Reflections, 11th January.

Strategy for Frogs.

I think, perhaps, that in many ways we’re all frogs; it’s just the nature of the water that we’re sitting in that is different.

For some, the bubbling that’s going on around them is driven by their concern for making the money they’ve already got work in order that they don’t have to. For others, it’s the drive to make money that they don’t need, because that’s what they think they’re supposed to do. And for others? It’s a matter of staying afloat, and for far too many, just plain survival.

For companies, and increasingly for countries and those who lead them, it’s about recognising that what they’re doing is not sustainable, and doubling down to try to bend to their will what will not be bent, even as they know, deep down, that it is futile over the medium, let alone the long term.

I wrote last week about the idea of frog soup, or more accurately, not becoming frog soup. About being aware enough of the changing temperature of the water in order to jump while we can. That needs us to have a strategy.

Strategy does not begin with bold intent or clever analysis; it begins with the environment. For any strategy to stand a reasonable chance of success, there must be enough stability to read signals, enough time to learn, and enough freedom to choose between real options.

Agency and capability matter. We need at least an idea of where we want to jump to, because jumping by itself isn't a strategy, and there needs to be at least a loose, shared understanding of what game we are playing. It is the space of the “quiet before” that sits between “private disquiet” and “shared naming”. When these conditions are absent, strategy collapses into a theatre of either reactive improvisation or ritualised planning.

At its heart, strategy is about choice. It relies on a capacity to experiment without catastrophic consequences in the space between becoming uncomfortable and being processed into soup.

I spend my time working with those at the edge. It is the space where the idealised view of the world held by those at the centre of the organisation meets the reality of those trying to put it into practice, who must deal with those who see the world differently, far from the comfort of the centre. It is the gap between Westminster and the realities of the NHS, Schools and Local Authorities. It is the difference between the neat, sanitised strategies of board presentations and the reality on the ground. It is the space where the neat battle plan meets the chaotic reality of first contact with the enemy.

All of this, even when profoundly inequitable, is tolerable and sustainable when a shared worldview unites those within it. When that changes, when the water we are in differs from others, and when it begins to boil, we enter a phase change.

Everything we have been comfortably assuming evaporates.

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When “might is right” becomes an operating principle, our approach must change accordingly. Our immediate reaction, understandably, is outrage of varying degrees, but when might is right, outrage is irrelevant. We are given a choice. If we don’t have the power to overcome what is being presented to us, we can either suck it up or leave the stage, and if neither of those options is acceptable, we have to think differently. Adam Kahane sums it up beautifully in his book, Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With, Like, or Trust.

Kahane’s conflict strategy is less about resolution in the traditional sense and more about building the capacity to act together amid disagreement. It treats conflict as a permanent condition of complex systems, not a temporary failure to be eliminated. Success is measured not by unanimity, but by whether adversaries can stay in a relationship long enough to understand the system they share, take joint responsibility for it, and move it, step by step, in a better direction.

It’s easy and temporarily satisfying to see those with whom we disagree, who we see causing conflict and pain, as bad people. Unfortunately, it’s irrelevant because they don’t care; it carries no weight and will cause us more harm than it does them. Helplessness is a learned capacity and insidious.

I think we need to regard this not as some additional increment in a linear form of change, but as something altogether different; a phase change. As energy increases and the waters boil, the relationships among us, our organisations, our communities, and our economies change fundamentally. Some phase changes are reversible, for instance, changing water to ice and back. Others are not; we can’t uncook an egg.

I’m not sure this phase change we’re in is reversible, or, in fact, something we want to change back. If strategy is about choices, and we’re going to have to jump, where do we jump?

Reframing the challenge in this way reveals a crucial point about individual phase change: it’s not about the energy we lack, but about the capabilities we already possess that remain locked in inappropriate configurations.

Each of us carries latent capacities - sophisticated skills, attitudes, and dispositions developed in one context but artificially separated from others.

Game developers don't theorise about motivation; they measure it through retention rates and session lengths. They understand the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, the danger of pay-to-win, and the delicate art of challenge curves. They could redesign education, workplace incentives, or public health campaigns, but instead they're asked to "gamify" things with points and badges, missing their deeper expertise entirely.

Account managers navigate invisible emotional landscapes daily: reading the unspoken tensions among stakeholders, sensing when a champion is losing internal support, and detecting organisational mood shifts months before they manifest in decisions. They build three-dimensional maps of power, influence, and anxiety that anthropologists would envy. This is high-resolution organisational intelligence, yet it's dismissed as "soft skills" rather than recognised as the strategic sensing capability it represents.

