Blog
December 11, 2019 2025-10-06 7:38Blog
Tips and valuable information for your work and life curated by ThinkHuman
Thoughts and Excerpts
Beyond the Seat: How Great Leaders Drive the Business Itself
It’s been a relentless few years for leaders: more demand, fewer resources, and constant pressure to show business impact. But the opportunity is extraordinary. In times like these, the differentiator isn’t strategy or resources. It’s ownership, the mindset that says, this is mine to fix. So we started where any strategy firm would: by diagnosing value creation itself. We asked one question: Where does this business create value, and what could destroy it? That question changed everything. …
Annual Planning: Rethinking How We Plan When the Future Is Foggy
For years, annual planning has been treated as a predictable ritual: review last year, set new targets, cascade them down. But when the ground under you keeps shifting, inflation up, interest rates high, demand cooling, supply chains unpredictable, that ritual becomes an illusion of control. Leaders are discovering what behavioral scientists have known for decades: the best way to prepare for uncertainty isn’t to predict it, it’s to build the capacity to adapt. That’s where the 3 Minute Executive Playbook comes in. It’s not a static template; it’s a framework for thinking like …
Turning Tension into Trust
Too many leaders treat conflict as a distraction from “real work.” But our work with executive teams across industries shows the opposite: the way leaders handle conflict is often the real work—and the strongest predictor of whether strategy sticks. Our data and field experience echo what McKinsey found: teams that engage in high-quality productive conflict make decisions 2.5× faster and outperform financially by 12%. But speed and performance only happen when leaders know how to navigate the middle ground between false harmony and destructive argument. At ThinkHuman, we’ve distilled this into a …
Don’t Just Fill Roles. Architect Teams That Deliver
Most leaders don’t wake up thinking, “Today, I’m going to ignore one of the most important levers for hitting our business goals.” But many do it anyway. Not on purpose. Not from laziness. From habit. They inherit a team structure. They chase deliverables. The flex to cover issues within the team. And somewhere in the sprint from Q1 to Q4, they skip the foundational move that separates high-performing teams from over-functioning ones: They forget to design the team their strategy actually requires. …
You’re Not Just a Messenger. You’re a Meaning-Maker
Julia stood in front of her team for the third time that month. Another change. Another eye-roll. Another “Didn’t we already try this?” moment. Her team nodded when leadership announced the strategy—but nothing changed. Why? Most organizations treat communication like a box to check: announce the change, send the email, hold the town hall. Then comes the confusion. The resistance. The dip in morale. The dreaded question: Didn’t we already tell them? Here’s the disconnect: strategy doesn’t cascade. Meaning does. And the people who determine whether that meaning sticks or slips …
AI Is Here And Its Not Waiting For Anyone To Catch Up
AI Is Here – And It’s Not Waiting For Anyone To Catch-Up AI as a Leadership Multiplier: Four New Imperatives The question isn’t whether AI will change leadership. It’s whether leadership will rise to meet the moment. In a world of exponential complexity, the best leaders won’t just adopt AI—they’ll evolve with it. They’ll rethink how they make decisions, how they scale influence, and how they stay human while everything around them accelerates. This isn’t leadership automated. It’s leadership amplified. 1. Stretch Your Judgment Leadership has always been about navigating …
Stop Wasting Your Mid Year Check Ins
Stop Wasting Your Mid-Year Check-Ins In many organizations, mid-year goal check-ins are polite, predictable, and performative. They’re well-intentioned but rarely transformative. Leaders review a dashboard. Color-coded statuses are read out. A few nods, some vague encouragement—and then it’s back to business as usual. But in high-performing organizations, these check-ins are something else entirely: a critical recalibration point. A place where execution meets reflection. Where leadership shows up not in a polished plan, but in how we course-correct when things get messy. This isn’t about fixing the ritual. It’s about redesigning …
We Fixed The Performance Review and Broke Feedback
We Fixed The Performance Review and Broke Feedback Let’s be honest: the traditional performance review had it coming. It was bureaucratic, backward-looking, and often more about ratings than real development. So companies scrapped it. But in the rush to be more human, the mission was missed. In many organizations today, they’ve traded rigid structure for comforting vagueness. Managers are encouraged to “check in”, but the hard conversations? They’re often sidestepped. Underperformance lingers, high performers get overburdened, and real growth conversations don’t actually happen. The pendulum has swung—from fear-based to coaching-lite. …
How Leaders Can Build Resilient Teams in a World of Uncertainty
How Leaders Can Build Resilient Teams in a World of Uncertainty Organizations today are operating in a state of persistent instability. Supply chains shift overnight, political environments rattle confidence, and economic signals change by the quarter. The old model of “manage change, then return to normal” has collapsed. There is no return. There is only continuous adaptation. In this new environment, resilience is no longer a personal trait—it’s a team capability. And the leaders who will succeed are not those who wait for clarity but those who can lead through ambiguity, …