants described visual details, emotional atmosphere, and staff-patient interactions. Their shared visions led to practical design changes that improved both patient experience and staff workflow.

Developing a Shared Understanding of New Concepts

In one regional public roads authority, management wanted all employees to take a holistic perspective on construction projects — but no one shared a clear picture of what this would mean in practice. Key stakeholders were invited to envision themselves three years ahead, describing how managers and project groups were collaborating when everyone was working from a holistic perspective. A discussion followed about what in the current situation was undermining or supporting that shift. Concrete action plans emerged.

Clarifying New Roles

In one hospital, leadership was establishing a new nursing role — the patient-care coordinator — responsible for ensuring that all providers were informed and cooperating in complex patient situations. A two-day seminar invited candidates to envision what was happening for nurses, staff, and patients when this role was working well. Their shared picture of the role in action helped identify the competencies needed and directly shaped the training program.

Long-Term Benefits

Beyond immediate outcomes, shared vision processes tend to produce several longer-term benefits.

Leaders and teams who envision solutions to critical challenges come into deeper contact with their sense of purpose — both individually and organizationally. They become more conscious of the choices needed to serve that purpose, and take greater responsibility for change rather than waiting to be told what to do.

A shared vision also provides focus and coordination across groups with diverging interests. Because participants have helped create the vision themselves, they feel genuine ownership — and are less likely to dissipate energy in unrelated directions.

Finally, vision processes engage imagination and intuition alongside analytical thinking. As people experience their own capacity for creative thinking, their confidence grows, encouraging a stronger culture of creativity.

A Note for Facilitators

Facilitating shared vision processes requires more than guiding a discussion about the future. It calls for creating a psychologically safe and reflective space where participants feel comfortable engaging both rational thinking and imagination. This involves careful framing, thoughtful questions, and the ability to guide groups through several stages — from exploring underlying assumptions and values to visualizing concrete images of a desired future. Taking the time to engage a group in this way — allowing it to bring the full potential of analytical thinking, intuition, and imagination to the table — unlocks insights and opportunities that traditional planning processes simply cannot reach.

When a compelling shared vision emerges, many of the common barriers to implementation — silo thinking, resistance to change, “us versus them” dynamics — tend to diminish on their own.

For those wishing to explore this approach further, the mindsets, principles, and practical steps involved, see: Creating Futures that Matter Today: Facilitating Change through Shared Vision (Amazon.com) — Pool, A. and Parker, M. Also available in Norwegian as Felles Visjoner – Veikart til nytenkning og bærekraftig endring — Parker, M. og Pool, A. (Norli bokhandel).

Whether you are a facilitator, a business or nonprofit leader, a consultant or educator, the book will provide you with a step-by-step methodology and practical tools to help you facilitate innovative organizational changes with the help of creating a shared vision.

About the author

Originally from the United States but based in Norway since 1965, Marjorie Parker is a consultant and author specializing in creative leadership and organizational development. With an M.Sc. from the International Center for Studies in Creativity at SUNY Buffalo, she is credited with bridging American creative theory with the collaborative, egalitarian work culture of Scandinavia.

Her book Creating Futures that Matter Today: Facilitating Change through Shared Vision (2017), alongside her earlier work Creating Shared Vision: The Story of a Pioneering Approach to Organizational Revitalization, remains a valuable resource for leaders navigating organizational change.

Both works address questions that matter deeply to modern organizations: how employees can find greater meaning in their work, how to build stronger alignment and focus around a desired future, and how to shape environments that actively support creativity and innovation.

Many teams complain about meetings.

Too many meetings.
Too long meetings.
Meetings that could have been emails.

But the real problem is rarely the number of meetings.

The real problem is lack of intentional design.

Most meetings simply happen because they always have. Over time they become rituals nobody questions anymore. People show up out of habit rather than purpose.

A much more productive approach is to design your meetings deliberately as a team.

One of the most powerful ways to do this is through a simple team or department workshop where people collectively clarify:

• What meetings they actually need

• What information they need from each other

• What they expect from status and sync meetings

• And how these meetings should be structured

This article outlines a facilitation approach you can use to run exactly that workshop.

Why run a “Meeting Design Workshop”?

Meetings are essentially coordination infrastructure.

They are the mechanism through which teams:

• Share information

• Align direction

• Solve problems

• Make decisions

• Maintain momentum

When meetings are poorly designed, the entire organization slows down.

But when meetings are clear, purposeful, and well structured, they become powerful enablers of collaboration.

A meeting design workshop helps teams:

• Reduce unnecessary meetings

• Clarify expectations

• Improve information flow

• Increase focus and productivity

• Create shared ownership of meeting culture

And importantly: the team co-designs the solution.

The 4 Conversations Every Team Needs

A simple way to structure the workshop is with four key questions.

Each question unlocks a different part of the meeting system.

1. What kind of meetings do we actually need?

Start by mapping the types of meetings the team needs.

Not every meeting serves the same purpose.

Common categories include:

Decision meetings

• Making strategic or operational decisions

Problem-solving meetings

• Tackling complex challenges together

Status & sync meetings

• Sharing updates and alignment

Planning meetings

• Prioritization and upcoming work

Learning / reflection meetings

• Retrospectives and continuous improvement

Creative workshops

• Generating ideas and exploring possibilities

Facilitation tip:

Ask participants to write meetings they believe are necessary on sticky notes and cluster them together.

You will often discover that several meetings serve overlapping purposes and can be merged.

2. What information do we need from each other?

Many meetings exist simply because information flow is unclear.

Ask the team:

• What do you need to know from others to do your job well?

• What information do others need from you?

• What information is missing today?

This conversation surfaces the dependencies inside the team.

Often teams realize:

• Some information should be shared asynchronously

• Some updates are unnecessary

• Some critical information is never communicated

By clarifying information needs, meetings become intentional communication channels instead of information dumping grounds.

3. What should a status & sync meeting give us?

Status meetings are often the most common and criticized meetings.

The problem is usually simple:

Nobody has agreed on what the meeting is actually for.

Ask the group:

What should we walk away with after a good status meeting?

Typical answers include:

• Shared awareness of progress

• Visibility of risks and blockers

• Alignment on priorities

• Quick decisions where needed

• Clear next steps

Once expectations are clear, teams often realize status meetings should focus on exceptions rather than reporting.

Instead of long updates, the meeting becomes:

• What changed

• What is blocked

• Where help is needed

4. How should our meetings be structured?

Finally, the team designs the operating system of their meetings.

Discuss and agree on:

Frequency

• Daily

• Weekly

• Monthly

• Quarterly

Duration

• 15 minutes

• 30 minutes

• 60 minutes

Agenda structure

Example for a weekly sync:

1. Key updates (5 min)

2. Risks and blockers (10 min)

3. Decisions needed (10 min)

4. Coordination & next steps (5 min)

Roles

Clarify who:

• Facilitates the meeting

• Keeps time

• Documents decisions

Good meetings rarely happen by accident.

They are carefully structured containers for collaboration.

