I began as a sports coach. What caught my attention wasn't technique — it was what happened when you stopped adding it. People who had been coached heavily, who knew exactly what they were supposed to do, often performed worse under pressure than those who had learned more naturally. Interference was the problem.
Timothy Gallwey named this clearly. The opponent worth worrying about is rarely across the net. Get the internal noise to quieten and something shifts — not just in what a person can access, but in how they learn. Observation becomes absorption. The rate at which people develop by this route consistently surprises.
I have been following that thread ever since. Through training and coaching, operations management, nine years with world-leading specialists in brain-friendly learning and change, all building toward substantial programmes designing and implementing approaches to engage people in change, building leadership capability, improving cross-cultural working across many continents, along with a significant number of engagements few want to take on.
David Bohm spent his life asking why we fragment reality and then wonder why things fall apart. His answer was that fragmentation is a cognitive habit — useful for navigation, costly when mistaken for the way things actually are. Donald Hoffman made the same point differently: what we perceive is an interface, not reality. A desktop that helps us function, built on processes we cannot see.
Organisations are expert fragmenters. Departments, hierarchies, reporting lines — all useful to a point, all bringing other real consequences. And all, eventually, the thing that leaves the system unable to see what it already knows about itself.
When I'm invited to work with an organisation, I try to arrive before my assumptions do. The work begins in the space between what people believe is happening and what is actually happening. That gap is almost always where the leverage is.
My son learned to ride a bicycle at two years old. No stabilisers. They mean well — like much of what accumulates in organisations: the structures, the controls, the careful fragmentation.
If you find yourself having to push harder than the results justify, what might become possible if you found out why?
To remain agile in a constantly changing world, I work with a small group of trusted experts whom I've known for decades. This means we can scale up and down per programme of work as required. Contact me to find out more.