Above

In my last post, I wrote that listening is where risk-aware leadership begins, not with the conditions around you, but with the ones following you. But listening, I've learned, is only half the equation. You can hear every voice in the room and still be lost in the weeds.

Christopher I. Maxwell's sixth principle - the one I've been circling for months - is about the view from above. The ability to see the whole terrain while your hands are busy with the details. It sounds obvious until you try to do it.

I am detail-oriented by nature. Give me a problem, and I will map it, measure it, optimize it. For years I thought this was my superpower. And it is, as I know that excellence is in the details. But it was also my trap.

Balance the Details

Some years ago, I was deep in a major systems project. The kind that starts with a clear purpose and slowly becomes its own universe. I had spent weeks in the configuration layer, mapping workflows, tracing dependencies, validating every edge case. I could explain the logic of every decision made. I could not tell you why we were doing the project in the first place.

The team was waiting on me. Not because they needed the mapping. Because they needed a decision about whether the project was worth finishing at all. The business case had shifted while I was down in the details. A new partnership had changed the cost structure. What had made sense before was now a marginal gain. But I was too busy optimizing the implementation to notice the implementation had become irrelevant.

I had to step back. Literally. I closed my laptop, went for a walk around the block, and asked myself one question: if this project vanished tomorrow, what would actually break?

The answer was: very little. We had confused motion with progress. I came back and told the team we were pivoting. Not canceling - but changing the scope so radically it felt like starting over. They were relieved. They had seen the same shift days earlier but assumed I was driving toward something they couldn't see. Walking away was harder than finishing would have been. The business ran on short-term metrics. But I kept coming back to the same question: what was I actually building? And who would still be standing here when the numbers finally turned?

That is the paradox of perspective. When you are the one who knows the most about the details, you are often the last to see that the details no longer matter. It takes courage to look up. It feels like abandoning your post. But it is actually the only way to lead.

Invite Others

I am an introvert. My instinct when things get complicated is to retreat. Notebook, coffee, a quiet corner. I will emerge with a fully formed plan and then present it as a finished product. For years I called this strategic thinking. It was just isolation with better branding.

” For years I called this strategic thinking. It was just isolation with better branding."

Maxwell writes that vision is not a telescope you look through alone. If you are the only one who can see the summit, you have failed. That line stung because it was true.

I have lived this failure many times. I would brief the team on a plan I had built in isolation. Here is the architecture. Here is your role. Any questions? And there would be no questions, not because of a lack of understanding, but because they were still trying to figure out what I had actually decided. Then the project would launch, and the people who had to live with it every day would be caught off guard. Not because the work was wrong, but because they had never been invited to see it with me. I had given them instructions, not a shared view.

Now when I kick off a project, I start with a blank slate. Not my plan. Their questions. What do you see? What do you need to know? Where does this break for you? The plan that emerges is messier than the one I would draw on my own. But it belongs to all of us. And that means people will fight for it when it gets hard.

Learn From Startups

Many years ago, I was mentoring a group of founders through Venture Cup, a leading startup and business idea competition in Sweden. These were twenty-somethings with pitch decks and panic. I showed up with my usual toolkit: experience, frameworks, metrics, operational detail. I was going to help them improve their models.

Then I watched one of them give a presentation.

He had spent days on a forecast so granular it predicted revenue by channel and quarter two years out. The spreadsheet was beautiful. Color-coded, dynamically linked, sensitivity analysis on every variable. I asked him what problem his product solved. He gave me an answer that contained three different value propositions, but no customer.

He had optimized the model. He had lost the product.

I told him to step back. Not because forecasting is wrong, but because he had confused the map for the territory. He was measuring a journey he had not defined. The model had become the work. It is the same trap I wrote about in Dare, the instinct to optimize what can be measured while neglecting what cannot. To make the spreadsheet perfect when the story still is broken.

He spent the next days talking to customers instead. Rewrote his value proposition to a single sentence. It was harder than building the model. Models are controllable. Conversations are not.

I learned something from watching him. I am that founder. I am the one who builds the model before I know the question. Who optimizes the path before I know the destination. Listening to him was like listening to a mirror. It reminded me that the bigger picture is not a luxury you earn after you master the details. It is what makes the details worth mastering.

This is what I mean when I say everything is becoming table stakes. The model, the tech, the forecast - anyone can build those. The willingness to delete your own spreadsheet and face the unmeasurable is what remains. And at a time when it is so easy to outsource our thinking to artificial intelligence, the courage to sit in the uncertainty yourself - to be the focal point, not the fixer - is what makes all the difference. I explored this tension in Backwater.

Accept Guides

I do not have a mentor. I have never been good at asking for one. There is something in me that still reads the word as a confession that I have not yet figured it out. Which is, of course, exactly the point.

What I do have are other peers who are renegades and storytellers in their own ways. We meet rarely. We text occasionally. But when one of us sends a message saying "I am looking at the wrong thing, aren't I," the others know exactly what to say. Not because they have the answer. Because they are outside the frame.

I also have books. Maxwell's is one. Others are scattered across my shelf, some read years ago, their pages still marked with passages I needed at the time. I return to them like old friends, not for new information but for old perspective. The words haven't changed. I have.

And I have the founders and persons I mentor. This is the part that surprises me most. I show up to teach them something about business, and they hand me a mirror. They ask the naive question I am too experienced to ask. They challenge the assumption I have stopped seeing. They remind me that the unmeasurable is still real, that the table stakes are not the game, and that hiding in the work is the easiest way to stop leading.

Guides come in many forms. The peer who sees your blind spot. The book that asks the question you have stopped asking. The person you are supposedly teaching who ends up teaching you. The only mistake is believing you don't need them.

Because perspective is not a height you achieve. It is a practice. A constant, uncomfortable, rebellious practice of looking up when every instinct says to look down. And you cannot do it alone.

Better Together

Perspective is not a solo sport. That is the hardest part for me to accept.

I have a habit of becoming the translator. The one person who knows how the work moves from decision to execution, who can trace the thread across teams and departments. I tell myself I am providing clarity. I am actually hoarding it.

There was a project where I was the single point of contact for every handoff. Marketing briefed me. I briefed operations. Operations reported back to me. I reported to leadership. It felt like efficiency. It was dependency wearing a good suit.

Then I was pulled away for two weeks to focus on something else. I assumed the handoffs would stall. Questions would pile up in my inbox. Decisions would wait.

They did not. The marketing lead had learned enough about the operations workflow to adjust the brief herself. The operations manager had traced a delivery issue to its source without looping me in. They had built their own fluency while I was busy being the interpreter.

I came back to a system that was humming without me. Not perfectly - there were things I would have done differently. But enough. And that was the point. I had spent months building myself into a bottleneck. I thought I was providing perspective. I was actually preventing it.

The invisible leader is not the one who sees the whole picture. It is the one who makes the whole picture so obvious that everyone sees it without asking. And that is what I am striving to be.

Connecting The Dots

This is the sixth and final post in my series on the principles from Christopher I. Maxwell’s Lead Like a Guide. It has taken me longer than I planned to write this one, partly because I kept getting lost in the details. The irony is not lost on me.

If you've read this far, thank you for following the journey. The next chapter will be about something I am still figuring out: what it means to lead when the game has no end.

Take risks. Accept guides. Embrace discomfort.