Useful meeting. Terrible seating plan...

Sometimes the value isn’t another plan - sometimes it is a better conversation

Andy Begley

6/25/20261 min read

Most leadership decisions involve more than one version of you; there’s the version that wants to move quickly, the version that knows the governance needs to be right, the version that’s seen the pattern before and is getting tired of pretending it’s new… and there’s the version that has to hold the room together while everyone else works out what they really think.

This is what leadership genuinely feels like in practice, there’s no heroic certainty, no neat sequence of decisions, more often than not, it’s a tough conversation between competing responsibilities.

Organisations often seem to reward the person who answers first, sounds most confident, or produces the neatest plan, but in complex work, the better judgement often comes from holding the tension for slightly longer than feels comfortable.

Some of the best leadership conversations I have been part of have not started from a point of certainty, they’ve started with someone saying, “I’m not sure we are asking the right question.” - and that can be an uncomfortable moment, but it can also be the moment the real work starts.

Sometimes the value isn’t another plan - sometimes it is a better conversation, a sharper question, or a calmer external view of what the system is really telling you.

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andy@andybegley.co.uk