I have ideas. I have research. I have an amazing designer on the case. And the biggest thing any of them can do for me, is help me keep it simple. Restraint on full volume.

I’m drawn to clever images. The kind that signal more than they show, that reward a second look. But the research is unambiguous. What sells is simplicity. What people remember is a single clear image, not only a clever one. I know this. I still find it hard to hold back.

Stripping something back takes far longer than leaving it alone.

Simplicity is the result of effort, not the absence of it.

We tend to picture restraint as a shortcut, the version you get when you didn’t have time to do more. But every designer I’ve worked with says the same thing in different words: the plain cover took longer than the busy one. The clear sentence took longer than the clever paragraph. Someone had to decide what to leave out, and decide it enough times to be sure. I certainly had a lot of back and forth to drop some of my busier cover versions.

I can still recall my days at Amazon and the discipline, or shall I say refined skill, of getting ideas and reviews onto six pages and six pages only.

But I also learned this before I ever ran a business. As a child in an ordinary house.

What you are willing to remove, not what you’re willing to add.

As a teenager in the 80’s I can still remember helping my parents strip a wall in our 1920s house. It went on for what felt like months. Under the first paint was another colour. Under that, wallpaper. Under that, more wallpaper, more paint, a pattern nobody living could explain. Every layer had once been someone’s fix (or fantasy given the styles!). Every layer had made the wall a little further from itself, a little harder to recover from.

Businesses do the same thing with their own thinking and ways of working. A process gets complicated, so a new process gets added on top to manage it. A message gets confused, so another slide gets built to clarify it. Nobody sets out to bury the wall. They just keep responding to the last layer instead of asking what’s underneath it and deciding to strip it back.

That’s why complexity is so hard to fix. It’s rarely one problem. It’s a decade of well-meant additions, and someone has to believe there’s something simpler under there before they’ll even consider devoting time to find it.

Keeping my promise simple

I had the same ‘wall’ to strip with my own value proposition as well as the miniscule slot on a book cover to add my bio.

A 360-degree career doesn’t fit a phrase nor an algorithm, and that’s not the algorithm’s fault.

I’ve led at scale. I speak. I write. I advise, selectively. Every part comes from the same place, thirty years inside the business world, and every part feeds the others. I have variety too, with many geographies and companies worked for. But the world doesn’t want a person with hundreds of dimensions, at least not at some moments. It wants one word it can tag you under, or one core service you provide, one category you ‘own.’

I understand why. Nobody has time to hold four things about a stranger in their head let alone hundreds. Asking to be seen in full is asking for more attention than most people have to give. So I simplify myself, not because I am hiding or compromising, but because I want to be legible and succinct to the people I’m trying to reach.

Even though I’m ever more disciplined now to do that too, it never seems to be finished. I explain what I do, and I hear myself reaching for one more clause to cover one more angle, and I have to stop and take it back off again.

Like the wall. You think you’ve reached the plaster, and there’s another colour under that.

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Visual clutter is the same thing killing our communications.

As I take 65,000 words and put them into 150 for the back blurb, it is painful. I know it is going to be worth it, and so I refine, remove, revise, and so on. The short version of the book, the blurb, definitely sells.

Why don’t we do this more across our communications?

• Strategies of 15 priorities that could be 3.

• A change programme that becomes constant workstream addition.

• Presentations of 60 slides that could be 5,

• And don’t get me started on the slides that have more than a report on them with font size < 20 that no one can read. Three bullets or one fact are often more impactful.

We could practice taking things away, or simply stop adding them.

Which raises the real question.

Is it optimisation, or is it care?

I’m generally suspicious of optimisation nowadays. Endless refining for its own sake is just another way of never finishing, dressed up as diligence. But I don’t think that’s what this is.

Stripping something back so it lands with someone else isn’t about polishing your own work. It’s about respecting how little attention the other person owes you. In a world when everyone is overwhelmed, arriving with anything less than simple starts to feel like a small failure of care, not a mark of quality.

So I’ve taken Decisions That Carry cover back as far as I can bear to. One idea. Standing on its own. Hoping it’s different enough to be remembered and plain enough to be trusted. I’ll share very soon.

I end the week proud of the restraint I am learning to build, not just the quality.

Look Again this week: What one thing in your work are you adding to instead of stripping back, a slide, an explanation. Are you ready to take off the top coat of decoration?

What did you strip out this week to get back to your core?

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Have a great week

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

My son asked me a question recently that I didn’t have a quick answer to.

“You’re not a marketer. You’re not a CFO. So what do you actually do, Mum?”

Fair point.

He wasn’t being mean, just trying to file me somewhere, the way all of us do with each other. And I realised, standing in the kitchen, that thirty years in business had given me a skill but not a permanent profession. I can’t point to a function, only to a kind of leadership and decisions I got better at making, over and over.

So what do I do?

I think I have got clearer on this with time. Pictures helped. I chose four characters; WD40, Bob the Builder, Ginger (Chicken Run) and the court jester. If these described your career, what would your job title be? Someone who gets things moving, builds for the future, motivates people and tells the uncomfortable truths to those at the top. Not easy.

As I’ve refined my personal brand over the last 12 months, working under my own name it actually made me question my professional label.

Where is the connection?

Last week my social media feeds were full of Cannes Lions.

Thousands of marketers reconnecting with their profession. And I found myself wondering…

Where do General Managers connect?

We don’t fit one discipline. We move between customers, finance, technology, operations and people. We switch roles constantly.

Builder. Challenger. Motivator. Problem solver.

I read David Epstein’s Range last year too and it resonated so much with me. Breadth is great for learning and adapting, and it equips for uncertainty. I shouldn’t fear the lack of functional label.

Breadth isn’t the absence of expertise, it’s a different kind of expertise. Contextual.

The more I reflect on my own career, the more I think the capability that holds it all together isn’t strategy, sales, marketing or finance. It’s judgement. Judgement is what allows us to know which hat to wear, which question to ask and which perspective the business needs next in that context. It’s not something that appears on an org chart, but it is far more important in my view.

The thing that matters most in leadership we stopped training

Every company I’ve worked in has a clear progress path for functional skills. You get better at marketing by doing marketing. You get better at finance by doing finance.

What that path doesn’t teach is what to do when the marketing answer and the finance answer disagree, the KPIs conflict and the power play kicks in. Somebody has to decide anyway. That’s not a functional skill. It sits between the functions, in the space the org chart doesn’t cover. It is hard but not to be ignored. The more precisely we train people in their function, the less practice they get standing in that gap, being that glue that connects.

We haven’t just failed to teach judgment. We’ve built systems that actively train it out of people and incentivise insular behaviour.

When the knowledge comes up short we need judgement.

Every functional problem has an answer, eventually, if you dig deep enough - if you optimise to bits. The spreadsheet balances or it doesn’t. The campaign performs or it doesn’t. Judgment is needed where those answers fail to capture the issue. Where the data has narrowed the field but not chosen for you, where two functions have each done their job correctly and still arrived at opposite conclusions.

I think this is why judgment is so hard to see in others, and harder still to see in yourself. It doesn’t look like expertise. It looks like perspective and yes, the ability to pause. A question from left field that means well and seeks to expand the thinking. Or a willingness to sit with an answer we can’t fully justify yet, and carry it regardless. Patience to be uncomfortable.

If judgment helps navigate the gap between functions, then the way to build it is not another course or specialism. It’s deliberately putting yourself, or the people you’re developing, into situations where no single function has the whole answer. Cross-functional projects without a clear owner. Decisions where the data points in two directions. To own the discomfort of not being able to say “that’s not my area” certainly when it really doesn’t feel like your area.

Career paths are built, by default, to remove exactly that discomfort. Judgment is built by staying in it.

Profession of discomfort

I’ve spent a career being hard to pigeonhole, and I’ve stopped apologising for it.

I lead. I speak. I write about what I’ve seen. It’s a 360 degree career, each one fuels the others. And being a mum and wife I add in there too. Multiple perspectives to bring and share for tangential learning. For a long time I felt the pressure to pick a lane, because the world runs on lanes, more so now we optimise everywhere. The systems want one word for you, not four.

I understand why this is. (and this turns up is my next article) It has advantages but shouldn’t define nor confine you.

The skill I actually have, the one my son couldn’t find a title for, is the same one this piece is about. It doesn’t come from any one function I’ve have had the pleasure of filling. It comes from having been in enough of them, long enough, to notice what happens in the messy space between. I have judgement as a profession and something I will develop continually.

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Look Again this week: Where in your work could you use a little more glue?

Have a great week

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

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Learning to use data also showed me when it wasn’t enough.

In the early days of advertising at Amazon, I remember the big debates about what went on the homepage - the premium ‘real estate’ of world’s largest online shop. Was it a Prime product, a major deal or any other thing we believed customers wanted to see? Or was it advertising space, sold to the highest bidder? It is a challenge other online platforms face too.

The data at that moment could tell you which one made more money at any particular time, but it could not tell you which one was right, nor what matched the long-term. The customer was always meant to be at the centre of that answer, and yet the customer isn’t always represented in the data served up. It depends entirely on how you set up the metric and what you consider matters.

Why I care?

