Strategy often gets lost in the noise. Endless frameworks. Endless slides. Endless talk.
The reality is strategy that doesn’t lead to clarity and action is just decoration. The best leaders know strategy isn’t a “document.” It’s a way of thinking, and a way of moving ideas into action.

Why Strategy Often Fails
Too many teams start with solutions before they’ve even defined the problem. They spend weeks polishing presentations that look impressive but change nothing. They confuse activity with progress.

The result is this: Teams feel busy but directionless. Leaders lose credibility. Opportunities slip through the cracks.

A Better Way to Approach Strategy
Think of strategy as a progression, from raw idea to bold action. Done right, it flows like this:

1. Define the Problem Clearly
   Everything starts with a sharp definition of what you’re trying to solve. Without this, all energy is wasted.
2. Break It Down
   Decompose the challenge into manageable parts. Complexity becomes clarity when broken into pieces.
3. Analyse Deeply
   Gather data, test assumptions, and explore angles. Insight lives where analysis meets curiosity.
4. Craft the Insight
   Look for patterns and meaning. Ask: So what? Why does this matter?
5. Build the Narrative
   Turn the insight into a story people believe in. Strategy without narrative doesn’t travel.
6. Make the Decision
   Clarity requires commitment. Choose the path. Show your reasoning. Stand behind it.
7. Take Bold Action
   Strategy dies without execution. Build the roadmap, mobilise the team, and move.

The Leadership Mindset Behind Great Strategy
Frameworks alone don’t create strategy. Mindset does. The leaders who succeed bring three things to the table:

Courage: They commit even without perfect information. Waiting for certainty kills momentum.

Discipline: They filter distractions and stick to what matters.

Humility: They adapt when the facts change, instead of clinging to ego.

Without this mindset, even the best model collapses under pressure.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong
Skip problem definition, and you’ll solve the wrong challenge brilliantly, but waste months. Ignore execution, and your team will build slide decks no one remembers, instead of products or outcomes that matter. Fail to decide, and you’ll burn energy analysing forever, only to watch opportunities pass you by.

Strategy isn’t a luxury. Done badly, it’s a liability.

What Leaders Need to Remember
Strategy isn’t theory. It’s not “nice slides.” It’s not endless debate. It’s about: Turning chaos into clarity. Aligning people around a story. Making decisions others can rally behind. Driving action that sticks.

The leaders who succeed know how to transform an idea into insight, shape that insight into a narrative, turn the narrative into a decision, and drive the decision into action

The Leader’s Checklist
Before you call something strategy, ask yourself: Have we defined the problem clearly? Do we understand the “so what”? Is there a story that people will believe and follow? Have we committed to a decision, not just a discussion? Do we know the first three actions to execute now?

If you can’t answer yes to all five, you don’t have strategy yet.

Closing Thought
Strategy is only powerful when it lives in motion. The next time you’re faced with uncertainty, don’t obsess over frameworks or templates. Ask the hard questions. Build the story. Make the decision. Then move. Because in the end, strategy isn’t about knowing more. It’s about creating clarity where others only see chaos, and moving people forward with it.

Digital disruption is not a distant event that organisations can prepare for in advance. It is here, unfolding daily and accelerated by generative AI, shifting regulations, and changing customer expectations. Technology is not the only challenge. The bigger test is leadership: how leaders behave when the rules of business keep being rewritten.

Our instincts in times of disruption are often to default to what worked before. Yet research from IMD and Harvard Business Review shows that the most effective leaders navigate disruption by blending traditional and emerging leadership behaviours. These behaviours are described as tensions because they are not simple choices of one style over another, but opposing pulls that leaders must consciously balance depending on the situation.

Healthcare, in particular, illustrates these dynamics vividly. Leadership in digital health services is being redefined, requiring not just technical competence, but the ability to navigate human factors, culture, and trust. As Laukka (2022) highlights, digital health leaders must balance operational authority with relational sensitivity if they are to drive adoption successfully.

So what are these behaviours, and why do they matter so much today?