A Simple Workshop Agenda (90 minutes)

Here is a practical facilitation structure.

1. Context (10 min)
Explain why the team is redesigning its meeting system.

2. Meeting types (20 min)
Identify and cluster the meetings the team actually needs.

3. Information needs (20 min)
Map what information people need from each other.

4. Status meeting expectations (20 min)
Define what success looks like for sync meetings.

5. Structure & agreements (15 min)
Design the format, frequency and agenda.

6. Wrap-up (5 min)
Capture agreements and next steps.

At the end, the team should have a clear meeting architecture.

The Hidden Benefit: Ownership

When leaders redesign meetings alone, the team often resists the changes.

When the team co-creates the system, something different happens.

People feel ownership.

They understand why meetings exist.

And they become more disciplined about making them work.

Meetings stop being a burden and become tools for collaboration.

Final Reflection

Meetings are not the problem.

Unintentional meetings are.

A short workshop like this can transform the way a team collaborates by turning meetings from default habits into deliberately designed interactions.

When teams design their own meeting system, they create:

• Better focus

• Better information flow

• Better decisions

• Better use of time

And perhaps most importantly:

More meaningful conversations.

If you want help facilitating this in your organization

Designing productive meetings is a surprisingly powerful lever for improving collaboration, leadership and team effectiveness.

If your team struggles with meeting overload, unclear communication, or lack of alignment, I help organizations run facilitated workshops to redesign their collaboration systems.

Reach out if you would like support facilitating a Meeting Design Workshop with your team or department.

In coaching, a coach supports one person — the coachee — in gaining clarity, insight, and forward movement.

In facilitation, the same thing happens.

The only difference is that the coachee is a group of people.

At their core, coaching and facilitation share the same philosophy:

The answers do not live with the expert. They live with the people in the system.

The role of the coach — or facilitator — is to create the conditions where those answers can emerge.

The Shared Foundation

Both coaching and facilitation are built on a profound shift in leadership thinking.

Instead of telling people what to do, the practitioner helps people think better.

This approach draws from decades of research in coaching psychology, organizational learning, and collective intelligence.

Two foundational ideas are particularly relevant:

1. People are more committed to solutions they help create.

2. Groups can think better together when the right conditions are present.

Both coaching and facilitation are practices designed to unlock those conditions.

Coaching: Supporting One Mind

In coaching, the process focuses on an individual.

The coach:

• Asks powerful questions

• Listens deeply

• Reflects patterns and insights

• Helps the person see new possibilities

This approach is strongly influenced by Edgar Schein’s concept of Humble Inquiry, which suggests that meaningful change begins when leaders shift from giving advice to asking genuine questions.

In this model, the coach does not provide answers.

Instead, the coach helps the coachee access their own insight and clarity.

As coaching pioneer John Whitmore, author of Coaching for Performance, famously wrote:

“Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance.”

The key word here is unlocking.

The wisdom already exists in the individual.

The coach helps reveal it.

Facilitation: Supporting Many Minds

Facilitation works in the same way — but at a different scale.

Instead of helping one person think better, the facilitator helps a group think better together.

The facilitator:

• Designs the thinking process

• Structures the conversation

• Creates psychological safety

• Encourages equal participation

• Surfaces different perspectives

Here, the group becomes the coachee.

The facilitator is essentially coaching the collective intelligence of the room.

Research on Collective Intelligence

This idea is supported by research on collective intelligence.

A landmark study by Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone at MIT found that groups possess a measurable collective intelligence factor — often called the “c-factor.”

Interestingly, the research showed that group performance was not driven by the smartest person in the room.

Instead, it depended on factors such as:

• Social sensitivity

• Equal participation in conversations

• Psychological safety

These are precisely the conditions that facilitators and coaches help create.

When a facilitator structures a conversation well, they are not just managing time or activities.

They are increasing the intelligence of the group.

Psychological Safety: The Hidden Ingredient

Another important research stream comes from Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety at Harvard Business School.

Her research shows that teams perform better when people feel safe to:

• Speak up

• Share ideas

• Admit uncertainty

• Challenge assumptions

Coaches create this safety for individuals.

Facilitators create it for groups.

Without psychological safety, both coaching conversations and facilitated workshops fail to unlock deeper thinking.

Real Examples: Coaching vs Facilitation in Practice

To make the connection clearer, here are a few real-world examples.

Example 1: A Leader Coaching an Employee

A manager notices that one of their team members feels stuck in their role.

Instead of giving advice, the manager asks questions like:

• What part of your work energizes you the most?

• What would success look like for you in six months?

• What options do you see?

Through this conversation, the employee realizes they want to take on more responsibility in a new area.

The insight did not come from the manager.

It emerged from the employee’s own thinking.

This is coaching.

Example 2: A Facilitated Strategy Workshop

A leadership team needs to decide on strategic priorities for the next year.

Instead of presenting a finished strategy, a facilitator designs a process where leaders:

1. Individually reflect on emerging trends.

2. Share perspectives in small groups.

3. Cluster themes together.

4. Debate priorities openly.

5. Converge on a shared direction.

The facilitator does not define the strategy.

They design the thinking process that allows the group to discover it together.

This is facilitation.

Example 3: Improving Meetings Through Facilitation

A department complains that their meetings are ineffective.

Instead of telling them how meetings should work, a facilitator asks the team questions like:

• What decisions actually need to happen in meetings?

• What information do you need from each other?

• Which meetings create value and which ones waste time?

Through structured exercises, the team redesigns their entire meeting structure.

The facilitator did not impose the solution.

The team co-created it.

Example 4: Innovation Workshops

In innovation work, facilitators often run design thinking workshops.

Participants might explore a challenge by:

• Mapping user needs

• Generating ideas

• Prototyping solutions

• Testing assumptions

The facilitator does not invent the ideas.

Instead, they create the environment where participants generate better ideas together.

This is collective coaching in action.

The Real Skill Is Not Answers — It Is Process

Both coaching and facilitation are often misunderstood.

Many people assume the value lies in expertise or advice.

But the real skill lies somewhere else.

It lies in process design and presence.

Great coaches and facilitators know how to:

• Ask the right questions

• Hold space for reflection

• Surface assumptions

• Guide conversations without dominating them

• Help people discover insight themselves

They are not solving the problem.

They are helping others become capable of solving it.

From Individual Insight to Collective Intelligence

Where coaching unlocks individual insight, facilitation unlocks collective intelligence.

This distinction matters enormously in organizations.

Most complex challenges today cannot be solved by a single expert or leader.

They require:

• Multiple perspectives

• Shared understanding

• Alignment

• Ownership

Facilitation helps groups move from fragmented thinking to shared clarity.

It transforms meetings into thinking environments.

The Facilitator as a Group Coach

Seen through this lens, facilitation becomes easier to understand.

A facilitator is essentially a group coach.

Someone who helps a team:

• Clarify what really matters

• See blind spots

• Align around priorities

• Make better decisions together

Instead of coaching one mind, they are coaching the intelligence of the system.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Modern leadership increasingly requires facilitation skills.