It’s perhaps worth sharing why I’ve spent over a year writing a book about this type of decision. Writing may look like a strange detour from a career spent leading, but data and judgment are with me every day as well as where they go once a decision has been made. And as a leader it is always about helping others see. I kept seeing something that didn’t sit right, and the things that don’t sit right are usually worth a second look, so I dived in.

I am a huge fan of data. I led for 20 years with relatively little, then ten more with an abundance. I see how it has changed what we’re capable of deciding, and changed it for the better. But data doesn’t take you all the way. And if it isn’t set up correctly, I’m not sure it helps you at all necessarily.

The muscle we are forgetting to train

When I look at how companies spend on data. Billions go into infrastructure, into joining up systems, some of which were never designed to talk to each other, and into data capability of every kind. Everyone is aiming to be ‘data driven’. Alarmingly I think, a fraction of the investment that goes into developing data, goes into developing judgment.

We are building the data muscle and just assuming that the judgment muscle will grow alongside it. It doesn’t. It atrophies or doesn’t even get built. Use it or you lose it very much applies here.

I spent six years working inside one of the most data-driven companies in the world. But judgment was never absent there. Amazon is in many cases data driven, but it is also unquestionably data informed. Data is used consistently to augment the decision, it doesn’t make all decisions alone. Judgement is what interrogates it, audits it and leverages it.

Take investment judgment. I spent years pushing to make things faster and cheaper for customers. The cost of that sat clearly in the data, in black and white, without ambiguity. We understood the inputs, but we discussed the opportunities and the adjustments. We did things because we believed it was right for the customer and sometimes before we could prove it back to the business.

Take a conscience related judgment. We made product recalls or put stock on hold. Extra guardrails that costs margin, yet protects someone who will never know it was actually done necessarily. That’s not a question of how much we would consider spending to fix something, rather it’s a question of what’s right.

The idea that judgement is not needed is simply wrong and short sighted. But so too is the idea that everyone knows how to use data to the max too.

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Data alone doesn’t help

Some leaders hide from data, not willing to listen or learn to what data has to say or leaning on instinct and call it experience. Others hide behind it, waving a dashboard to justify a budget, build prestige or win an argument with a peer. Neither one is leadership.

Then there’s a third failure worth mentioning because it isn’t data’s fault. I call it data decorated — when data gets reached for after judgment has already made the call, purely to dress the decision up and make it look defensible. When that happens, data hasn’t let anyone down. It was never asked to inform anything. It was asked to perform or protect and it can end up misleading.

The two together, data informing and judgment deciding, is where the real strength lives. Either one alone, and something goes missing.

We see this outside work too, we do the homework on the price of a house, the mortgage the repayments, the costs etc. yet we let the best one pass because ‘ we didn’t have a good feel about it when we walk in.’

Or the job offer we get after much negotiation and all the attributes in the job descriptions line up well, but we meet the team or the manager, and decide the culture or vibe is not for us.

The final mile

Data narrows the field. It does that brilliantly, better than it has ever done before. But judgment is still needed for the final mile, on the calls that actually count. Sometimes that final mile is commercial, and you can model your way close to an answer. But sometimes that final mile needs conscience. And conscience is something data will never see.

As we bring more AI into how we work, I don’t think judgment disappears. I think it concentrates. The decisions left for us become the ones the data genuinely cannot answer, which makes them harder, not easier, and more consequential than before. So surely now, more than ever, is the moment to invest in judgment the way we’ve invested in data?

I’m not writing this as an academic. I’m writing it as a practitioner who led for three decades, some of it with rich data, some of it with almost none. And the honest answer is that when the data is in front of me and the call is still hard, I ask myself a short, unglamorous set of questions. What does my conscience say? What do my values say? What’s right for the people on the other end of this, the ones a metric will never quite capture. Would this decision still hold up if I had to explain it to all of them, not just the ones who’ll never ask me.

We have a long way to go in our relationship with data. It isn’t the enemy of judgment. It’s the thing that should be standing right beside it partnering - together stronger.

It is time to invest in judgement too to get the best of both.

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Look again this week: Be aware of where you use data this week and ask are you narrowing the field or letting go of the responsibility to choose?

Have a great week

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

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First, up. I believe in my book and that’s the most important thing. I don’t need a classic publishing deal to tell me that. Traditional publishing is however, still external validation and many people’s reason for pursuing it. For a book which in many ways encourages us not to need that very thing, I wonder why I even considered it? I warn against doing what we ‘should’ do over what is right in a decision. I am encouraging human judgement alongside data and so combining them myself, being honest with my audience data and the all important per unit economics, I arrived at my choice to go hybrid-independent publishing. Customer focused, professional quality, just funded and orchestrated differently.

Decision clarity

Getting my final agent rejection this week was actually uplifting. Honestly it felt like relief. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not giving up on my book, rather I was hit with instant clarity. I had choices and narrowed them down — traditional publishing won’t be the route for me.

As I have weighed up the options of traditional, hybrid and self-publishing, there was no obvious choice at the beginning. As a second time author I know what it takes, and I know where my budget is best spent, what I miss and what I will and won’t compromise on — quality or the idea itself. I would have loved the idea of traditional, but as vanity is not why I write, plus 18-24 months waiting is not what I feel works for me, I was wary. After speaking to many of those who did get published this way it wasn’t all as rosy as they thought. Many traded royalties for very little in return, some had to cut content to save cost, and most still had much of the work to do and no actual guarantee of being in a bookstore. Perhaps I just needed to take options off the table for focus.

If I was an agent, I wouldn’t sign me

This one was the eye-opener. I fully believe in my idea and the problem it solves but at the end of the day I’m a business leader and so I too look at the per unit economics; publishing is after all a business. Although writers like myself want to change the world and share ideas that matter, it doesn’t mean the financials don’t apply to us.

Writing about decisions as a leader with 30 years experience, it would be remiss of me to blindly ignore the financials just because this is my book. Data and judgement together all the way. As with any category, the more parties involved in the making, distributing and selling of something, the more parties the margin needs to be split between. Books themselves don’t make much money, and connected activities — speaking, workshops, other opportunities — don’t always flow via the agent.

I’m not a celebrity

This is no surprise, I’m not famous. Writing non-fiction comes with a few hurdles; it’s a crowded category, business and management even more so. You pretty much need to be a celebrity or one of five people in the world who are the source of truth on your topic to have a chance of getting backing into a large publishing house. I totally get that and I’m not complaining. Publishing is not really about the idea of the book — it’s about the platform and the ability to sell.

If I were an agent with limited resources, I would be looking for the handful of contracts that make the most money. I can see how an agent makes far more money with other books than they can with mine. I’m not a household name and I’m not writing for the masses, at least not in this edition.

It’s always about risk

The strange rule in publishing that I’ve not seen anywhere in the businesses I’ve been close to, is that a retailer can still return unsold copies to the wholesaler for a full refund. This effectively means they destroy the books rather than pay additional shipping costs. It seems not only a colossal waste but a policy in need of updating. To get per unit costs small enough to have headroom for good marketing needs big production runs, and yet those are the most risky. Publishers take all the risk rather than it being shared across the value chain. It’s a significant hurdle. So I will lean in to it.

The perceived value is changing

My last paperback book retailed at €12.99 was reasonably priced. A hardback at €25-€30 today still feels like a sensible purchase. And yet today readers seem more willing to subscribe to a Substack — the entry-level is €5 or €6, equating to over €70 for a year — for a volume of wisdom that’s likely far less organised, less tangible and for many writers involved far less work. Continuous relationship rather than information alone is the direction.

I’m still a newbie here so don’t have that channel established really either. I’m building it gradually, but it does make me smile at the change and perceived value of writing itself. It’s a perfect reminder for me of why I decided to put pen to paper — finger to keyboard — with a book and what I’m going to do with it, and how I will stay connected in my writing in the new ways too.

Being honest about what I have or what I don’t

Writing from 30 years of experience gives me a deep experience bank — dare I say wisdom — but I haven’t spent my entire career building an audience. Moving countries and industries while a source of my creativity, my name on a book in a bookstore will mean nothing to most people. Yes I worked at some big brands but that is not the marketing itself.

If I write advice and create metaphors and concepts that aim to inspire people, so I absolutely need to walk my talk. Regardless of how much you love your work — and there was a lot of love for my book amongst my early readers — it still needs to earn its place on a retail shelf.

Where my experience and storytelling shows up is on a stage or in front of teams doing the actual work. Those channels are still there, and that is how I will also take my insights to market.

It changes changes the target customer

Decisions That Carry is written for leaders who need to make and communicate decisions across their business, and need to create, protect or rebuild trust in doing so. Some of those leaders may find my book directly, but many won’t — and so the HR department, the learning and development teams, the corporate offsites, those are the moments where my concentrated wisdom could enter. It’s not likely to be something that needs an agent, and I know that the agents know that too.

Living and learning

Yes there is the slight frustration that I put many hours into the agent submissions — tracking down agents in my genre, waiting for submissions to open, dutifully following each one’s specific process. I had only three replies, one within 24 hours after I accidentally signalled that AI was used. The rest are lost on the wind. I’ll never really know whether my idea wasn’t liked or, as I suspect, that my platform and commerciality were the challenge. Feedback is a core component in most businesses, but largely absent in publishing. I think we can do better here in the future.

