Here’s something I keep seeing.
Brilliant, capable, experienced leaders — making decisions about the future using maps drawn from the past. Old assumptions about how teams work. Old beliefs about what leadership looks like. Old stories about who they are and what they’re capable of.
The map served them well. That’s why they still reach for it.
But the territory has changed. And a map of somewhere you used to be can’t tell you how to navigate somewhere you’ve never been.
I see it in the leader who knows something has to change but keeps defaulting to what worked before. In the founder scaling fast but leading the way they were led — and wondering why it’s not working. In the executive who is deeply capable and quietly exhausted, because they’re working twice as hard to make an old approach fit a new reality.
The map isn’t wrong. It’s just old.
The question isn’t how to work harder with the same map. It’s how to sense the territory as it actually is — and find the courage to navigate without a map that’s already been drawn for you.
Where are you still using an old map — and what might the territory actually look like right now?
With warmth,
Elaine