In complex environments, leaders cannot rely solely on authority or expertise.

Instead, they must enable the intelligence of the people around them.

Leadership today is increasingly about:

• Asking better questions

• Creating space for thinking

• Structuring productive conversations

• Aligning people around shared understanding

In other words:

The best leaders are often the best facilitators.

A Simple Way to Think About It

You can summarize the relationship like this:

Coaching = Facilitating the thinking of one person

Facilitation = Coaching the thinking of a group

Different scale.

Same philosophy.

Same intention.

Same impact.

References and Influences

This perspective draws on several influential research streams:

• John Whitmore — Coaching for Performance

• Edgar Schein — Humble Inquiry

• Amy Edmondson — Psychological Safety research

• Anita Woolley & Thomas Malone (MIT) — Collective Intelligence research

• David Clutterbuck — Team coaching research

Together, their work reinforces a powerful idea:

Better questions and better conversations lead to better thinking — individually and collectively.

Want to Go Deeper?

If you are interested in facilitation, leadership, and collective intelligence, I regularly share ideas, frameworks, and practical tools in my newsletter.

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And if your organization wants to strengthen its ability to think, align, and decide better together, feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to help.

Transformation is not a project.
It is a shift from now to future — across strategy, structure, processes, technology, and culture — with people at the center.

The sketch above captures a powerful truth: transformation is multi-dimensional. If you over-focus on one element, you destabilize the whole system. If you hold them together, you create momentum.

Here is how I think about leading transformation journeys and where leaders should focus.

1. Start With Direction: Strategy and Revenue

Transformation without direction creates noise.

Before launching initiatives, clarify:

• What future are we moving toward?

• What strategic choices are we making?

• How does this create value — for customers, society, and the business?

• Where will revenue or impact come from?

Too many organizations jump into tools and restructuring without strategic clarity. Transformation must answer the “where and why” before the “how.”

Clarity reduces resistance. Ambiguity increases it.

2. Put People at the Center — Not as an Afterthought

At the center of the drawing is one word: People.

Not technology. Not process. Not structure.

People.

Transformation succeeds or fails based on:

• Psychological safety

• Trust in leadership

• Ownership and engagement

• Capability and competence

• State of mind

You cannot impose transformation. You can only invite people into it.

That requires listening, involvement, and co-creation. When people understand the purpose and feel part of the solution, energy replaces resistance.

3. Align Leadership and Culture

Strategy may be written on slides.
Culture is lived in meetings.

If leadership behavior does not match the transformation narrative, credibility collapses.

Ask:

• Are leaders modeling the change?

• Are incentives aligned with the new direction?

• Are we rewarding collaboration or protecting silos?

• Is experimentation safe?

Culture is not changed by communication campaigns.
It shifts when leadership behavior shifts.

4. Redesign Processes for Flow, Not Control

Transformation often exposes friction:

• Slow decision cycles

• Handover bottlenecks

• Redundant approvals

• Lack of clarity in roles

Instead of layering more governance, redesign for flow:

• What decisions can move closer to the frontline?

• What steps create no real value?

• Where are we optimizing locally but harming the whole?

Efficiency is not about doing more.
It is about removing what no longer serves.

5. Clarify Organizational Structure

Structure should support strategy — not resist it.

If you are aiming for customer-centricity but your organization is siloed by function, friction is guaranteed.

Transformation questions:

• Do we organize around customers, products, or internal departments?

• Are roles and mandates clear?

• Is accountability visible?

Structure communicates priorities more loudly than strategy documents ever will.

6. Use Technology as an Enabler — Not the Driver

Technology appears in the drawing as tools — databases, systems, devices.

Technology should enable:

• Better decisions

• Simpler workflows

• Improved user experience

• Scalable value creation

But technology alone never transforms an organization.

Digital transformation fails when it becomes a system implementation instead of a behavioral shift supported by technology.

7. Manage the Journey Between “Now” and “Future”

Transformation is a journey across tension:

• Stability vs. change

• Efficiency vs. experimentation

• Short-term performance vs. long-term direction

Leaders must hold this tension without overreacting.

Progress rarely looks linear. There will be confusion, fatigue, and pushback.

The key is rhythm:

• Clear milestones

• Visible quick wins

• Ongoing communication

• Continuous feedback loops

Transformation is less about one big launch and more about sustained movement.

8. Integrate — Don’t Fragment

The biggest risk in transformation is fragmentation:

• Strategy team working separately from operations

• HR driving culture initiatives disconnected from business goals

• IT implementing tools without user insight

• Leadership talking change without redesigning processes

The drawing reminds us: all elements are connected.

Transformation leadership is about integration.

Seeing the whole system.

Designing across boundaries.

Connecting dots others don’t see.

Final Thought: Transformation Is Human Before It Is Structural

Organizations don’t transform.
People do.

If you focus only on structure, you get compliance.
If you focus on people, clarity, and alignment, you get commitment.

Transformation journeys are complex — but they become manageable when you work systemically:

• Strategy gives direction

• Structure gives shape

• Process gives flow

• Technology gives enablement

• Leadership and culture give energy

• People make it real

And that journey — from “Now” to “Future” — is where true value is created.

Ready to Lead a Transformation — But Want to Do It Right?

If your organization is:

• Navigating restructuring or downsizing

• Redesigning processes for efficiency and impact

• Clarifying strategy and direction

• Strengthening leadership and culture

• Implementing digital or service transformation

• Trying to move from silos to collaboration

… you don’t have to do it alone.

I am currently available and actively looking for new professional challenges where I can contribute as a Senior Service Designer, Innovation Lead, and Transformation Facilitator.

I help leaders and teams:

• Align strategy with execution

• Simplify complexity

• Improve processes and decision flows

• Build engagement and ownership

• Design transformation journeys that actually stick

If you are leading or preparing for a transformation journey and want to approach it in a more integrated, human-centered way and you need someone who can connect strategy, people, structure, process, and technology — and turn ambition into movement — I am always open for a conversation.

📩 Send me a message.
☕ Book a coffee.
🤝 Or introduce me to someone leading change who could use support.

Transformation is too important to approach randomly.

Let’s design it intentionally — together.

I like simple drawings.

They often say more about organizations than 200-slide strategy decks.

In this image, four roles appear: Controllers, Creatives, Producers, and at the center, Glue. It looks almost playful. But it captures something essential about how products and services actually come to life.

At its core, product and service development is not about ideas.
It is about holding three forces in tension:

• Desirability – Do people actually want this?

• Feasibility – Can we realistically build and sustain it?

• Viability – Does it make business sense?

When one dominates, the system tilts.

Viability – The Logic of Sustainability

The Controllers represent viability.

They care about:

• Financial health

• Strategic alignment

• Risk

• Measurable outcomes

Without viability, innovation becomes expensive experimentation. We build things that impress but do not endure.

But when viability dominates, fear quietly shapes decisions. Short-term control replaces long-term courage. Exploration shrinks.

Viability is not the enemy of innovation. It is its stabilizer. But it cannot lead alone.