As I look forward I’m energised. The indecision that sat with me while I left options open is now gone. Clarity, focus and renewed drive are on my side. I think I always knew I wanted this route, but when you have open leads, sometimes you don’t want to be the one to close them. So it worked out well that I got that rejection. It was the last one because I am not looking for any more.

I’m very much still in the game, but I’m not playing to win. I’m playing to improve.

This week’s Look Again

What answer do you already know yourself, but are waiting for someone else to say for you?

Thanks for reading along. Have a good week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

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I wasn’t grieving for them, at least not that alone. There was something on a more personal level. Perhaps I was mourning a childhood. One we had shared with a version of me that existed then. Where is she now? Perhaps it was simply how far I had come from that version of me? Memories are great, but they are clear evidence that something has gone.

The book that wasn’t on my list

At the same moment, co-incidentally, I was listening to Lyndsey Simpson’s new book ‘The Age Rebellion’. Strangely I wasn’t looking to re-design or supercharge the second half of my life as Simpson suggests. I was simply doing market research for my upcoming launch, observing authors launching their books right now. I was impressed on all counts, it was a great launch. There was at least a professional curiosity, however the book landed at a perfect moment and I was all ears.

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Simpson is on a mission to retire the idea of retirement and what’s not to like about that? I think it’s a great mission. The world of work we currently inhabit and the idea that we should stop at an arbitrary age - fitting when work was largely hard labour - but now no longer fit for purpose. The way forward, she argues, is to re-establish your purpose and achieve it via different perhaps multiple income streams. So plural identities and careers that could look very different.

As I was listening, I smiled, because I have those multiple streams, a portfolio. I’ve had different sides to me for years; leading, speaking, writing, volunteering, mentoring and let’s not forget the ‘job for life’ of being a mum. As I sit changing the proportions of those ‘elements’ and investing more in writing and speaking at this moment in time professionally, and more time in caring for parents than for toddlers personally, it looks a little messy.

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The world and the ‘system’, be that employment or social media, isn’t ready for that new reality. We want diversity and yet we shoehorn people into categories where you can only tick one box, or be known for one thing - at least be known for one thing well. Having dialled down my corporate career to write my second book I sit clearly in between or outside the formats that our systems currently recognise. I’m gradually disappearing from view, not because I have retired, but because I’m living a life that doesn’t meet the standard we’ve become used to viewing things through; because I haven’t structured my way through life for maximum visibility.

So whilst accidentally picking up a book to read, I stumbled over the real issue. The patterns that govern visibility and relevance require me to change if they wont; certainly if I sustain this route as the larger piece of my portfolio.

The catalyst is just a signpost

So the passing of the classmate asked me more questions about my identity than it did about them. It was actually the catalyst for my deeper reflection. It was not about the loss of life, but the loss of identity and something that slowed me to make me look at my present. The book I picked up professionally handed me something personal too. Neither was the subject. Both were the thing that got me to the real question.

This is exactly how it works.

The catalyst that hits us is rarely the subject that needs attention, but it can be the thing that gets you into the place where the real question sits. And we are not great at this.

Leaders do this regularly. We solve the stuff that arrives not the reason it arrives; wild inefficiency prompts a restructure that fails to change the culture, the feedback that was actioned without deeper understanding, and failed to improve the relationship. And the many meetings where we miss asking a different version of the same question. ‘What is it that we’re trying to solve here?’

If nobody asked that question in a meeting quite often you’d solve something else; a metric pointing to one thing, something normally easier to articulate. It is easy to gloss over the real problem but there’s normally a bigger question which once found makes all other ones irrelevant.

No-one rewards discomfort but we should

But do we take enough time? Leaders everywhere are under pressure to be super decisive the system rewards decisiveness, hesitation is seen as weak. Perhaps sitting in questioning mode means a lack conviction and we move too quickly; we take the catalyst at face value find a simple answer and move on.

The discipline that actually changes things is if you can stay in the discomfort longer long enough for the right questions to surface.

I am admittedly doing that right now in my own work in my next chapter. Asking questions. Did I leave the corporate world to write a set up writing business or speaking business? Did I trade structure for the freedom of fractional executive work? Or even as somebody mentioned in a email recently - “Enjoy your sabbatical.”

I don’t have a firm answer but I do have patience and as I enjoy the writing journey, I’m still asking questions.

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When are we done?

So how do you know when you’ve wrestled with a problem long enough to have allowed the real stuff to emerge? How do you distinguish the real productive discomfort from the stuff which looks like reflection but it’s too shallow and is probably just avoiding the problem?

I don’t think there’s a clear cut test here, but I do think if you start solving something and the questions start pointing to something else entirely, then maybe you’re really not done, you could just be starting.

I am seeing this in my writing too, not just the portfolio of life. My book Decisions That Carry, has this tension. It is a core reason that we make decisions that fail to go anywhere. Do we give the problem statement enough thought and challenge. Do we interrogate the data from all angles enough too?

Curiosity helps you asks a new question, but it’s discomfort that keeps you in the same one long enough to get real answers.

I’m sitting with my own questions still. About what this next chapter really looks like and what I’m actually building. The “enjoy your sabbatical” comment didn’t hurt, it just illustrated the point perfectly, I thought it was funny. Even the people around us have internalised the same system. If it doesn’t fit a recognised category, it must be a gap. A pause. A sabbatical.

It isn’t. The real question I’m sitting with, not how to explain myself to the system, but what I’m actually building in a life I see beyond it

.

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This week’s Look Again:

Let me challenge you to notice the next thing that stops you; be that a result that surprises you or a conversation that doesn’t sit well. Or perhaps even news that lands harder than expected. Before you work on it, ask one question first.

Is this the actual issue, or is this what’s pointing me to the real one?

Sit with the discomfort a little longer than feels comfortable. That’s where the real question lives.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

As this week is Dementia Action Week, I’m taking a slight diversion of topic, but an important one I think.

I have been learning more about dementia this year as it pops up every increasingly in my world. It has really made me ponder. I think we’re asking the wrong questions.

55 million people worldwide are living with dementia today. By 2050, that number is projected to more than double. 139 million people. Think of that. That’s a civilisational challenge; and we seem to be responding to it as if it’s inevitable.

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The system is backwards

I was excited that AI can really change situations and so I dived in to learn more. AI is doing extraordinary things in the dementia space. Early detection. Drug discovery. Helping families whose lives are upended to take on the caring role, and providing company via bots, that can reduce anxiety in sufferers. These matter enormously to the people living inside that reality right now.

But what doesn’t sit well with me is this realisation: the ‘system’ — the research funding, the pharmaceutical incentives, the AI applications getting the most investment, feel overwhelmingly oriented toward people who already have dementia, or are close to it, rather than removing it.

This makes a certain kind of sense as the need is urgent. However, that perhaps not coincidentally, that seems to be where the money is.

Get this. A daily drug that treats Alzheimer’s generates revenue for years. A drug that could delay onset by five years will generate far less. Nobody gets spectacularly rich from prevention. And so despite the science being robust, despite the evidence being clear that lifestyle factors can meaningfully shift the odds, we leave the prevention conversation for the background.

So are we setting up to solve this or just to manage it?

The sad reality is that incentives wont change anytime soon? Pharma companies are not going to walk away from treatment revenues for the greater good. So if the system wont change, perhaps we can.

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Our fear responses close down the prevention route

Many people really fear the loss of their mental capability. Given the statistics, dementia is on the cards for many of us so how are we preparing?

Some don’t think about it at all. Either the fear is too large, the horizon too distant, and so it gets filed under “things I’ll deal with later.” This is denial, and it’s very human.

Others, and this is the one that really strikes me as I am seeing it first hand; focus their energy on planning for the aftermath. From discussions of euthanasia (yep I heard that one) to getting their affairs in order be that deciding where to live, having conversations with family about what they’d want or simply organising the powers of attorney that are a common thing, there’s wisdom in this. But sadly also underneath it, is the acceptance that the outcome is fixed. That somehow the die is cast.

Both responses skip something entirely. The middle reaction. The one that says: the trajectory is not fixed. There are things I can do now, today, this year; that will genuinely change my odds. The idea of health futures, where we actively shape what life looks like isn’t completely new, but here it feels absent.

That middle option, prevention, gets very little airtime. And I think it’s the most important conversation we’re not having.

Why this isn’t abstract for me

Dementia runs in my family. Both sides. The risk factors I’ve watched up close early retirement, social isolation, stress, lack of exercise, a sedentary lifestyle, untreated hearing loss — are the same ones the research flags as most significant and most modifiable.

I’m 56. I’m building something new, in a country where my social connections are still growing. By the standard risk checklist, I’m not in a great position.

I’m also an extrovert who needs connection like oxygen and so I am actively building it. Ensuring I do cognitively demanding work every day. I’m curious. I’m learning. I’m paying attention to my sleep, my exercise and my diet. Not perfectly but I am becoming aware, and avoiding ultra processed foods which will no doubt get connected to this at some point! I am thinking in a way I never used to.

I’m writing this, which requires me to think carefully and argue clearly, and I am trying to use AI to expand my thinking, not to allow cognitive atrophy - that is an ongoing area to monitor.

