The Bounce of the Ball
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Hi Subscriber First Name,
Since my white paper Burnout in the Age of AI went out, I've been having a particular kind of conversation.
Leaders keep coming back to the headwinds I flagged in the paper. Burnout. The pace of AI. The compliance shift. The pressure landing on the people in the middle. Those are the big ones, and there are a few others sitting just behind them.
But underneath all of it is a quieter question. How do you plan for something you can't see coming?
If the next COVID-scale shock, market disruption or competitor challenge landed tomorrow, would your best people be ready? Or are they already running on empty?
It helps to separate two words we tend to treat as the same thing. Uncertainty and unpredictability. Thank you, Dr Isabella Allan, for the distinction.
Uncertainty, we can work with. We don't know exactly what the year holds, so we map and forecast the range, develop a strategy, run the scenarios, build in a buffer. A round ball is uncertain. It might roll left or right, and a good keeper reads it and gets across in time. (someone has been watching his share of the World Cup!)
Unpredictability is a different animal.
Think of a rugby ball. It's oval, and the moment it hits the turf it can go anywhere. You can be the best player on the park, perfectly positioned, and the bounce still beats you. No amount of planning fixes the bounce.
And most of what's landing on business right now is the bounce.
Each headwind on its own is something we can prepare for. Burnout, we can manage, a change process or an AI rollout, we can govern. A market wobble, or economic downturn we can ride out. The trouble starts when they turn up together. Sailors call it a ‘perfect storm’ where three or more fronts that are fine on their own, all arrive at once. Now we can't forecast the outcome. We can't even see it clearly while it's happening.
So, here's the shift I keep landing on with people.
You can't plan the bounce. What you can do is build a team that plays well when the ball goes sideways.
That's the whole idea behind Level Up. It grows a group of leaders inside your organisation who stay steady when things get strange. Reliable, regulated people you lean on when the forecast is useless. The ones who keep the team playing while everyone else is chasing the ball.
If your best people are already stretched thin, that's worth a conversation. I'm always up for a chat and I’d love to share the Level Up program with you as a solution.
