It’s lost in the ‘Why’ and the ‘Where’
We talk endlessly about how to lead.
How to communicate better.
How to run meetings.
How to be more agile.
How to drive performance.
And don’t get me wrong - the how matters.
But it’s not where leadership is being lost.
Leadership isn’t being lost because leaders don’t know how to lead.
It’s being lost because we’ve stopped anchoring leadership in why we’re here and where we’re actually going.
The missing conversation
When why and where are unclear, everything else degrades.
• Strategy becomes activity.
• Performance becomes busyness.
• Agility becomes reaction.
• Leadership becomes management of the urgent.
Without a compelling why, people optimise for safety, optics and short-term wins.
Without a clear where, goals become artificial horizons - arbitrary numbers, timeframes and targets that look good on paper and exhaust people in practice.
We end up sprinting… then contracting… then sprinting again.
Not because it’s strategic - but because we don’t know what else to do.
Short-term focus is not strategic
Here’s where we’ve really gone off track.
Short-term thinking has been dressed up as discipline.
Urgency has been confused with importance.
And ‘delivery at all costs’ has been mistaken for leadership.
Short-term focus breeds:
• Overt internal competition
• Narrow decision-making
• Stop-start momentum
• Risk aversion masquerading as prudence.
It creates businesses that are busy, brittle and strangely exhausted - even when they’re profitable.
And the more uncertain the environment becomes, the more leaders double down on the short term… which ironically makes the business less resilient, not more.
Agile and Adaptive have been hijacked
This one might sting.
Agile and adaptive were never meant to be short-term activities.
They were meant to be long-term characteristics.
Instead, many organisations now treat them as mechanisms for speed rather than coherence:
• A sprint methodology
• A delivery cadence
• A response to disruption
• A synonym for ‘move faster’.
That’s not adaptability. That’s reactivity with better branding.
True adaptability is not about moving quickly - it’s about moving coherently toward a future that matters, even when the information is incomplete and the path isn’t linear.
It’s about having:
• A clear sense of where you’re heading
• Multiple scenarios, not a single plan
• Guardrails that guide decisions, not scripts that constrain them
• Leaders who can hold uncertainty without defaulting to control.
When you lose the future, you lose leadership
Here’s the real cost of all of this.
When leaders lose sight of the future - or avoid talking about it because it feels too uncertain, too messy, too risky - leadership collapses inward.
People stop asking:
• What are we really trying to create here?
• What kind of business are we becoming?
• What will be demanded of us next?
And instead ask:
• What do I need to deliver this quarter?
• How do I protect my patch?
• What’s the safest decision right now?
That’s not a capability problem.
That’s a context problem.
The reframe leaders need right now
What we need is a return to intentional leadership - leadership that:
• Anchors action in why
• Uses the short term in service of the long term
• Treats agility as a capability, not a tactic
• Builds businesses that can adapt without burning out their people.
This is the work of the adaptive leader.
Not perfect.
Not certain.
But clear enough about the future to make better decisions today.
A question worth sitting with
So here’s the real question - and it’s not a comfortable one:
“Are you leading toward something… or just leading through things?”
Because if leadership feels harder than it should…
If performance feels fragile…
If your people are capable but misdirected…
It might not be your how that needs fixing.
It might be that your why has faded - and your where is no longer doing the heavy lifting it should.
And that’s where the real work begins.
The risk right now isn’t moving too slowly.
It’s moving decisively in the wrong direction.
If you’re ready to lift your leadership conversation out of the short term and re-anchor it in a future worth building, I work with a small number of CEOs and executive teams each quarter on exactly that problem.
This is the work of adaptive leadership.
And it starts with a different conversation.