None of that is accidental. It’s a choice. A deliberate choice to address the part of the equation I can actually influence, and be aware of the things that don’t work in my favour.

It’s not just the big things either. Did you know this? The meetings you didn’t want to sit in this week also corroded your brain. Stress built by being somewhere you don’t want to be is also a dementia risk. Listen to your instincts, there is lots we can do.

I’m not frightened. I’m challenged to own this, and you can be too.

Can I help?

Given the genetics are not stacked in my favour, and I feel like a sitting duck, helping myself seems a no-brainer, but perhaps I can help beyond that. I wonder if I am a potential walking case study of how to prevent? And so I’m looking and genuinely open to a baseline assessment of my brain health. Not because I expect bad news. But because I would know where I’m starting from. I think there’s something useful in being a living, documented case study of someone who has the genetics and family history working against them, and who decides to take active, evidence-based steps to change the odds.

If you’re a researcher, a clinician, or working on prevention-focused programmes — I’d genuinely love to talk.

The question I want to leave you with

I think it’s the most clarifying question in this space, and I don’t hear it asked enough:

If you knew you were going to get dementia — where would you put your energy?

Into planning what happens after? Or into doing everything in your power to push that moment as far into the future as possible and perhaps avoid it altogether?

The science says the second option is real. It’s available. It requires no waiting for a drug approval or a diagnostic breakthrough. It requires the decision to act, now, while the window is wide open.

That’s the missing option. And I think it’s where the most important work of the next decade needs to happen.

The important question isn’t will you get it, but what are you doing about it now?

Have a good week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And if you’re working in dementia prevention — find me. I want to help.

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We don’t. We discover it at the moments it costs us something.

Last week I said authenticity needs a customer. This week I want to go one step further. Knowing that authenticity matters is one thing. Knowing how it actually shows up, and what you need to draw on when it does, is something else entirely.

And here is something I have noticed that still surprises me. I know when I am not aligned with who I am more reliably than when I am. Because misalignment doesn’t sit well. It has a feeling. And that feeling, it turns out, is one of the most useful signals a leader has.

The talent review table

Many years ago I sat in a talent meeting reviewing colleagues for performance. A group of leaders were building a case to exit someone from the business. The picture being painted wasn’t positive. My peers around the room were nodding along.

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As it happened I had a quite different view. This person didn’t work for me but I had seen something different, not the behaviours being discussed. It would have been easy, even convenient, to stay quiet and let the decision take its course.

But that wasn’t me. I couldn’t.

So I spoke up. Offered examples to the contrary. The debate resumed. Sadly, after much discussion, the exit was progressed. I wasn’t successful. But I had spoken up, reasoned, stood my ground against the consensus. I left knowing I had at least tried.

Not challenging didn’t seem right nor fair. And fairness is a core value of mine. I feel it most sharply when it’s absent.

Not fighting for people because it’s inconvenient is also not the kind of leadership I want to role model.

It was one of those grey moments. Where ethical or moral lines get close to being crossed. Where staying silent or toeing the line would be easier, and the person, or customer, most affected is not at the heart of the consideration. The comfortable route and the right route are seldom the same thing.

These are the moments I started to understand what bringing my whole self to work actually meant in practice. Moments of alignment between who you are and what you do about it. Beliefs and actions.

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These moments had a pattern

The more I reflected on the decisions I was most proud of, the more a pattern emerged.

Those were the ones where the data could only take me so far and I needed to draw on something else. I reached for what I had within. Something I carry with me always. Not data, but values, experience, instincts, stories, knowledge of the track record of trust built over time.

The decisions I’m least proud of shared something too. I didn’t seek alignment. I wasn’t fully in the room. I left core pieces of myself outside the door, outside of the moment.

• My instinct that something was wrong.

• My values pulling in a different direction.

• A perspective that might have shifted the outcome if I had been aware enough to use it.

An alignment check isn’t a formal process. It is a pause on the precipice. A moment to check in with yourself before a decision lands or a communication goes out.

Am I bringing all of myself to this? Or have I left the most important parts of me outside the room?

This is also where it gets personal. If your values differ significantly from your organisation’s, the tension builds internally over time. Going against what you believe in order to do the job extracts a cost. Choosing to stay in those situations is a trade-off only you can make. But it is always a choice.

What you are actually carrying

Across the moments when I was unquestionably myself, proud ones and ones I’m not, I realised I was drawing on the same things each time.

Not the capacity for data but the lived experience that lets me see patterns others might miss. The intuition that steers me before I can prove it. The values that tell me what I can live with and what I can’t. The stories I’ve collected that give me confidence and context when logic alone isn’t enough. And the trust I’ve built over time, a bank balance earned decision by decision, that gives my voice weight in the room.

These things are different for every leader. They come from who you are, how you have lived, and how you have led. No two people carry the same collection.

But we all carry something.

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A unique bag for everyone

Every leader carries these things with them into every situation. Every decision. Every communication moment, large and small. Whether consciously or not, we draw on what we carry.

The leader who uses it intentionally pauses at the precipice. They balance data with the full weight of who they are, experience, intuition, values, stories, earned trust, and they bring it in service of others. Not for themselves. Not at the cost of others.

This is not impression management. Impression management is performing a version of yourself others prefer to see. This is something different. Knowing yourself well enough to bring the right things at the right moment. Genuinely, not strategically.

I have come to think of this as a Yellow Bag (yes there is a story as to why yellow and why a bag and I promise to come back and share that one with all it’s rather wacky detail.) Suffice to say we all have one. No two are the same.

The question is whether you know what’s in yours.

An invitation

Bringing your whole self to work was always a good idea. It just needed to be more specific.

Not a general invitation for self-expression alone. Rather deliberate practice, asking for consciousness at the pinch points, when what you do and how you do it carries disproportionate weight. When the data has taken you so far and something more is being asked of you.

The moments I’m most proud of weren’t comfortable. They were the ones where I stood on the precipice, aware, and brought everything I had to the decision.

Why? Because the cost of not doing felt higher than the cost doing so.

That’s what alignment with who you are looks like in practice.

Now that I have felt it and named it, I seek to use the unique bits I carry like a decision accessory. Deliberately.

Could you name the things you carry with you? Could you access them deliberately at the moments that matter, rather than discovering what you believe only after the moment has passed?

That’s the difference between authenticity that happens to you and authenticity you choose.

Your bag is already packed. The question is whether you know what’s in it?

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Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

“Hold your breath, make a wish. Count to three. Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.”

It’s a mix of craziness and seriousness, and underneath it all, somebody who is arguably being purely who they are. It’s a search for someone genuinely and consistently themselves; not trying to be what society wants, not performing, not trying to win priority for themselves.

When Charlie wins, it doesn’t really feel like a surprise. We’ve warmed to him. Even the harshest critics would struggle to find real fault. Is he a good example of authenticity?

Willy Wonka himself splits the pack. You either find him magical, original, inspirational, or perhaps a little unsettling. Perhaps he is a little too unpredictable, surprising in the way he treats and ultimately disposes of children when they don’t meet his exacting standards.

Both are arguably authentic. However, Wonka is authentic without restraint. Magnificent, visionary, completely himself — and yet he allows children become collateral damage towards his dream. He justifies it to himself because the goal is worthy enough. He genuinely wants the factory to go into good hands. He believes he’s doing this for the right reasons. But he’s leaving a trail of destruction in his wake.

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This is the sort of authenticity that turns people off. It’s not so much that it isn’t genuine, rather the people around the leader are secondary to the leader’s own goal.

Charlie, on the other hand, could have gone it alone. He could have taken the golden ticket and run. Had lots of chocolate for himself. But he took Grandpa Joe, which itself took much persuading. He tried to help others achieve their dreams. He was generous. He was still himself, standing by his principles and saying what he thought, even to Wonka.

Authenticity is Marmite. You either love it or you’ve been burnt by someone wielding it badly.

In conversation with a number of senior leaders recently, when I broach this subject, some are warm to it — fully understanding the benefits of being authentic and values-driven. Others bristle at the mention, associating it with some of the negative ways we’ve seen it emerge in recent times.

The sort of unchecked authenticity that is self-obsessed does not make people warm to the topic.

Think of the meeting room

The leader who leads with courage, energy, and character; in line with who they are, but making space to hear others. Holds their own opinions back so the quieter voices get their turn. Accommodates different points of view. Is willing to change their mind. Inclusive without losing who they are themselves.

These people have nothing to prove. And that itself is endearing.

They haven’t got the showmanship of Willy Wonka. They’ve also grown past Charlie’s instinct, using authenticity more deliberately, and taking responsibility for others without ever forgetting who they are and how they got there.

When you’ve been in that kind of meeting, you feel drawn to a leader who puts the people in the room ahead of the goal, not instead of it.

To me, that is authenticity in service of others, not at the cost of others. I believe it’s the kind of description we could warm to as opposed to running a mile from the topic because the notion has been overused, misapplied and come to stand for something else entirely.

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Where it went wrong

“Bring your whole self to work” is perhaps one of the most well-meaning yet ultimately unhelpful pieces of advice in modern leadership. It’s an invitation without a map. It asks people to express themselves with no consideration of the person, or the people, on the receiving end.

Bringing your bad habits, your dark side, and your self-centred ambition to work is not well received when you have to push past people and tread on toes to get there.