Feasibility – The Discipline of Delivery

The Producers represent feasibility.

They care about:

• Capacity

• Competence

• Systems

• Processes

• Operational reality

They live in the tension between ambition and resources.

Without feasibility, strategy remains conceptual. Roadmaps become fiction. Teams burn out trying to deliver what the system cannot support.

But when feasibility dominates, the organization slowly becomes allergic to change. “This is how we do things” hardens into culture.

Feasibility is not about limitation. It is about responsible realization.

Desirability – The Courage to Care About Users

The Creatives represent desirability.

They ask:

• Does this solve a real problem?

• Is it intuitive?

• Does it matter to people?

• Is there product–market fit?

Without desirability, organizations become efficient at producing irrelevance.

But when desirability stands alone, ideas remain beautiful and disconnected from reality.

Desirability gives direction.
Feasibility gives structure.
Viability gives endurance.

The Most Undervalued Capability: Glue

At the center sits Glue.

The one who:

• Connects finance and design

• Translates constraints into creative possibilities

• Aligns delivery teams with strategic intent

• Holds difficult conversations

• Builds shared understanding

Glue is rarely a formal job title. It often shows up in:

• Strong product leaders

• Service designers

• Innovation leads

• Facilitators

• Mature product owners

Glue is not soft. It is systemic.

Without Glue:

• Controllers push back.

• Creatives push forward.

• Producers protect stability.

• Silos win.

With Glue:

• Trade-offs become conscious.

• Tension becomes productive.

• Decisions become clearer.

Most organizations do not struggle because of lack of talent.
They struggle because no one is intentionally holding the whole system together.

A Quiet Diagnostic

If you look at your current context, where is the imbalance?

• Are financial controls suffocating experimentation?

• Are delivery teams overloaded and reactive?

• Are user insights disconnected from strategic priorities?

• Or is no one bridging the conversations that matter most?

The quality of your products often reflects the quality of the conversations between these roles.

Product Excellence Is an Orchestration Problem

Great product and service development is not about maximizing one dimension.

It is about consciously orchestrating:

• What users need

• What teams can sustain

• What the business can support

And developing the capability to move between these perspectives without losing alignment.

That orchestration does not happen by accident. It is designed.

If You Are Navigating This Tension

Many leaders I speak with feel this pressure:

• Finance pulling one way

• Delivery teams overwhelmed

• User expectations evolving

• Strategy unclear

If you are working in that space, trying to create coherence across disciplines, reduce friction, and strengthen collaboration, this is precisely the work I support.

Through facilitation, advisory work, and coaching, I help leaders and teams:

• Clarify strategic intent

• Strengthen cross-functional dialogue

• Navigate complexity without oversimplifying

• Build stronger “Glue” capabilities inside the organization

If this reflection resonates with where you are right now, let’s have a conversation.

Sometimes what organizations need most is not a new framework.
It is better alignment between the people already there.

We live and work in a world that feels increasingly unstable.

Volatile.
Uncertain.
Complex.
Ambiguous.

VUCA is no longer a theoretical framework from military strategy textbooks. It’s Tuesday morning in your organization.

Add to that:

• Climate transitions

• Digital transformation

• AI disruption

• Budget cuts and reorganizations

• Shifting citizen expectations

• Talent shortages

• Political polarization

And suddenly we’re not just dealing with “problems.”

We’re dealing with wicked problems.

What Makes a Problem Wicked?

Wicked problems:

• Have no clear definition

• Have no single right answer

• Involve many stakeholders with conflicting perspectives

• Change while you’re trying to solve them

• Cannot be solved once and for all

Healthcare reform. Urban development. Digital inclusion. Youth unemployment. Organizational transformation.

You don’t “fix” them.

You navigate them.

And that’s where service design becomes essential.

Service Design as a Navigation System

Service design is often misunderstood as post-it notes, workshops, or journey maps.

But at its core, service design is something much deeper:

A structured way of thinking and working in complexity.

It helps organizations move from:

• Assumptions → Insight

• Silos → Systems

• Opinions → Evidence

• Big ideas → Tested prototypes

• Fear → Learning

In a VUCA world, service design doesn’t remove uncertainty.
It makes uncertainty workable.

1. From Chaos to Clarity

In volatile environments, people rush to solutions.

Service design slows us down just enough to ask:

• What problem are we actually trying to solve?

• For whom?

• In what context?

• What does success look like?

Through stakeholder mapping, user research, system visualization, and journey mapping, complexity becomes visible.

And once you can see the system, you can start influencing it.

2. From Complexity to Collaboration

Wicked problems live between departments.

But most organizations are structured in silos.

Service design brings:

• Cross-functional workshops

• Co-creation sessions

• Shared language

• Collective sense-making

Instead of fighting complexity, teams learn to hold it together.

This builds alignment, ownership, and psychological safety — all prerequisites for innovation in uncertain environments.

3. From Risk Avoidance to Safe Experimentation

In ambiguous situations, many organizations freeze.

Service design introduces prototyping as a mindset:

• Test small

• Learn fast

• Reduce risk early

• Iterate continuously

Instead of betting everything on a five-year master plan, you create learning loops.

In a VUCA world, adaptability is more valuable than certainty.

4. From Outputs to Real Value

Many organizations measure activity:

• Number of projects

• Number of initiatives

• Number of digital tools launched

Service design shifts the focus to outcomes:

• Did it create value for users?

• Did it simplify processes?

• Did it reduce friction?

• Did it improve trust?

• Did it increase engagement?

In complex systems, value is relational and systemic — not just transactional.

The Deeper Layer: State of Mind in Complexity

Here’s something we rarely talk about.

Navigating wicked problems is not only about tools and methods.

It’s about state of mind.

In VUCA environments:

• Fear rises

• Control tightens

• Defensiveness increases

• Blame spreads

But service design, when practiced well, cultivates:

• Curiosity

• Openness

• Empathy

• Systems thinking

• Shared responsibility

The external complexity mirrors our internal state.

When leaders operate from clarity rather than fear, complexity becomes manageable.

When teams feel safe, creativity emerges.

When organizations listen deeply, innovation follows.

Service Design Is Not About Control

It’s about:

• Seeing the whole system

• Engaging the right people

• Learning continuously

• Designing with, not for

• Creating value that lasts

In a VUCA world, control is an illusion.

But direction is not.

Service design provides direction.

If You’re Facing a Wicked Problem Right Now

Ask yourself:

• Have we truly understood the problem?

• Have we involved the people affected?

• Have we visualized the system?

• Are we testing small before scaling big?

• Are we measuring real value — or just activity?

If the answer to several of these is “no,” you don’t need more pressure.

You need better design.

Final Thought

VUCA is not going away.

Wicked problems will not disappear.

But organizations that embrace service design as a way of thinking — not just a toolkit — will:

• Move faster with less chaos

• Collaborate better across silos

• Reduce waste and friction

• Create meaningful, measurable value

• And build resilience for whatever comes next

The question is not whether your organization faces complexity.

