Burnout has become a catch-all for something most organizations don't have language for. The slow drain of capacity that no one names until it's already a problem. I was in a debrief conversation with a client last week, and we were talking about team performance. The word "burnout" kept coming up. When we dug into what was actually happening though, the perception of burnout and the reality of output didn't match. The team wasn't necessarily burned out; they didn't have a full grasp on their...
9 days ago • 3 min read
A friend recently shared this sports event with me because it's so relevant to the work we do at The Venned Group. During the 2005 Japanese Grand Prix, Fernando Alonso found himself wheel-to-wheel with 7x Champion, Michael Schumacher, at the infamous 130R, a corner taken at over 180 miles per hour with walls on either side. Rather than back off, Alonso stayed flat on the throttle, and it was Schumacher who hit the brakes. When asked about it later, Alonso shrugged: "At times like that, I...
16 days ago • 4 min read
I was reviewing my notetaker’s notes the other day after a meeting. They were immaculate. Perfectly sorted, action steps clearly highlighted, even the smallest contextual details captured accurately. We use Motion, which meant those action items had already been translated into tasks and offered to be placed into my calendar before the call had officially ended. The efficiency was undeniable and so was the feeling that followed. Irrelevance is the closest word I can find, although...
23 days ago • 3 min read
Last week, we got into the nitty-gritty of process and "meta conversations" with 110 participants, across 3 teams, over 4 days. By process & meta convos, I mean the real discussions about how work actually moves through an organization, not the polished strategic planning sessions that produce impressive slide decks and very little behavioural change. These are the conversations that rarely happen organically because the pace of daily operations doesn't leave room for them. There's always...
30 days ago • 3 min read
I've been in a lot of planning meetings over the past few months. Kickoffs, quarterly goal-setting, initiative launches, and I keep hearing the same phrase (or variation of): "We should..." "The team should..." "The team will..." The team will handle the rollout. The team will follow up with clients. The team will figure out the details. Which, at first encounter, sounds like delegation but it's actually diffusion. When no one's name is attached to an outcome, no one owns it. "The team"...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
In case you don't already know, I love dogs. One of the reasons is that you always know where you stand with them. A belly-up rollover is trust. A lean into your leg is trust. That slow blink before they fall asleep next to you on the couch is trust. There's no guessing involved. Humans are harder... We don't give you those obvious signals, and when trust starts to erode, it rarely announces itself. What you get instead is subtler: someone who used to bring ideas to meetings stops offering...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader! Given the way the holidays fall this year, I'm sneaking our last newsletter of 2025 in today as our team will be OOO until January 5th, 2026. Here's one last thought before we unplug... If I had to choose a single word to define the conversations we had with clients this year, it would be around finding alignment. Not the absence of conflict, but something quieter and more corrosive: the slow accumulation of small mismatches that nobody thinks to name. Different definitions....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
I don't take for granted that you open these emails. Some of you have been reading these newsletters for years. Some of you just subscribed last week. Either way, you're part of the reason I keep writing, and I wanted you to have this first. This year we trained over 800 leaders. We facilitated the conversations that don't happen in regular meetings, sat in rooms where alignment finally clicked, and watched teams work through the friction they'd been dancing around for months. As we entered...
2 months ago • 1 min read
You've satisfactorily answered every question in the room, and somehow nobody feels satisfied. A senior leader prepares to announce a significant change, knowing it's big, knowing people might be uncertain, so they come in ready. With big energy, optimism and genuine excitement about what's ahead. The instinct makes sense: if people are going to be nervous, show them there's nothing to be nervous about, paint the picture of where we're going so vividly that they can't help but want to come...
2 months ago • 6 min read