Showing a little restraint, a little consideration of others doesn’t need to mean you’re no longer being authentic. It means you are being authentic in service of others. Not at the cost of them.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, in his book Don’t Be Yourself, in my view, compounds the problem. I happen to agree with a lot of what Tomas says, just not the labels he and others give it. To suggest that authenticity is simply being yourself regardless of anybody else, is a limiting definition. To suggest that showing restraint or accommodating others means you’re no longer being authentic. Well that’s where the theory breaks down for me.

He calls this impression management, which makes it sound contrived. But I don’t believe the idea is to try to not be yourself. That is never sustainable, as it builds internal stress. It’s about putting others first while still being who you are, rather than performing a version of yourself that isn’t real. About recognising that we work with, for and through others, and therefore being considerate is still part of it. Authentic people can still be considerate.

A leader who knows who they are, leads from the heart, stands behind their decisions, and communicates them in a way that inspires, hasn’t just found their voice. They’re using it for and with others.

In Service of Others

To be authentic you need identity. You need conviction. You need values. You need craft. And perhaps most importantly, you need a customer. Not just a goal.

By all means, bring your whole self to work. Don’t leave the best parts of you outside the door. These cool, distinctive, entirely human pieces of who you are, they matter. They make an impact. They are what draws people to you, and makes them want to work with you or for you.

But don’t be Wonka. Disposing of people one by one as you pursue your goal, without fully explaining what you’re doing or why. It doesn’t matter how worthy the goal is. If you have to tread all over people to get there, you’ve lost the point of leadership entirely.

Authenticity was never a licence.

I still believe it’s a gift. One to be used, and spread, carefully.

Next week I’ll get into what that actually looks like in practice, and what you might want to carry with you when you do.

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Have a great week

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

A couple of days before my last holiday a friend who was going with me, asked me

“Are you taking your laptop?”

I didn’t have to think long. I answered immediately. “No, I’m going on holiday.”

As I said that I realised that a holiday is no longer what it used to be. I grew up, looking at getting away as being both literal, in terms of a new destination and mentally, in leaving the daily grind, the household chores, the admin, the work behind.

But as our world of remote work has morphed, I’m left wondering whether the holiday really is about the destination or about the ability to simply switch off and out?

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Learning to leave behind

Over the last decade I got better at leaving my work behind, not taking emails on holiday or at the weekend for that matter. I saw plenty of people around the pool glued to their phones or answering mails to me (when I was in the office) when I knew there were quite clearly between two G&T’s.

It is of course everybody’s choice how they spend their time off. I remember years earlier standing on a chair in the corner of a cottage garden on a remote cliff top trying to get a signal because somebody needed me at work. I now wonder how important was that really? And whether people decided to track me and involve me as there wasn’t a strong bench behind me to be able to pick up the slack when I was gone? I sought to change that.

Over the years, I learned to let go fully, but it took many mind shifts to do it

View taking a holiday as a leadership skill

Holidays may look like they are simply self care, but there’s more to it.

Firstly it shows trust. If I find myself to be indispensable, I haven’t set the trust with a team to step in on my behalf. Further, still, I deny somebody that development opportunity to step in for me whenever I’m away. It’s the perfect breeding ground for a successor or stretch challenge for those wondering what it’s like in my role.

The fact that my team relies on me to be there, makes it less a team. It’s not a team. It’s at the mercy of one person and one pin in a system. Being too important is a breakage waiting to happen.

Secondly, it sets the standard. If I can’t take a holiday, what do I role model? Am I saying that holidays don’t matter at my level, they are for junior people, or that no-one should drop work? This is of course nonsense. We all need a holiday. They are there for a reason, failing to take one in my view sets a bad example they pressurise these others to not take one either.

Thirdly and importantly it is good long-term hygiene. I know that taking a holiday from things, be that my kids, my admin or my job or, simply putting the bins out, switching out is an important part of endurance. Life is relentless and no-one runs an eternal marathon. Resilience is needed for our physical and our mental health. The holiday builds us up. And so not taking a holiday is a weakness not a strength.

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What if holidays improved your decisions?

I’ve seen over the years that better decisions are made when people are rested, relaxed or recharged. Worse ones are made when people are tired, pressured, and the clarity of thought is compromised. The latter happens when we go too long without a break. Even machines get downtime scheduled; so we should think about that too? (That’s a whole new post coming shortly).

So if all these things are so important, why are we failing to prioritise holidays for what they are?

We have simply forgotten to practice

I think we have forgotten how to take a holiday. We haven’t forgotten how to travel to pick destinations to go to the spa or the mountains to do things, but when we take our laptop with us, we take the mental burden. We take our work. We don’t leave.

It takes a strong self-assured person to decline that temptation, to protect the hard earned mental and physical downtime that we need. Time with family or time alone or time with friends; time with activity, time with stillness. What matters is not what you do, but it matters that you mentally leave things behind not just the physical location you started from.

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Perhaps in our connected societies and remote working possibilities we’re not really going on holiday. We are just changing our desk view for better scenery.

As I headed off without the laptop stuck in my bag, I realised I was actually heading to the same location I went recently for a deeply productive writing week. I had been working there intensely, but now I the destination would be my holiday. This was hard evidence that the holiday is not the actual place, but the fact that we choose to leave mentally. It is about how you leave things behind.

So the snapshot to leave you with it this:

The leadership skill is to see taking holidays as both a discipline and a duty. We need to leave things behind and reload not just for our own benefits, but for those of our teams and our organization.

Ask yourself when did you actually take a real holiday?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

Early in my career I worked at Kraft General Foods, R&D where I shared an office with two other colleagues. We had one PC terminal. It was pre-internet, early email days. Emails came once, maybe twice a week and only a handful of them. The rest came by what I’ll call the stagecoach; the internal post. I had to get my own information from a handful of sources; library written papers. I talked to people, picked up the phone or walked to other offices. I got work done, and I never found it to be inefficient.

I collected research, I experimented and generated my own data and I made decisions. I’ll bet money on the fact that the conclusions I made based on a handful of sources would not be that significantly different if I had 100 times the volume of input.

Years later, as a general manager, I still believe that 80% of information on time is better than 100% late. The pursuit of absolute answers and the endless optimization and analysis we do doesn’t necessarily help make better decisions. It does however ensure we avoid judgment and avoid responsibility. This won’t change with AI unless something else does.

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We’ve built this problem

Somewhere between that research and development lab and today we built something unbelievable and we called it a productivity improvement. That’s what it was at the start. The inbox, the workflow to the report that feeds another report; a content calendar, the meeting to prepare for a meeting. All are digital dust. The debris of three decades of knowledge work layered so finely, that most people aren’t able to see it. They are inside it.

Take a step back and look. Knowledge workers create much of their own inefficiency, then hire people to manage it and then buy software to manage those people. And we wonder why it never feels enough?

Technology didn’t just land on us. We built it. We built the always on email culture, the notification economy, the proliferation of communication channels that seem to somehow produce less real communication in the long run (that’s an entirely new post waiting to be penned). We didn’t start by being buried under a digital process that needed controlling, we actually created it one step at a time and let the guardrails on the rest slip.

This is where I find it quite comical. We’re deploying the most powerful technology in human history, but we’re using it first to manage the messed up technology we created. Is this not a drama of resource wastage? Should we really do this?

The view from outside

In the last few months, having stepped away from large corporate organizations after 30 years of being inside, the bureaucracy that was wrapped around my daily life has gone. I suppose I had stopped noticing things, but that bureaucracy hasn’t followed me home, and it doesn’t currently exist in my combination of work; a portfolio life as an advisor, a leader, speaker, and an author. Let’s hope it stays like that.

It is also possible that I am adopting and learning AI differently by being on the outside of the complex systems. I’m using it to extend my knowledge in

a way I choose, to challenge my thinking, not really to automate, because I don’t have endless personal workflows to remove.

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But as I look at most organizations, they seem to be using AI to automate the dust that we created. Whether that is summarizing emails or scheduling more content or streaming approvals, creating personalized reports. It’s a huge investment, but we’re using it on top of processes that exist only because other processes are still there and broken. Is this not madness?

The question comes before the tool

As I glance at my modest line of books near my desk one makes me smile. Michael Hammer and James Champy. These two were right on the money when they wrote Re-engineering the Corporation in 1993, making an argument so obvious it seemed immediately overlooked.

Don’t automate a bad process. If you automate a bad process you get a faster, bad process.

It’s harder to make something simple, (that goes for writing too) but that’s the discipline. Ask first should a process or the step even exist, let alone should we speed it up.

That was a cool message back then in 1993 and it’s one most organizations should start asking again now.

It takes a lot to slow down in order to question, but shouldn’t we be asking; “How do we go from A to B to C, and to be faster do we even need to go to D at all? What happens if we were to go straight to E?”

That might be a harder question than it sounds because it threatens people who own processes, who own road maps and who might want to sandbag their existence. It requires us to look at something which we built and genuinely ask should it have been built at all, and is now the time that we should remove it?

AI should not be the answer to the mess we made, but it is an excuse to finally clean it up. That requires that we laugh at what we put in place and that maybe we got it wrong. But we can use AI or technology to serve something better and not just prop up something that maybe should go away.