The question is:

Do you have a way to navigate it?

Ready to Navigate Complexity Differently?

If your organization is facing:

• A messy transformation

• A stalled innovation initiative

• Cross-silo friction

• Unclear direction

• A wicked problem that refuses to “go away”

You don’t need more pressure.

You need clarity, alignment, and a structured way to move forward.

That’s where I can help.

As a Senior Service Designer and Innovation Lead with deep experience navigating complexity in both public and private sectors, I help leaders and teams:

• Make sense of messy systems

• Align stakeholders around real problems

• Design practical, testable solutions

• Create measurable value — not just activity

I’m currently available and actively looking for new professional challenges where I can contribute strategically and hands-on.

If you’re working on something complex and important — let’s talk.

Send me a message.
Book a coffee.

Invite me into the conversation

Wicked problems don’t solve themselves.

But with the right mindset and the right design approach, they become navigable.

Let’s design value in complexity, together.

In a world obsessed with clarity, dashboards, foresight and predictive analytics, I have been thinking about an unlikely leadership metaphor: Mr. Magoo.

Mr. Magoo is famously near-sighted.
He misinterprets situations.
He walks confidently into chaos.
He mistakes construction sites for golf courses.
And somehow, he keeps moving.

At first glance, this looks like incompetence.

But in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) perhaps there is something surprisingly relevant in his approach.

The Illusion of Perfect Vision

Modern leadership culture tells us:

• Anticipate everything

• Analyze all risks

• Forecast scenarios

• Eliminate uncertainty

But VUCA environments do not reward perfect prediction.
They reward adaptability.

Leaders today face:

• Shifting markets

• AI disruption

• Geopolitical instability

• Continuous organizational restructuring

• Emotional fatigue in teams

No one sees clearly.

The myth is that some leaders do.

They don’t.

They simply move anyway.

What Mr. Magoo Gets Right (Accidentally)

Mr. Magoo does three things surprisingly well:

1. He moves forward despite incomplete information

He does not freeze.

In many organizations, paralysis is more dangerous than error.
Over-analysis creates delay. Delay creates decay.

2. He trusts his internal map

Even when the external world is chaotic, he acts from an inner certainty.

Not arrogance, but orientation.

In leadership, this translates to:

• Clear values

• Clear intent

• Clear direction of travel
  Even when the path itself is unclear.

3. He doesn’t collapse psychologically

He misreads situations constantly, yet he remains calm.

This is not about ignorance.

It’s about state of mind.

Leadership Is Not About Seeing Everything

In VUCA conditions, the leader’s job is not to eliminate uncertainty.

It is to:

• Create psychological stability inside uncertainty

• Provide direction without pretending to control outcomes

• Normalize ambiguity instead of fighting it

The leader who waits for perfect clarity will always be late.

The leader who acts recklessly without reflection will create damage.

The leader who acts with grounded presence, that is different.

The Real Lesson: Internal Clarity > External Certainty

In complex environments, the most important “vision” is not external forecasting.

It is internal clarity.

When leaders:

• Understand their own thinking

• Are not hijacked by fear-based assumptions

• Separate facts from interpretation

• See that experience is created internally

They become less reactive and more responsive.

They don’t need perfect sight.

They need grounded awareness.

From Change Management to Change Presence

Traditional leadership asks:
“How do we manage change?”

VUCA leadership asks:
“How do we stay steady while everything changes?”

That steadiness is not about strategy.

It is about state of mind.

A calm nervous system scales better than a detailed PowerPoint.

The Danger of False Confidence

Of course, Mr. Magoo is a cartoon.

In real leadership, blindness without awareness is dangerous.

The point is not to ignore reality.

The point is this:

You will never see the full picture anyway.

So the question becomes:

• Can you act without illusion of control?

• Can you hold direction without rigidity?

• Can you admit uncertainty without losing authority?

That is modern leadership.

A Question for You

Where are you waiting for perfect clarity before moving?

And what would shift if you accepted that clarity often emerges after action — not before it?

If this resonates with you, explore how your state of mind shapes your leadership capacity more than your strategic plan ever will.

VUCA is not going away.

But grounded leaders can thrive inside it.

And maybe, just maybe, Mr. Magoo would make a surprisingly resilient CEO.

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

Just 1,5 years ago, I received a message that stopped me in my tracks: “Your position has been downsized.” Five seemingly simple words, but they changed everything.

My role was gone, my department shut down, and overnight what once felt stable and certain disappeared. I wasn’t just losing a job, I was losing structure, identity, daily rhythm, and a sense of “this is how life is supposed to be.”

I wrote about that experience in a post called “Downsized, Not Defeated,” where I shared not only what happened, but how I navigated shock, anxiety, self-doubt, and eventually clarity and direction. Being downsized wasn’t just a career setback, it forced me to look inward, to examine how I respond to life’s most disappointing and unfair moments.

Believe or not, one month ago I was back to the same painful situation, that is why, in this post, I want to explore how to deal with unfairness, not as an abstract concept, but as a personal vulnerable reality. Because if you’re reading this after losing something important, a job, a relationship, a chance, a dream, you are not alone.

1. First: Let Yourself Feel It (Fully)

When unfairness hits, it often comes with shock, anger, sadness, denial, even shame. My first instinct after being downsized was to sprint into action: update my CV, start applying, reach out to every contact I had. But that wasn’t healing. It was distraction.

Instead, I learned to:

• Notice what I was feeling

• Name it

• Let it surface without judgment

You don’t have to be fine immediately, you just have to be honest with yourself.

2. Separate What Happened From the Story You Tell

An unfair event is what happened.
Your interpretation, the meaning you add, is a story.

When I lost my job, a part of me immediately whispered:

• “This means you weren’t good enough.”

• “This is personal.”

• “Everyone will see you as a failure.”

But facts and stories are different:

• Fact: The organization reorganized and downsized roles.

• Story: “I am not valuable.”

Acknowledging the difference doesn’t diminish the pain, it gives you clarity, and clarity restores agency.

3. Focus on What You Can Control

Unfair situations by definition involve forces outside your control. When I was downsized, whether that decision was “fair” or not had no impact on the reality: my role was gone.

But I could control:

• How I structured my days

• Whether I kept a routine

• Who I talked to

• What I learned during the process

Focusing on what’s in your control is not denial. It’s empowerment.

4. Don’t Let Bitterness Become Your Identity

One of the most dangerous traps after unfairness is identity takeover.

It’s easy to start thinking:

• “I am the person who was wronged.”

• “This happened to me.”

I’ve been there too. But holding on to bitterness keeps you stuck in the moment of hurt rather than moving toward what’s next.

You can acknowledge injustice without becoming defined by it, and that’s where true freedom begins.

5. Ask the Hard but Helpful Questions

Instead of “Why is this happening to me?” try:

• What is this pushing me to learn?

• What boundary needs strengthening?

• What opportunity is hidden in this challenge?

The answers won’t come overnight but they start the shift from reaction to reflection.

6. Respond From Values, Not Emotion

Your first reaction might be driven by emotion, that’s normal.

