62% of execs open this newsletter every week. Why? Because it’s blunt, useful, and occasionally rude about meetings.

Dear Reader

Here is a sentence that should worry any senior leader:

You can waste billions solving a problem that only exists because nobody asked a better question.

The replay for my webinar “6 habits that help leaders stay productive AND innovative” is now ready to watch here.

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The webinar will help you create more space for the deeper level thinking that prevents this sort of nonsense.

Because one of the most expensive habits in leadership is confusing a practical problem with a psychological one.

Not because people are stupid, lazy or lack ambition.

Mostly because they’re efficient. Yes. Efficient.

And efficiency, while lovely on a spreadsheet, has a nasty habit of making people feel clever while they sprint in the wrong direction.

Rory Sutherland (Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy UK) tells a story I think every leader should have pinned somewhere visible. Possibly above the coffee machine. Possibly on their forehead.

The high-speed rail link between Channel Tunnel and London (opened in 2007) spent over 6 billion pounds(!) to cut the journey between London and Paris by roughly 20 minutes.

Which sounds impressive.

It sounds strategic.
It sounds serious.
It sounds exactly like the sort of thing that gets nodded through in a boardroom because everyone likes the look of speed.

And then Sutherland, being gloriously irritating in the most useful way, suggested (afterwards mind you) that for a fraction of the cost they could simply make the journey more enjoyable.

His now-famous example was that for around 10% of that budget, they could have hired beautiful people to walk through the train serving free Château Petrus champagne, and passengers would probably ask for the train to slow down.

Now, whether your own corporate style leans more toward vintage Bordeaux or a slightly stale Pret coffee, the point stands.

People do not only experience reality.
​They experience their perception of reality.

And that is where leadership gets interesting.

Because most leaders are still trying to solve everything like railway engineers.

• How do we make it faster?
• How do we make it leaner?
• How do we reduce the time?
• How do we add more?
• How do we optimise the system?

Fine questions.
Useful questions.
Dangerously incomplete questions.

Because sometimes the real issue is not the thing itself.
​It is the experience of the thing.

Your team may not need more resources for the project.
→ They may need more clarity.

Your stakeholders may not need more data.
→ They may need more confidence.

You may not need to reduce your workload by 20%.
→ You may need to stop experiencing every task like a personal moral emergency.

That last one stings a bit, I know.

But it matters.

Because a surprising number of leadership “problems” are not operational problems at all.

They are psychological ones.

The meeting is not too long.
...It is too vague.

The strategy is not too ambitious.
...It is too disconnected from human behaviour.

The workload is not always too much.
...Sometimes it is too fragmented, too reactive, too full of low-level nonsense that keeps your brain in admin mode and away from the deeper thinking your role actually requires.

And this is why I think Sutherland’s story matters far beyond trains.

It reminds us that asking better questions is often more valuable than throwing more resources at bad ones.

Instead of:
​→ How do we make this faster?

Try:
​→ How do we make this feel clearer, calmer, easier, more meaningful, or more human?

Instead of:
​→ How do we get people to do more?

Try:
​→ What is making this feel harder than it needs to?

Instead of:
​→ How do I fix all of this?

Try:
​→ Is there actually a real problem here, or have I simply decided there is one because my brain dislikes uncertainty, waiting, or the mild inconvenience of not being in control?

That, by the way, is a very expensive habit in senior leadership.

Not just financially.
But Cognitively.
Emotionally.
And Culturally.

Because once a leader starts treating every discomfort as a systems failure, everyone around them learns to do the same.

Soon you have an entire team running around trying to “solve” tension that should have been thought through, not managed into submission with another dashboard.

And let’s be honest, some of what leaders call productivity is just panic.

So this is where the real work begins.

The value of deeper thinking is not just that it makes you slow down enough to see clearer.

It is also that it stops you being efficiently ridiculous.

It helps you see when the answer is not more effort, more budget, more urgency, more meetings, or one more person frantically colour-coding a spreadsheet.

Sometimes the answer is a psychological intervention.

More reassurance.
More ownership.
More context.
More delight.
More trust.
More space to think.

Or, occasionally, the deeply offensive discovery that nothing is fundamentally wrong except the story you’re telling yourself about it.

Which is irritating.
But useful. And much cheaper.

And if you are reading this thinking, “Yes, lovely, but when exactly am I meant to do this deeper level thinking while my calendar looks like a hostage situation?” then good news.

The replay for my webinar “6 habits that help leaders stay productive AND innovative” is now ready to watch here:

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PLUS: One useful question to take into this week

Pick one thing currently frustrating you at work and ask:

What if I stopped trying to make this faster and started trying to make it better to experience?

That is often where the real solution is hiding.

Not in the stopwatch.
In the psychology.

Your executive coach,

Terez

P.S. There is something deeply corporate about spending millions to avoid asking a better question.

P.P.S. If you have ever wondered why coaching works so well, it is precisely because we stop trying to solve every human problem with budget, pressure, and a fresh spreadsheet. Psychological solutions are faster, cheaper, and far less exhausting. Find out more here.​

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