Stop, remove then automate

The office at Kraft didn’t feel like a constraint, it was simple, but the clarity it brought was valuable; clear of thinking, faster decisions, and genuine accountability for what you did.

That type of work doesn’t have to be gone. It’s just currently buried.

The next automation question needs to be. Does this need to be faster or does it simply need to stop?

As I look at how I can use AI in my private life - to ensure I am learning with all use cases in mind, I don’t see much. Perhaps my personal email inbox? Then again I can just open it, select 95% of the messages and hit delete. It takes a few minutes, no automation needed.

If there’s something that doesn’t need to be automated, there’s a reasonable chance it doesn’t need to be in existence at.

Take it away. Laugh at the fallacy. Then and only then will we have space to decide what a technology is actually for.

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Have a great week

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

My phone was safely stowed in my bag.

That was a choice, though not a hard one. I’ve done plenty of digital detox, and this was not one of them.

As I looked around me, everybody was on their phone. We pick it up, it helps to pass time, to distract us. I get it. But when we allow ourselves to be consumed by something we guarantee that we don’t see anything else.

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I see it as a parent too, the long car journeys when I see something cool out of the window and point it out to the kids. By the time they gaze up from their phones, it’s gone.

They don’t miss anything life-changing, but they do miss something simply different. They’ll never know unless they look. The phone was a guaranteed stream of something, the window offered the possibility of something unexpected.

Sometimes there will be something worth seeing but we only find it if we are open to looking. That possibility of something is worth protecting in my view.

We focus here, we notice this. It’s like the skill sits in directing our focus, finding the perfect thing worthy of our time, and focusing intently on it. But what if the real skill is actually the opposite of that? What if managing our attention were actually about reducing focus?

Maybe to be open to something you need to be closed to something else.

That is a decision, one many leaders don’t make, at least not explicitly and not honestly; what they are willing to call ‘a distraction’ that they should be closed to more often.

I am not referring to the obvious waste like phones. What I mean is the pointless meeting or the activity masquerading as legitimate work. A packed calendar, back to back calls, pursuit of inbox zero. These are often things keeping you from something else. They fill the space where possibility could be.

Dare to call it a distraction, even if it looks like work.

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Your diary has this opportunity every day

The best executive assistants I had understood that their job was to keep people (more realistically, unnecessary meetings people asked for) out of my agenda. Protecting the space between things. My EA’s understood something that many leaders will take years to learn, that all empty space is not wasted time. It’s not inefficiency; it is the art of leadership.

There is space for thinking, there is space for possibility.

This week I had a handful of Zoom calls with people I didn’t know that well. I gave them my time from the “slush fund of unallocated time” not devoted to anything fixed this week.

Time box devotees amongst you may read this and wince - “How can anybody have unallocated time? How inefficient!”

New ideas emerged from these calls. If my diary had been wall to wall with meetings and appointments, they would have been missed.

I am not arguing that everything should be deep focused solitary work. Cal Newport and others have done this brilliantly already. Protecting time for deep work matters, but that is not what most leaders are missing.

Being in control of your time, and being available when it matters most are not the same thing.

The practice for managers to get on top of

People often lose track of their schedule in their time when they start managing people. But what if you saw 20% of your diary as being available for the stuff you’ve got no idea is coming? That to me is being a manager.

A colleague needs five minutes of your time, and that turns into a longer conversation. Someone stops you in the corridor with a question that deserves a real answer, not an off the cuff one. Someone shares something insightful while making tea in the kitchen.

I think the more seniority you hold, the more responsibility and more demands in your time, the more you need to show you are indeed available. Not just physically either.

A leader who is everywhere and technically available, but not actually available in the way that people will need them because they’re mentally focused on something else.

The one who’s got their eyes on the dashboard and every KPI the minute they enter into the meeting. They already know what they’re looking for and they don’t start to listen.

That’s the sort of leader who fills the silence with their own voice, never hearing what the silence, the body language, and the shifting on seats might have to have to say.

People who focus intently on something can feel oriented, but this often comes at the cost of the open mind, the cost of not being ready for the unexpected.

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Your diary is your leadership philosophy, visible to others

Your diary shows without ambiguity what you believe matters. Do you have space that isn’t dedicated to something, space to allow you to breathe or to think, to be available?

I have a date with myself every Friday for what I call Blue Sky Thinking. Simply space that’s open; available in case there’s something that matters..

I use it to remove things from my calendar or carry forward things that might be important. I use it to subtract to create availability, and freeing my mind in the process too.

Your diary is the first signal your thinking is under threat, one meeting at a time as the space for possibility gets filled with things that may simply be a CYA for others who want your presence, not your contribution.

Whatever your people might need from you today, they may not have told you and you won’t see any of it if you’re already looking fixedly, at something else.

The question is whether you’ve got any time left after you’ve pencilled in everything else you choose to focus on.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there

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It was a phrase that stung. Perhaps one that even prompted shame. Both my parents were teachers, grandparents were teachers. Many people I know are teachers too. I was already in the business world when I heard it, so it wasn’t that it made me avoid a career choice. I did perhaps double down on doing, not steering towards teaching. I saw the practicality of doing, rather than advising, as the stronger route. Wrongly so.

What I should have asked sooner

As I reflect now, it would’ve been better to instantly challenge the phrase, or seek to understand it. But young and impressionable as I was, I took it on face value.

Years later, I decided to see where it came from, having held teaching in such a poor light. It was contrary to everything I was seeing, and the art of teaching itself, so I looked again.

Origins of the phrase are traced to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who used it as a dig at revolutionaries or reformers. The idea that those who can no longer bring about change, decide to teach others how to do it. Retreating into words instead of actions.

This was never aimed at the teaching profession, but it did indeed contribute to negative views of the teaching profession, suggesting teachers are those who have failed in their profession.

His words, “He who can does, he who cannot, teaches.” have themselves been attributed to many people, as the phrase itself became distorted. The origin itself being as disputed as the meaning it seems.

Many other public figures have added to it, including Woody Allen I believe, “Those who can’t do, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach gym.”

There is no sense in these lines. There is often no sense in phrases we pass around, and yet we frequently fail to challenge them.

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What else are we not questioning?

In the world of work, we throw phrases, buzzwords, catch phrases around too often and we assume understanding. We take the absence of questions or nodding of heads to mean understanding. We never check in enough to see if the way people interpret what we say is actually what we meant.

How many other phrases, like the one I misread, occupy the minds of bright people shaping their future, and inadvertently affect the actions they take or those actions that they seek to avoid?

For leaders, ensuring that what you want to communicate not only lands well, but is understood in the way you had intended it to be perceived, is a skill. It’s one I seek to improve regularly as it is core to so many things in work, in society, in cultures.

Do we set environments where people are comfortable challenging when their interpretation is sketchy or if we leave them unclear? I hope so. But hope is not a plan, we need intentionality to make a change. We need to check in and be ready to repeat, re-phrase and reload when we communicate words.

Teaching is actually mastery

There is more when we look closer at teaching. Teaching itself accelerates the teacher’s understanding.

As I mature in my own career, I invest more time in developing others, mentoring or coaching too, and helping people learn. I regularly take the stage to share thoughts and distil ideas for others, be that leadership or the industries and challenges that have made my own career so varied.

Having accountability, or the responsibility to nurture people, that’s not necessarily a harder thing. It is different.

I am perhaps evolved enough now to become a teacher, a voice that can help. The irony here is that I wouldn’t be capable of doing this if I hadn’t already done some of this. So being able to teach, is in my view, not only a luxury, it seems to be something you reach as you progress. It feels like a compliment, a reward, and indeed a responsibility.

But learning itself, is never finished, and I believe the idea that if you want to really master something, you should try teaching it. The very act of trying to explain it in more simple terms, to those not yet of the same understanding, forces you to revisit what you really know about something and distil it. Cutting it down to its bare bones.

I remind myself that if I can’t explain something to a four-year-old I don’t understand it fully myself.

I am a leader, speaker and author, and very much still learning in all of them. In trying to teach some of them, I learn continuously, I stay open for feedback and I improve

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This past week in India I spent time with some seriously inspiring entrepreneurs. Some of whom are building teaching institutions, some involved in teaching too. Caring for the minds of many generations. Thinking and designing what people need to learn, and delivering the messages to create the societies we need in the future. It is really important work. I also had a glimpse of the skills it takes to get that all off the ground. To continue to shape positively, the most difficult of audiences, young impressionable minds, is one of the hardest tasks there is.

I was in India for some speaking engagements. I was tackling topics around data and automation and human judgment, and although I had done what I thought was a good job in distilling the big ideas, a very helpful question from the audience helped me take the chance to simplify it even further. Removing words I had taken for granted as being widely understood, which perhaps could have sent someone in the wrong direction. Easy to do, and easy to call out if we are brave enough.

I received a lesson, whilst I was teaching one.

I wrap up the week with new admiration for the teaching profession. I am inspired too, to do better myself, to impart learnings where I can, to help the minds that I touch as a leader, a speaker, and an author and of course as human being.

I want to get better at all of it, so I seek to be worthy enough to teach.

I am starting to look at mechanisms that would prompt me to question more frequently.