There’s a whole arena of skills that we have lost sight of as we have become obsessed with efficiency, productivity, and process. Within seconds of entering a new café, you've classified: whether you can take a call here, if they'll be annoyed by your laptop, whether that corner table will stay quiet, and if the WiFi password request will be grudging or friendly. You're reading wood grain and music choices, chair arrangements and laptop-to-book ratios, barista body language and customer flow patterns. You've built a complete social physics model from cues AI wouldn't even recognise as data.

The phase change moment isn’t when we acquire new capabilities but when we stop maintaining the exhausting fiction that these capacities must remain separate. Just as water molecules can exist in either the solid or liquid state, we carry multiple potential configurations within us. The question isn’t what we need to learn but what we’re not allowed to use, and more importantly, what happens when we stop asking permission. (It is easy to let our unused talents be taken hostage, but that’s another post.)

It shifts the entire strategic frame from deficit (needing energy to escape) to recognition (understanding we already have what we need, just in the wrong configuration). The real work of jumping from the pot isn’t about building escape velocity; it’s about allowing ourselves to harness what was always there.

Those making the decisions we hate are just as helpless as we are. They are in different water, and viewing them as the enemy is counterproductive. We can be fairly certain that when they finish making the decisions about where they’re going to replace us with AI, it will be followed in fairly short order by the “oh shit” moment when they realise that they didn’t know what they didn’t know. They will have their own journey from private disquiet to shared naming and the need for reorientation - and a different conversation with those they assumed optional.

It opens questions about resilience: how do we survive what is going to be an inevitable period of turmoil? About recognition: what qualities have we kept dormant that might now matter, that we can configure, develop, and shape, ready when the need arises? About unexpected value: where might we create the greatest impact?

It’s very probably not the area we’re operating in at the moment.

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These are topics I’ll be looking at in more detail over at New Artisans in the coming weeks, if you want to join in the conversation, please consider subscribing.

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This is an important moment for the choices we make. We can either choose to make enemies or to explore possibilities, even when we may not like or trust the people we need to speak with.

If we make bad choices, it’s going to be easy to find ourselves hostage to our own fears. What we laughingly call social media can be our worst enemy, designed as it is to capture our attention as it boils the water around us in pursuit of profit. It’s not where we need to spend time.

We can better spend our time in small groups, developing trust, exploring ideas, and making small moves as we find our ways forward in these changing circumstances.

It’s not about solutions or big leaps, and it’s most certainly not about scale. These are the spaces where our private disquiet meets other people’s private disquiet and moves to shared naming that is constructive, not inflammatory. These are spaces where we can explore, recognise, and shape the qualities we possess that are not required in the jobs we currently hold but will be needed as we move forward, to wherever that may be.

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I have my own space that I’m currently hosting for these sorts of conversations at The Athanor. It’s a small group that we did not allow to grow large because there are many other groups of people doing the same things in different ways. We’re better diversified than creating one big group. If however you want a place to start, consider subscribing.

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It reminds me of a good friend who looks after trees and embodies the idea that phase change requires a mindset that our best strategies must allow for an evolving environment, and the sobering thought that the metaphorical trees we plant will provide shade for others, not us. We are shaped not just by those around us and those before us, and, as surely, we are shaping those who follow us. Strategy is a responsibility to people we do not know.

I think we have to recognise the preoccupations that blind us as we respond to KPIs, OKRs, and other measures that revolve around the problematic idea of perpetual linear growth. The pressures to submerge our humanity to the point where we no longer consider it, and as we become enervated by an AI story, it serves only a part of who we are now, and nothing at all about who we may become.

I’m looking forward to 2026, hoping that the quiet before will give way to something altogether more coherent as an idea for moving forward together. I find it easier and more productive to think of what we are going through as a phase change rather than something we can somehow put right. As I write about this at The Athanor, it feels somewhat alchemical, and our approach to thriving in it must occupy spaces beyond the logic and the data that are boiling around us.

Have a great week!

Some posts I enjoyed this week:

Yascha Mounk with a considered view of the world according to Trump.

There’s a Strange, Depressing Logic to Trump’s Foreign Policy

Mike Hind on Sensemaking

The Ecstasy of Sensemaking

An end-of-the-year reflection from Anthony Howard - long, but worth it

The Hole in the Tapestry