What matters more is your second reaction, the one that comes after a pause, a breath, a moment of grounding.

Ask:

• Who do I want to be in this moment?

• What response aligns with my long-term values?

The difference between emotional and values-based responses is enormous.

7. Rebuild With Intention

Dealing with unfairness isn’t just about surviving it, it’s about rebuilding from it.

In my case, the downsizing became:

• A period to reflect on what matters

• A time to protect my mental and emotional health

• An opening to explore new professional directions and opportunities

• A reminder that my worth is not tied to a single position or role

Out of endings can come beginnings, sometimes clearer, stronger, more aligned with your purpose.

A Short Reflection & Meditation on Unfairness

Before you move on, pause.

Take a breath.

If you are currently in the middle of something that feels unfair — don’t rush past it.

Sit comfortably.
Close your eyes if that feels safe.
Take three slow breaths.

And gently reflect:

1. What actually happened?
Not the interpretation. Not the story. Just the facts.

2. What am I feeling right now?
Name it without judging it. Anger. Sadness. Disappointment. Fear.

Let the feeling be there — without trying to fix it.

3. What story am I telling myself about this?
Is it absolutely true?
Could there be another way to see this?

Now shift your attention inward.

Notice that:

• Thoughts are appearing.

• Feelings are moving.

• Sensations are present.

But there is also something deeper — an awareness that is steady.

Unfairness touches your circumstances.
It does not touch your core.

Take another slow breath.

And ask yourself:

• Who do I want to be in response to this?

• What would acting from clarity, not hurt, look like?

• If this were happening for my growth, what might it be teaching me?

You don’t need perfect answers.

Just allow space.

Sometimes resilience is not force.
It is remembering that your state of mind shapes how you experience what happens , even when you cannot control what happens.

When you’re ready, open your eyes.

You are still here.
You are still capable.
You are not defeated.

And this chapter — unfair as it may feel — is not the end of your story.

Final Reflection

Unfairness is a part of life we try to avoid, but can’t escape.

What we can do is choose how we respond.

You can let unfairness define you
or you can let it deepen you.

What matters most is not what happened to you,
but who you choose to become because of it.

If This Helped…

If you know someone going through a downsizing, rejection, or something that feels unfair — share this with them.

Sometimes we don’t need solutions.
We just need perspective.

Pass it on.

Most leadership development still focuses on the outside.

Better strategies.
Better KPIs.
Better communication techniques.
Better feedback models.
Better execution frameworks.

All useful.

But what if the real leverage point in leadership isn’t external at all?

What if the quality of our leadership is shaped far more by how we experience reality than by the circumstances we are trying to manage?

This is where the Inside-Out understanding becomes transformative.

What Is the Inside-Out Understanding?

The Inside-Out understanding points to a simple but profound insight:

We do not experience life directly through circumstances.
We experience life through our thinking in the moment.

Our experience is generated from the inside out.

Not by the board meeting.
Not by the reorganization.
Not by the market downturn.
Not by the difficult conversation.

Circumstances are real.
But our psychological experience of them is created internally.

In other words:

Two leaders can be in the exact same situation —
one feels pressure, the other sees opportunity.

The difference is not the circumstance.
It is the thinking occurring in the moment.

And most of the time, we don’t realize this. We assume our feelings are coming from “out there.”

That misunderstanding drives a huge amount of stress, overreaction, and unnecessary complexity in leadership.

The Iceberg We Don’t See

In our last State of Mind Oslo gathering, we explored the iceberg metaphor.

Above the surface:

• Behavior

• Decisions

• Reactions

• Communication

Below the surface:

• Thought

• Assumptions

• Beliefs

• Moment-to-moment mental activity

Most leadership interventions focus above the waterline.

But leadership quality is shaped below it.

If I believe my stress is caused by my team, I will try to fix my team.

If I believe my frustration is caused by resistance, I will try to eliminate resistance.

If I believe my insecurity is caused by uncertainty, I will try to control uncertainty.

All reasonable responses — based on a misunderstanding of where experience is coming from.

Why This Matters in Leadership

1. Clarity under pressure

When leaders see that stress is a product of temporary thinking, they stop treating every stressful thought as truth. That space creates clarity.

Clarity improves decisions.

2. Psychological stability

If your state of mind depends entirely on external conditions, leadership becomes exhausting.
If you understand that your experience is internally generated, you regain psychological stability.

Stability builds trust.

3. Less reactivity, more wisdom

Reactivity is usually a reaction to thought, not to reality.
When we see this, we respond instead of react.

And teams feel the difference.

4. Resilience without force

Resilience is not toughness.
It is the natural capacity to reset when we understand how experience works.

Leaders who understand this recover faster. They do not carry yesterday’s thinking into tomorrow’s strategy.

From Change Management to Change Leadership

Organizations today are not changing for a season. They are in continuous transformation.

Many leaders try to manage change externally while being internally overwhelmed.

But when leaders understand the Inside-Out nature of experience:

• They can hold clarity without certainty.

• They can stabilize teams while reinventing strategy.

• They create capacity for change by modeling psychological steadiness.

That steadiness cannot be trained as a technique.

It comes from insight.

This Is Not Philosophy. It’s Practical.

This understanding is not about positive thinking.
It is not about ignoring reality.
It is not about blaming leaders for their emotions.

It is about seeing how the mind works.

When that becomes clear:

• Difficult conversations feel lighter.

• Strategic uncertainty feels manageable.

• Conflict becomes less personal.

• Creativity returns.

And leadership becomes less about control
and more about presence.

An Invitation to Reflect

Before trying to fix your next situation, pause and ask:

• What am I thinking right now?

• Am I treating this thought as absolute truth?

• If this thinking settled, would the situation look different?

Not to manipulate your thinking.

But to see how experience is being created.

That insight alone changes the quality of leadership.

State of Mind Oslo

This will be the core topic of our next State of Mind Oslo gathering at Mesh Youngstorget.

We explore these ideas not as theory, but through lived experience, reflection, and application to real leadership challenges.

Very few seats remain for this upcoming session.

If you are curious about leadership beyond techniques, leadership grounded in psychological understanding, reach out.

The most powerful shift in leadership does not happen in strategy decks.

It happens in the mind of the leader.

And from there, everything changes.

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

There was a time when leadership meant having the answers.
Clear direction. Decisive action. Strong opinions.

That time has passed.

Today’s leaders are navigating complexity, ambiguity, and constant change. Problems don’t arrive neatly packaged, and solutions rarely come from a single perspective. In this landscape, leadership is less about control and more about creating the conditions where people can think well together.

That’s where facilitation quietly steps in.

From “Leading the Way” to “Holding the Space”

Facilitation isn’t about standing back or being neutral.
It’s about being intentionally present.

A facilitative leader knows how to:

• Slow the conversation down when clarity is missing

• Surface what’s not being said — without forcing it

• Invite multiple perspectives without losing direction

• Guide a group through uncertainty rather than around it

This kind of leadership doesn’t demand attention. It earns trust.

