Make Change the Conversation

Resilience is becoming a leadership liability

In a recent Forbes article titled "Why Resilience Is Becoming a Leadership Liability", Nell Derick Debevoise argues that resilience has been overused as a leadership reflex, and the result is predictable: more endurance, less effectiveness. (Forbes)

What this exposes in real operating conditions:

• "Resilience" becomes a polite way to ask people to absorb a broken workload.
• Pressure keeps rising, but priorities stay blurry.
• Teams look fine on the outside, but decision quality quietly deteriorates.
• Recovery time stretches, and everything costs more energy than it should.

Everyone wants resilience, but the humans are burned out

This is not just a personal stamina issue. Complexity has doubled at the top.

McKinsey estimates that a decade ago CEOs and top teams typically focused on 4-5 critical issues at a time, and today that number is roughly double. (McKinsey)

Decision cycles are less forgiving

The last two years created a sharper environment where "push through" stops working.

What changed:

• AI compressed timelines, expectations, and comparison pressure.
• Attention fractured, so clarity has to be faster and more repeatable.
• The amount of "unknown unknowns" increased, so certainty got more expensive.
• The margin for sloppy priorities collapsed, because the pace exposes drift immediately.

This is why ideas like doing fewer things and working at a natural pace now read as strategic, not soft. ("Slow Productivity" - Cal Newpor)

And this is why the AI era feels less like progress and more like a containment challenge if it is not governed, framed, and explained. ("The Coming Wave")

Don't ask "How do I endure more?"

This problem is not about you lacking grit. It is about using grit to solve the wrong kind of problem.

Adaptive Leadership shifts the question away from endurance and toward interpretation:

• If the pressure is coming from uncertainty, resilience will not fix it.
• If the work requires learning, unlearning, and rapid re-prioritization, effort alone becomes waste.
• If the organization is waiting for you to absorb ambiguity personally, you become the bottleneck.

Resilience fails when it is used to carry unresolved ambiguity. It becomes sustainable only when sense-making is distributed and learning speed improves.

Public voice turns ambiguity into shared meaning

If the constraint is interpretation, the resolution cannot stay private.

Public voice matters because:

• Clarity gets tested in real time, not in internal documents.
• Vague language collapses under conversation.
• Your point of view becomes a stabilizer when the environment is unstable.
• Authority forms in public now, because trust is increasingly observational.

Podcasting is not a marketing bolt-on here. It is a forcing function that pressures your thinking into clean, repeatable language, and reveals what is unclear.

A practical example of this "voice as leverage" approach is repurposing podcast guest appearances into durable thought leadership assets. (Guests on Air Guide)

Make change an open conversation

Stop saying "we need to be more resilient" and start explaining "here is what changed, here is what matters now, here is what we are no longer doing, and here is how decisions will get made". Resilience is what you earn after shared sense-making, not what you demand before it.