Before this issue begins: you can help spread the word about my SXSW 2027 talk proposal, Stop Arguing With Urgency. It Won. Community voting is open through this Sunday, August 23, and a vote takes about two minutes. If you know someone who would want this argument on a bigger stage, forwarding this note helps too. Thank you.
Now, the issue.
Ask a leadership team what got them here and they will name execution: discipline, focus, delivery. Ask them what gets them through the next disruption and the honest ones go quiet.
Here is the chain I keep seeing. A company recognizes it needs to disrupt itself before the market does. The question I hear too rarely is “how do we disrupt ourselves,” and credit to the teams that ask it, because the chain it starts is demanding. Self-disruption requires innovation capacity. Innovation capacity requires leadership capacity. And that capacity does not live in execution skills. It lives in three tendencies: curiosity, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias for action.
The problem is that these three pull against each other.
Curiosity wants to keep exploring. It asks one more question, opens one more door, and resists closing the file. Comfort with ambiguity is willing to sit inside an unresolved situation without forcing it shut. And a bias for action wants to move now, with the information in hand.
Any one of them alone is a failure mode. All curiosity, and the team researches forever. All action, and the team executes yesterday’s plan faster. All tolerance for ambiguity, and the team drifts. The leaders who scale are not the ones with the strongest single tendency. They are the ones who hold all three in tension and know which one the moment requires.
Two things make this harder than it sounds.
The first is composition. Leadership teams select for the tendency that built the company, and in operating businesses that is almost always execution. This is not a hiring mistake. It is success doing what success does: promoting the people who look like what worked. But it means the team that got the company here is systematically thin on the tendencies the next chapter requires. When someone says the future needs a seat at the table, that is nearly literal. The best leaders I work with know this about themselves. They know their strengths and their development needs, they hire for the tendencies that complement their own, and then they do the part most leaders skip: they ask those people, out loud and in front of the team, to bring that strength into the room without regard for hierarchy. No one is omniscient. The leaders who say so publicly are the ones building the capacity everything above depends on.
The second is Ambient Urgency. Constant pressure starves all three tendencies at once. Curiosity is the first casualty, because exploration looks like a luxury when everything is urgent. Comfort with ambiguity goes next, because urgency demands resolution. What survives is bias for action alone, which is how capable teams end up moving fast in a direction chosen by the past.
The practical move is not a workshop on innovation. It is an audit, and it takes three questions. Which of the three tendencies does this team reward in practice, whatever the values statement says? Which one is missing from our actual meetings, not our self-image? And who is currently holding the unpopular one alone, and what is that costing them? Readiness for needs you cannot yet name is what these tendencies buy. That readiness is built before it is needed, which is the only time it is cheap.
Take good care,
Karen