Why Facilitation Is a Human Skill. Not a Soft One

Facilitation is often misunderstood as a “nice-to-have” capability. Something useful in workshops, but secondary in real decision-making.

In reality, it’s one of the most strategic skills a leader can develop.

Why?

Because facilitation is about:

• How decisions are made, not just what decisions are made

• How people feel in the process, not just the outcome

• How ownership is created, not just alignment

When people are involved in shaping the path forward, commitment follows naturally. Not because they were convinced but because they were included.

The Invisible Power of Psychological Safety

Great facilitation creates something subtle but powerful: psychological safety.

Not by setting rules or naming values, but by:

• Asking better questions than giving better answers

• Making room for uncertainty without rushing to closure

• Treating disagreement as information, not resistance

When people feel safe, they don’t just participate, they think. And thinking together is where real progress begins.

Practical Impacts of Facilitative Leadership

When leaders adopt a facilitative mindset, organisations benefit in multiple ways:

• Better decision-making because diverse viewpoints are surfaced and integrated.

• Stronger engagement because people contribute from their strengths.

• Greater innovation because psychological safety encourages risk-taking and creative thinking.

• More resilient collaboration because teams can navigate conflict and uncertainty together.

Facilitation isn’t about relinquishing leadership. It’s about elevating it — from being the person who decides to being the person who enables the team to decide well together.

Shifting Mindsets: From “Leader as Expert” to “Leader as Enabler”

If you want to broaden your leadership impact today, one of the most effective shifts is this: see your role not as offering all the answers but as creating space for collective insight.

That doesn’t mean being passive or neutral about outcomes, it means being intentional about process: designing conversations, guiding thinking, and harnessing human energy toward shared goals. The facilitative leader doesn’t just lead work, they lead the way people work together.

Facilitation in an Age of AI

As AI takes over more analytical and operational tasks, the uniquely human aspects of leadership become even more valuable.

Facilitation lives right there:

• Reading the room

• Sensing energy shifts

• Navigating emotions and meaning

• Helping groups find clarity without being told what to think

These are not tasks that can be automated. They require presence, judgment, and a calm state of mind.

The Shift That Changes Everything

The most powerful mindset shift for modern leaders is this:

My role is not to provide the answer, but to design the conversation where the best answer can emerge.

That’s facilitation.

Not as a technique.
Not as a workshop format.
But as a way of showing up.

And once you see leadership through that lens, everything changes — including how people experience working with you.

I hope this post, made sense and you found it useful.

If “HELL YEAH!”, please like it and share it in social media so more people can get can also benefit from it :-)

I would also appreciate if you subscribe, and give some comments here if you wonder something and want to give me some feedback. I would love to read your input here!

If you have a Substack yourself and like my content, I would love for you to recommend “Facili-station” to your subscribers.

Have a nice one!!

Looking for a coach?

In service of those who serve others.

Leadership is hard. Whether you’re stepping into management, leading an entire organization or wondering about your career, the challenges are real: confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes isolating.

I offer a tailored 1:1 or team coaching quarterly program to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. I’ve walked in your shoes, and I’ll work with you to build the resilience and relational skills needed to lead well, beyond just the work.

If this sounds like what you need, let’s talk. Email me at jose@facilistation.com to book a no-strings attached, no-obligation call to talk about your needs and see what I can offer that will fit you the best. Because coaching isn’t expensive. Staying stuck is.

You should see the cost of a life and work that you don’t love... sometimes one good conversation can change your life and your career forever.

Looking for a facilitator and workshop designer?

If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.

Leaders today are expected to make good decisions in conditions that are anything but simple. They’re asked to adapt, reduce costs, reorganise, adopt new technologies, and lead people through ongoing change. These often happen at the same time, and with little room for error. Teams are capable and motivated, yet progress can feel heavy. Meetings happen. Communication happens. Agreement happens. And still, not so much actually changes.

This isn’t because leaders or teams aren’t trying hard enough. From what I’ve seen, it’s mostly because action is expected before people have had the chance to truly make sense of the situation they’re in.

The hidden problem: acting before understanding

In many organisations, the pressure is to move quickly. Strategies are announced, directions are set, and people are asked to align and execute. What often gets skipped is the work of sense-making.

Different people hold different interpretations of what the problem actually is, what matters most, and what the consequences of certain decisions might be. Even when the same words are used, the mental pictures behind them can be very different.

Agreement on language is mistaken for shared understanding. That’s where friction, rework, and quiet disengagement begin to appear.

What sense-making is

Sense-making is the practice of people helping each other to see a given situation clearly enough to make good decisions and act well. It is not analysis done on behalf of others. It is not consensus-building or “getting everyone on board”. It is not a dictated truth.

Sense-making is about creating the conditions for people to think together. So they can surface assumptions, explore cause and effect, and build a shared picture of what’s really going on. Sense-making is what needs to happen before good decisions are possible.

Brainstorming, creative thinking, imagining futures, and finding solutions together are natural next steps. After sense-making, creative effort is grounded in a shared understanding of the situation. When people are clear on what they are responding to, creativity becomes far more focused, relevant, and effective.

Without that shared understanding, even the most energetic ideation sessions risk producing ideas that solve different problems (or the wrong problems entirely).

Why sense-making matters for leadership and teams

When leaders and teams take the time to make sense of a situation together, a few things reliably change:

• Decisions improve, because they’re grounded in a fuller understanding of reality

• Progress speeds up, because there’s less rework and fewer reversals

• Ownership increases, because people understand why decisions are being made, not just what they’re being asked to do

• Team dynamics improve, because curiosity and empathy replaces blame and fear

Importantly, this doesn’t mean slowing everything down. In fact, many leaders find that a relatively small investment in sense-making removes a great deal of hidden friction down the line.

What sense-making looks like in practice

In leadership and team development contexts, sense-making looks different from many familiar approaches.

Instead of presenting solutions, leaders and facilitators help teams explore the situation itself. Different perspectives are made visible across roles, disciplines, personalities, and levels of seniority. Tensions and constraints are named rather than smoothed over. Uncertainty is acknowledged instead of hidden.

Visual tools often play an important role here, not as decoration, but as thinking aids. When complexity is made visible, people can reason about it together more effectively than through conversation alone.

The result is not perfect clarity or total agreement. It is something more practical: a shared enough understanding that people can make sound decisions and take responsibility for them.

Sense-making as a leadership stance

Sense-making is often associated with design or facilitation, and while my method for it is grounded in those aspects, this is a leadership stance.

Leaders are already shaping systems every day. Through the decisions they make, the questions they ask, and the signals they send about what matters. Sense-making simply makes what happens more conscious and collective.

Crucially, this doesn’t mean giving up authority. It means grounding authority in understanding rather than instruction. Leaders move from “telling” people what to do, to creating the conditions where people can see the situation clearly and act responsibly.

Why “telling” isn’t enough

Many leaders rely on presentations and directives to communicate change. Others take a more authoritarian approach.