How would you know if you are on the receiving end of a phrase that needs another look?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

Some people just look at the price and turn up, though often they get something different than they expected. That’s not because the hotel changed, but because the picture they viewed or the image they had in their head was not enough to build honest expectations.

Same destination, completely different experience on arrival and the journey to get there.

But then I think, who chose what was in the photographs? Who chose what was in the information provided and what they missed out? That moment shapes much of what follows. Building expectations long before anybody packs a bag.

Perhaps that’s what I do when I make bigger decisions. I don’t just mean the hotels or the restaurant booking, but the decisions that affect other people. Decisions that I have to communicate or defend and to pass to other people to carry without me in the room.

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The curator hiding in plain sight.

The hotel, the supermarket shelf, the annual report, the spa menu, the townhall presentation.

Everywhere we make decisions somebody up stream has already decided what information we deserve to see. I don’t just mean the photograph that shows the pool and doesn’t show the building site next door. It’s also the packaging that shows the farm and not the factory. The leadership communication that announces the destination but doesn’t even attempt to describe the journey the lead to the decision.

We see this in politics. Announcements without reasoning, decisions handed down with the expectations that people can just see themselves in it and get on with in. Destinations without journeys. People lose trust in those making these decisions.

We think we’re making an informed decision but we’re not. The quality of any decision is only as good as the completeness of the information the completeness of the picture we use and that we were shown. There’s always somebody else who decides what’s in the frame what we get to see.

We’re not just making a decision we are continuously working from curated photographs making potentially curated conclusions.

We have all been on the receiving end of this, it isn’t great. But consider now if you changed positions.

When it’s your turn to hold the camera or set the frame in the backdrop do you know that you’re doing it? Are you conscious of what you’re leaving out?

The questions you ask shape what matters.

When you lead others to a decision, to a strategy, to a destination or to a restructure, you are effectively that photographer, that curator.

You see more information than the people you lead. You sat in more information sessions and pre-decisions and you read data they never saw. You took part in trade-offs they weren’t asked about. Then you communicated a decision.

Now here’s the bit most leadership thinking skips over. As you arrive at your decision, it’s not the information itself that tells you what to conclude, it needs to be evaluated or chewed over first. The way to do that is the questions that you bring to it and the things you push back on. The things you dive deep or the things you don’t take for granted. These don’t always come from the data. The new perspectives come from what you value and what you pushed to uncover.

This is why the journey matters, not just the destination. We are all different.

Two leaders in the same room observing identical information can arrive at completely different decisions because they feel different things were worth asking. They see different things in the data.

One asks about costs, another one asks how it costs other people it will land on. One of them asks if it works, when the other asks whether it can be explained to somebody who wasn’t in the room and didn’t have the details. That not a flaw in the process, but a human angle. We bring ourselves to decisions and we can leverage it beyond that moment.

The quality of the decision isn’t just about the information available. It’s very much about how you interrogate it. Your experience, your judgement, your intuition and your willingness to simply ask what the data is not saying as much as what it is.

Did you try to find the angle for the person that wants to see the view past the hotel? Do you try to provide the information that helps the person with poor mobility access services near your hotel? Did you consciously omit it?

Every decision is like the hotel booking with information that affects a ‘go’ or ‘no go’, and the amount of satisfaction that accompanies it in real life.

What matters is crucially whether you feel enough responsibility toward the people who are going to live with the decision, and to ask the questions on their behalf as you decide.

When two people arrive at the same hotel, one researched it and is happy, the other didn’t and feels they don’t get their money’s worth. The pictures sold a great luxurious room, but not services that matched that expectation. They feel mislead, not because anything was a lie, but because it was incomplete information to form the right expectation.

Take people with you early

This happens in the world of work too where people are told the destination not the trade-offs. The reorganisation that didn’t explain why the last structure had to go. Leaders left in the middle unable to answer questions why.

When you make a decision on behalf of others, you become responsible for how they live with or in the decision. Whether a decision lands in reality or not doesn’t sit with decision-maker alone, but with those they need to take it forward.

Leaders who shortcut the journey and simply gives an answer or a partial picture don’t help anybody carry it forward.

People don’t lose faith in decisions per se, but they do lose faith in those who make decisions. Not because the destination is wrong, but because they turn up unprepared.

When you show me how you arrived at your decision it helps you take me with you. When you think about others while deciding, you made decisions that already start to work.

We will never have complete information, not perfect frames or photos to work from. That is not the aim.

The aim is to bring everything you can to evaluating what you have as input. To ensure your values shape the questions you asked, and that those questions were asked on behalf of everyone who will travel with you.

I know I don’t sleep well next to a building site. I know my kids don’t freely walk too far to the amenities. I take that into account. I look further, even though we are all persuaded by the glorious pictures around the pool and the attractiveness of the price, that makes it possible.

I know that when we hit the pillow after a long journey, everybody will be contented. That is, when everybody’s considerations showed up at least in the process of research and not just in price.

So next time you make a decision ask yourself, are you sharing the full picture? Or have you set people up for disappointment when they arrive?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

I have had visions of smooth, sharp flint spearheads this week, finding some convincing shapes in the garden. I started thinking about the quality of tools, and wondering when we stopped making them ourselves? In the Stone Age everybody made their own tools as well as use them. Making and using them sat with one person. Survival skills.

And then, copper arrived and later again the bronze age and all that changed. Not a one-man operation. Making the tools became much more specialist. You needed knowledge, specialist conditions - at least in terms of heat and more than a one-person cave on a mountainside. So most people stopped making. You didn’t need to understand how to mix metal and actually make tools. You simply had to use them. A farmer didn’t need to know how to build, he just needed to want a better plough. The hunter got a better spear. It was improvement.

We have always let the specialist be master of the making of it and the rest of us master the using of it. This didn’t slow us down, it accelerated us.

The Pattern Continues For Centuries

Fast forward to today. We all use phones and a fraction of us know exactly how to get the full maximum amount of them let alone build them. We drive cars that few of us know how to build. Each of us has a body most of us will never fully understand, let alone will be able to build it at a cellular level. Our body is perhaps the most sophisticated computer we will ever own and we don’t even need instructions to use it. (perhaps we need some to look after it but that’s probably a different article.)

The Internet, the electricity, and for a large part also the foods we consume. When did we ever all really need to know how to build it in order to use it? We don’t even know or need to know how to fully understand it in order to get started.

Now AI arrives and I am feeling that AI is being treated differently. AI admittedly it’s going to be a disruptor. It’s a paradigm shift. Yet we’re either hesitating to start because we don’t understand it, or feeling that to do well with it means we need to build.

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Where is the messaging coming from?

I caught myself doing it too this week. I’m learning to use AI but as I dabble and play with multiple tools, I am diving in but also, I’m wondering should I be learning differently?

When I see social media, news, new products, events, I realize it’s all around us culturally. Let’s build, let’s create with it. High energy and excitement.

Somewhere within that mixture of passion to get going, and anxiety to not be left behind, is the same assumption. Should we all be building and if we are not, then are we falling behind?

Seeing it differently

Without seeing it instantly, I was all scooped up in the noise around me with builders being close to me. I felt I should be doing that too. I almost outsourced my thinking. I took someone else’s lens.

The builder bias that I’m feeling surrounding AI is not driven from bad intentions or aspirations. It’s simply that the loudest voices at least in proximity to me are skewed more to builders.

But most people aren’t builders. I’m not necessarily a builder. You don’t need to be either.

AI doesn’t need to be different but it does need the confidence and even the permission to get started.

The anxiety of the fear many people have about AI is only natural. This is new but we remove that fear and find more clarity when we stop confusing AI literacy with AI engineering.

Just as we expect everybody to read, but we don’t expect everybody to write a book. This era is one where we should help everybody to adopt AI to be curious about AI, but that doesn’t mean build.

Aim for fluency. Simply learn to be comfortable with and around the tools.

My AI insight this week was not technical. It was simply that some patterns from the past are worth repeating. We saw a new tool, we accepted a new tool, picked up a new tool and used a new tool.

So my question for you is simple:

Are you surrounded by builders or users? That answer will tell you whose lens you are looking through.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look Again. See what was always there

25 years ago I went with a friend to help choose some art for their home. I left with a painting I hadn’t planned to buy, in a country where I wasn’t living and with no clear logistics to get it home.

Three boats on a pristine beach. Deep blue sky. White sand. It was captivating. As I stood in front of it, I could feel the beating heat of the midday sun. There was no actual sun in the picture, no yellow. But I could feel it nonetheless. I described what I felt so that my friend could see how he could know when a piece of art was right. I didn’t know any other rationale. I realised then that I had been inside the painting for at least 20 minutes.

Great art does that. Put you in the picture that transports you away from your surroundings and utterly focuses you, and your mind. You feel it you are part of it. I’m not a painter so I don’t know if that’s what they aim for, but I do know when I speak I want my audience to be captivated.

It moved me so much that I purchased it. It was my first original canvas. It wasn’t a practical purchase. In fact it was months before I found an affordable way to easily transport it overseas to join me. But I wasn’t prepared to walk away from it. The cost of losing felt higher than the cost of committing. I guess that’s what judgement looks like. Not the absence of doubt, but the clarity and the confidence of a risk that’s worth taking, and the willingness to act.

