From force to flow

This is article 1 of 4 in The Long Focus series.

I spent thirty years pushing toward targets and calling it vision. A recent conversation I had with leadership expert Rashmir Balasubramaniam gave me language for something I'd been doing wrong the whole time. She calls it the shift from force to flow. I call it the reason so many of my hardest years in business felt like winning and losing at once.

A word I didn't expect to need

Steward is a word I associate with land, not spreadsheets. Rashmir opened our conversation with it anyway. She argues that leaders need to become stewards first and creators second. My first reaction was scepticism. I've sat across from enough consultants selling new vocabulary for old problems.

But she kept going, and the second word she used was the one that landed. Creativity. Not innovation. Creativity. There is a difference, and business has been confusing the two for decades.

What force actually looks like in a boardroom

Force is the water I swam in for three decades. You set a target. You build a plan to hit it. You push until you do. I ran companies this way. I closed acquisitions this way. Somewhere across more than seventy deals, I stopped noticing I was doing it, because everyone around me was doing it too.

Force works. That's the uncomfortable part. It gets results, on schedule, on budget, in a quarter that satisfies a board. I'm not here to tell you force is wrong. There's a time and a place for it. The same way there's a time and a place for a hard deadline or a difficult conversation.

The problem isn't force itself. It's that most of us were never taught anything else.

The cost nobody puts on the P&L

Force has a price, and it rarely shows up in the financial statements discussed in the boardroom. I've signed off on decisions built entirely on force logic. Hit the number, protect the shareholder return, worry about the human cost later. Later usually meant never.

In my experience, the businesses that ran hardest on force were also the ones that hollowed out fastest once the pressure let up. The people who built them left with nothing left to give. I was one of them.

The flow I'd never been taught

Flow, as Rashmir describes it, isn't the performance-optimisation kind, you know, the flow state athletes and executives chase to work faster and think sharper. It's closer to pausing long enough to ask what's actually trying to happen, rather than what you already decided should happen.

That distinction sounds soft until you sit with it. Force asks, "How do I make this happen?" Flow asks: What's wanting to happen here, and where do I need to get out of the way?

I've made a career out of the first question. I'm only now learning to ask the second.

Why innovation sessions rarely produce anything new

Here's where the conversation got uncomfortable, in the best way. Somewhere along the line, corporations decided innovation and creativity were the same thing. They aren't. Most innovation sessions I've sat through – the sticky notes, the whiteboards, the forced brainstorming – are forcing creativity into its clothes. We're still trying to make something happen on schedule. We've just dressed up the effort with bean bag chairs and a facilitator.

Real creativity, the kind Rashmir means, requires the one thing force can't tolerate. Not knowing the answer yet. Most boardrooms cannot sit with not knowing. Somebody needs to own the outcome by Friday.

The energy we run on without noticing

Most of what happens at work runs on automatic energy. The habits, processes, and decisions we stopped thinking about years ago. Mainly because thinking about them stopped being useful. Don't get me wrong; automatic energy has its place. Nobody wants to relearn how to run payroll every month.

The trouble starts when we put things on automatic that deserve conscious attention. Strategy on automatic. Culture on automatic. The way people get treated during a restructuring, on automatic, because that's how it's always been done here.

In my experience, most organisational failures aren't failures of intelligence. It's a failure to notice that something shifted from a conscious choice to an unquestioned habit. Usually, years before, anyone in the room today joined the company.

Where automatic becomes a liability

I watched this happen inside a company I helped scale from six figures to nearly a billion in revenue. The processes that got us through the first ten million dollars were still running the show at nine hundred million, unchanged and unquestioned, because nobody had stopped long enough to ask whether they still served the business we'd become.

That's automatic energy at scale. It isn't stupidity. It's momentum. And momentum is exactly what makes it invisible from inside the machine.

Sensing versus deciding

Rashmir's framework asks something different of a leader. Not just deciding faster but sensing more accurately first. What does the system already want to become? Where is the resistance – actual information, not obstruction – to push through?

I don't think this replaces good decision-making. I think it comes before it. You can't decide well what you haven't first sensed accurately. Force by design skips the sensing step. Force decides first and looks for confirmation second.

What changed when I asked a different question

There was a moment in our conversation where something clicked that I hadn't heard articulated that clearly before. It wasn't a new fact. It was old experience, finally given a name. Thirty years of watching businesses win by force and lose by force, in almost equal measure, suddenly made more sense as two sides of the same limitation, not two separate stories.

I don't think I'll stop using force. Some situations call for it. But I now ask a question before I reach for it. Is this a moment that genuinely needs force, or a moment I've defaulted to force because it's the only tool I was ever handed?

Where this leaves a businessperson like me

This series is my attempt to work through what that question means for people running real companies, not spiritual retreats. Over the next three pieces, I'll get into the balance between forceful and receptive approaches to leadership, what systems thinking actually offers a business that wants to last, and what the leader of tomorrow needs to know to do that which today's leader was never taught.

I don't have this figured out. I have thirty years of force, one particularly good conversation, and a question I can't stop asking. That seems like a reasonable place to start.

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