While this can produce short-term compliance, it often comes at a cost. Research highlighted by Harvard Business Review shows that people in high-trust organisations report significantly higher productivity, engagement, and energy, and lower stress. At the same time, low-trust environments slow decision-making and make it harder for people to speak up and contribute.

Fear may produce action, but it rarely produces good judgment.

Sense-making offers a different path: one that treats people not as obstacles to change, but as essential contributors to understanding it.

Making sense before moving forward

From my own experience working with leaders and teams, I’ve seen that change rarely fails because people resist it. It fails because they are asked to act before they’ve had the chance to understand the situation together.

Participatory sense-making doesn’t promise easy answers or quick fixes. What it offers is something longer lasting: understanding that informs behaviour, decisions people can stand behind, and progress that doesn’t rely on fear or force.

For leaders navigating complexity, that can make all the difference.

If this perspective resonates, I explore participatory sense-making as a leadership practice more deeply in my own writing and work.

About the author

Kat Mather is the founder of Design Linking and brings more than 25 years of experience across design, communication, and organisational change, including over a decade working inside global energy organisations.

She works as a leadership partner at the intersection of leadership, collaboration, and design thinking, often stepping in before clarity exists.

Much of her work happens in moments of uncertainty, where decisions haven’t yet been made and pressure is high. Kat is drawn to these moments. She sees uncertainty not as something to avoid, but as a space full of potential, when teams are willing to explore it together.

Her role is to help leaders and teams make sense of complexity and carry that clarity into action.

There is a sentence that has stayed with me for years:

Nothing can grow in the shadow of a big tree.

It is simple, almost obvious, but its truth unfolds slowly with experience. I didn’t fully understand it until it became personal.

A Personal Story: The Weight of Someone Else’s Shadow

Years ago, I found myself working under a leader who valued control above all else. His way was the only way. Every decision I made was questioned. Every success I had was quietly minimized or reframed as luck. The more I performed, the more he tightened the oversight. It was as if he couldn’t tolerate the idea that someone different from him could also deliver strong results.

At first, I tried harder. I put in more hours, became increasingly prepared, sharpened my delivery. But something unexpected happened: the harder I worked, the smaller I felt. My confidence shrank, my creativity narrowed, and eventually I began to doubt even the things I knew I was good at.

What struck me most was not the micromanagement, but the emotional residue it left. I would go home irritated, tense, and strangely muted. I recognized myself less and less. It wasn’t until I took a rare week off that I felt something I hadn’t felt in months: relief. Space. Air.

And in that quiet, one reality became impossible to ignore:

I was no longer growing. I was surviving in shade.

Leaving that job was not a dramatic, heroic act. It was simply a quiet step out of the shadow — a return to sunlight. What followed surprised me: within weeks, my natural energy returned. Ideas flowed again. My voice came back. I was reminded how growth feels when the environment supports it instead of suppressing it.

That experience stayed with me, and it continues to shape how I lead, how I facilitate, and how I design spaces for others.

The Many Forms of “Big Trees”

Big trees don’t always intend to overshadow.

Sometimes they do it unconsciously.

Sometimes it is the culture doing the overshadowing.

A big tree can be:

- A dominant voice in a meeting

- An expert whose presence silences others

- A colleague who absorbs all challenging tasks

- A leader who talks first and therefore defines the entire field

- A team member who never makes room for others to stretch

And sometimes the big tree is yourself.

Expertise can become a comfort zone.

Confidence can become over-presence.

Speed of thinking can unintentionally suppress slower, deeper voices.

I’ve noticed all these patterns in myself at different points in my career.

This awareness is not comfortable, but it’s necessary. Because facilitation is not only a set of tools. It is a discipline of self-control, presence, and generosity of space.

As a Leader and Facilitator, You Must Control Your Own Shadow

Facilitation and leadership share the same fundamental responsibility:

Designing environments where people can express their thinking freely and fully.

Knowing that I take space easily — verbally, mentally, physically — I’ve had to train the opposite muscle:

- Listening before speaking

- Delaying my opinion

- Allowing silence to work

- Distributing responsibilities in a way that stretches others

- Trusting people to find their own solutions

- Not solving problems I didn’t need to solve

- Creating structures that flatten the room

These are not techniques. They are commitments. And they deeply influence the emotional climate of a team.

When Expertise Threatens a Team’s Growth

At one point, a global expert considered joining a team I was part of. Brilliant. Known. Respected. On paper, the perfect candidate.

But something felt off. His presence was so strong that I could imagine exactly what would happen: quieter voices would disappear, junior designers would stop experimenting, and the team’s internal curiosity would shrink under the weight of his authority.

We didn’t hire him.

That decision taught me something essential:

Sometimes the bravest leadership act is choosing not to add brilliance when it comes at the cost of collective growth.

Practical Facilitation Strategies When Shadows Appear

Here are strategies you can use the moment you notice overshadowing, dominance, silence, or stagnation in a team or workshop.

1. Structured Turn-Taking

Use rounds where everyone speaks once before any discussion.

This prevents dominant voices from framing the entire conversation.

2. Leader Speaks Last

If leaders are in the room, explicitly ask them to speak after everyone else.

It protects the group’s thinking field from early anchoring.

3. Silent Co-creation Before Discussion

Let participants reflect and write silently before sharing.

This ensures equal contribution and protects quieter thinkers.

4. Transparent Task Distribution

Use a task canvas to visualize who holds what responsibilities.

Rebalance intentionally to avoid concentration of power or expertise.

5. Comfort–Stretch–Panic Mapping

Ask the team to map activities into these three zones.

Then redistribute tasks so everyone gets at least one stretch opportunity.

6. Shadow Retrospectives

Include a regular check-in:

- Who or what is taking too much space?

- Who or what is not getting enough?

- What needs more sunlight?

This makes invisible dynamics visible.

7. Reciprocal Learning Partnerships

Pair people so teaching flows in both directions.

This disrupts hierarchy and democratizes expertise.

8. Facilitated Decision-Making Tools

Move from loud opinion-based decisions to:

- Dot-voting

- Gradient of Agreement

- Consent decision-making

This equalizes influence.

9. Step Up / Step Back Agreements

Set explicit norms for participation:

If you speak often, step back.

If you speak rarely, step up.

10. Ego-Free Working Zones

Create sessions where titles temporarily disappear.

Ideas matter more when hierarchy is paused.

Choosing Light Over Shadow

Shadows are not always intentional. Big trees are not always harmful. But the effect is the same: growth slows, creativity tightens, and people withdraw.

The most important insight is simple:

Standing in someone’s shadow is optional.

Casting a shadow over others is a responsibility.

As facilitators and leaders, our task is not to become the tallest tree in the forest.

Our task is to ensure the forest grows.

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If you need a workshop designer and facilitator to help you or your team to solve challenges, find solutions, make decisions, and to be more effective an perform better and faster, or a trainer to teach your team on how do this, please contact me at jose@facilistation.com

My workshops are designed to provide the structure required to quickly align and move forward with a plan or idea so you can reclaim time, energy and headspace.