I’ve never regretted that painting and it has adorned every fireplace in the places I’ve lived in during those 25 years. It still makes me smile.

Translation

Most leaders aim to be understood. Best in class may aim to be felt. If we think in logic and use data to help decide, then want to try and land an outcome in someone’s mind, there is a translation step needed. So many people skip the translation step, but when you skip it your message doesn’t get remembered. For those who don’t skip it, their messages, their strategies live and get carried. They exist in the minds of the people they were made for, such that they are able to take action because they can feel it. Between thinking and speaking their is a choice. What do you want people to see?

Frame it

Why not start with a picture? An actual one or a mental image, just give people something to aspire to. Don’t start with your words, even though you’re going to communicate much with them. The best communicators start with the image they want to leave behind and they build backwards. Words become effectively the artist brushstrokes as they paint that image in your mind.

I plan for communications and presentations by asking myself:

• What do I want my audience to think?

• What do I want them to feel?

• What do I want them to do?

I learned that precise framing from a wonderful communication coach, though I realised I was doing it through pictures without being aware.

I storyboard and I start with the final slide, what I want you to leave with and work backwards. What arguments, data or images would I need to put together so people believe and leave with that idea. I do the same whether it’s a new plan, a strategy, a major decision.

Many people start with words and hope that the picture will form. I’m not sure that it does.

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Pictures make it easier

I continually create metaphors, not because they’re catchy or as a decoration to my speeches, but because they help translate my ideas. They take something unfamiliar, something difficult, something complex and compare it to something familiar. That familiarity evokes a feeling. That is association is often enough. Enough to build your picture.

The formula starts with a question, for every pitch, every development conversation if it matters.

What is the picture I’m trying to paint?

Don’t ask, what information do I want to deliver? Ask how do you want somebody to feel when they relive or recall your topic months from now? Which image will make you and the topic memorable?

That is the formula it’s not just the clarity of the completeness it’s the way that you capture the topic and their imagination.

Three boats, deep blue sky, perfect white sand. No sun in the painting. I can still feel the heat.

The portability of ideas, plans or decisions matters. Thinking whether a picture will travel without you in the room, depends on the picture you paint.

Let me ask you. What is the picture you are building next in your work, and will it travel once you have left the room?

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look twice. See what was always there.

Is it the process or the output that matters? I reflect on that question a lot when I look at why I started writing, for whom I write, and where the pleasure is. I never set out to be a writer. When reading story books to my kids when they were younger, some of the rhymes felt forced and they jarred with me. One syllable too many. Trivial yes, but when your day has been one long test of your patience from sleep deficit to broken bottles, spilt milk, endless washing and the usual round of bedtime tantrums, the tiny things can seem far more irksome than they might actually be, when you are not your normal wide awake and intellectually engaged self. I just wanted to fix the rhythm, and do it myself.

I remember the symmetry and timbre of the sentences sat with me. I would hum a tune and retro fit words rhythmically. It became a regular thing. A handful of actual children’s books emerged from that time; some built together with the kids as they chose rhyming works with me. I may publish them one day too.

Trains and Planes

Back in the business world I travelled a lot. And, not a fan of sitting still in a confined space, I found myself reaching for my pen and notebook to write as a distraction when trains stalled and planes sat, sometimes for hours on runways. I passed the time making more rhymes. The mechanism of writing became the point.

What started as a deflection became a skill and something I began to enjoy. I still enjoy it. There’s satisfaction in seeing something coming together. I used it to capture events for my team and play them back to the organisation as an end of year poem. It surprised and delighted people and soon that too became a tradition.

In all of these I didn’t start with the end in mind. I simple started. The process of writing became thinking by doing, and slowly perhaps more valuable than other outputs I had created. I was exploring something differently. I wrote to fix something as a challenge, but then I wrote to lose myself in the experience. Now I largely write to help others see differently, writing itself being one of the ways I do that myself.

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No Spoilers

I am not the sort of person that reads the end of the book first and then settles in for a story that no longer holds suspense. I take the enjoyment form the whole story - build up, peak, ending. The journey through the book is very much how we absorb enough to remember the ending long after the cover is closed. Why would we skip the joy of that?

I can’t help thinking that we are doing some of that but not calling it a spoiler. I don’t mean skipping to the end of the Netflix series because you don’t have time to watch all the episodes. I mean the sort of stuff where we’re beginning to use AI as a tool.

As I’ve been writing my second book, I’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that I do the writing and not AI for the obvious reason of ownership. But when it comes to other types of written documents, a report, an overview, a performance summary, an email response, how much is too much? Is less AI, more? I don’t think everybody shares my thinking.

This is exactly where our use of AI is short circuiting thinking. That may work for mindless admin and repetitive tasks that give little joy but do we go too far?

As we race to adopt AI and drive productivity and greater intelligence, I do believe we need to preserve critical thinking alongside it. Writing builds communication and creativity, precisely the core skills we need to embrace alongside our tech journey. Strangely I don’t see the commitment to developing these skills in any way like the commitment to dive in and try AI, or to sign up and learn it formally. I don’t think I’ll be on my own in noticing that the adoption of AI challenges that very aspect of my writing that I value.

If we use AI to shortcut processes and reach outcomes more quickly, be that the year-end reflection, the poem of thanks, even the strategy document, we skip the process that makes the contents better, more refined. We miss building the thinking muscle.

Show The Working Out

AI can give us outputs, but it cannot give us the thinking, questionably not the enjoyment either if we skip to the end. These only happen when we do the work ourselves.

I see the same challenge with my kids, now grown-up using calculators for school. It’s quicker, the answer pops up, but it is hit and miss or more accurately all or nothing in terms of points on an exam that ways. I always remember having to show how I got there, gaining marks show for my working out. Again, it was learning how to do things yourself first, then automate.

It’s not that we need to do everything ourselves. I’m a huge fan of leveraging technology but not when it takes away the things that will help us exist in tandem alongside it as humans. Thinking is like any muscle, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

I believe the joy is in the journey from A to B, not just the destination. The same is true for the process of writing for me. It helps me to refine my thoughts, to sharpen my argument and hopefully to appeal to you to do the same, or at least think carefully and slowly about not doing it.

Let me know what and indeed how you think and how you protect and develop your thinking skills.

Have a great week.

Fiona

Look again. See what was always there.

Turquoise, the colour of warm, clear waters, the sort you can see all the way to the bottom. Nothing hidden, just a pure unobstructed view of what is beneath.

I want my thinking and communication to be clear enough that people can see all the way through to the idea underneath, and believe it. That’s why I am here.

The magpie has it too

Double Magpie, is a brand for my ideas that I created nearly 20 years ago, though it hasn’t always been visible.

The magpie is full of angles. People see a noisy, opportunistic bird, collecting shinny things. What they miss, if they never look twice, is one of the most cognitively sophisticated creatures alive. Fiercely intelligent. Drawn to what glints. Impossible to ignore once you really see it. Positive in most culture too. And that iridescent blue/green tail. Catch it at a different angle, a different light, from a different direction and suddenly it is, in my view, extraordinary. It’s not black and white like we think, it is a shade of turquoise. We just needed to shift our view.

This is my point.

So what is The Turquoise Bit?

It’s for people who are done sleepwalking.

The world is moving fast, it’s relentless and it is too easy to just keep going the same way. Making decisions, leading teams, building businesses, living lives, yet never really stopping to look at what’s in front of us. What matters.

We rush past the detail things, accept the first version and in doing that we might miss what makes us unique and miss an idea that could change everything.

The turquoise bit is the space where we slow down enough to look again, playfully, but seriously too.

What would you find here?

I write about thinking differently, not just conceptually, but as practice. Stories, metaphors and the splash of colour that makes it come to life.

The sort that could change how you lead, how you decide, how you communicate and how you see the world you’re walking through, maybe even appreciate more of it.

That might sometimes mean sitting with a difficult decision a bit longer, asking what’s really in the bag of tools that you bring to it - your values, your experience, your gut feel, your stories and the trust that people have in you. Sometimes asking a better question of the data.

Sometimes it might just mean watching the grass grow or playing. Letting an idea take shape, often visually, not forcing it. I’m hoping you’ll find and trust that slowing down does not equal falling behind.

Whatever it looks like, I’ll keep it honest. I’ll share what I’m still working out not just what I’ve already solved. I’ll ask questions and I’ll try to write the same turquoise clarity that I’m always chasing, so you can see all the way through to the clear underneath and decide for yourself what it’s worth.

So who am I?

Hello, I’m Fiona McDonnell a mum of two, with 30 years leadership in large business under my belt and a world view that’s been shaped living, working and travelling through many countries, cultures, and languages.

I believe that the most important shift any of us can make in business, in leadership and in life, is to simply stop accepting the first version of what we see, to question and to let things be simpler. My upcoming second book Decisions That Carry grows from the same place, a belief that answer and the trust we need are already there if we change what we combine and how we look.

I spent years working with leaders who are capable of extraordinary things and sometimes they need someone to hold up the light at a different angle so that they can see what was always there. That’s what I do. That’s what I hope this is for you.

Your turn

I’d love to know about you. What made you stop and read this, what you’re looking for and perhaps what you now suspect could be worth a second glance? Feel free to tell me in the comments. Thank you for being here.

Fiona

Look twice. See what was always there