Seven Tensions Leaders Must Master

1. Teller vs Listener

This tension is about communication style. Do leaders push their own viewpoint, or do they engage and absorb what others are saying?

• Teller: Directs and instructs.
• Listener: Creates space for input and learning.
• Healthcare example: A hospital CIO who dictates an EHR rollout risks backlash, while one who listens to nurses and clinicians uncovers workflow challenges that smooth adoption.

2. Intuitionist vs Analyst

This tension reflects decision-making style. Should leaders rely on instinct, or lean on data?

• Intuitionist: Uses experience and gut feel.
• Analyst: Anchors decisions in data and evidence.
• Healthcare example: A medical director may expand services based on clinical instinct, but predictive analytics might reveal entirely different patterns of patient demand.

3. Perfectionist vs Accelerator

This tension addresses speed versus accuracy. Should leaders slow down to get it right, or move fast to stay ahead?

• Perfectionist: Prioritises thoroughness and safety.
• Accelerator: Prioritises speed and responsiveness.
• Healthcare example: During COVID-19, hospitals had to accelerate telemedicine rollouts overnight. But patient safety checks could not be ignored.

4. Constant vs Adapter

This tension is about consistency versus flexibility. Should leaders stick to one clear message, or adjust as circumstances evolve?

• Constant: Provides stability and reassurance.
• Adapter: Updates direction and messaging as new information emerges.
• Healthcare example: Public health leaders who adapted communication as new vaccine data emerged maintained trust, while rigid messaging undermined credibility.

5. Tactician vs Visionary

This tension weighs short-term execution against long-term direction. Should leaders focus on getting today’s job done, or inspiring with a bigger picture?

• Tactician: Executes detailed plans with precision.
• Visionary: Inspires with long-term purpose and future focus.
• Healthcare example: A digital claims platform must go live on time (tactician), but leaders must also show how it fits into a 10-year roadmap for connected care (visionary).

Here, leadership structure matters. Lemak (2024) emphasises that health systems must rethink executive teams, aligning strategy, culture, and technology so that both tactical delivery and visionary leadership are present.

6. Power-Holder vs Power-Sharer

This tension explores authority. Should leaders retain control, or distribute power to others?

• Power-Holder: Centralises authority and decisions.
• Power-Sharer: Involves others in ownership and execution.
• Healthcare example: Ministries that co-created national HIE frameworks with providers achieved higher adoption than those that dictated top-down mandates.

7. Miner vs Prospector

This is the most critical tension. Should leaders dig deep into existing systems, or look broadly for new opportunities?

• Miner: Extracts full value from what already exists.
• Prospector: Scans widely for threats and opportunities.
• Healthcare example: Leaders must mine existing EHR systems for compliance and efficiency while prospecting for AI tools that can transform diagnostics and patient care.

Empirical evidence supports this. Kludacz-Alessandri (2025) found that leaders who blend transformational behaviours, both prospecting for new ideas and mining existing systems, drive greater digital intensity in healthcare institutions.

Going Wide, Then Deep

The most successful leaders do not choose one behaviour and discard the other. They sequence them. They go wide to prospect, scanning the environment, listening to signals, engaging with external ideas. Then they go deep to mine, committing resources, building discipline, and extracting value. And then they resurface to prospect again, asking: Has the environment shifted? Do we need to adapt?

This rhythm, wide, deep, wide again, is especially critical in the era of AI. Fail to prospect, and you miss opportunities altogether. Fail to mine, and your innovations never reach maturity.

Lessons for Healthcare Leaders

Healthcare illustrates these tensions vividly because it sits at the intersection of high regulation, high stakes, and rapid innovation. Leaders must:

• Listen deeply to clinicians and patients while also telling a clear story about transformation.
• Ground decisions in data, but not dismiss frontline intuition.
• Move fast when crises demand, but ensure patient safety is never compromised.
• Adapt messages as evidence evolves, even if it means admitting prior assumptions were wrong.
• Deliver projects on time while inspiring teams with a vision of patient-centred, connected care.
• Share authority with providers and staff, while maintaining accountability for outcomes.
• Prospect broadly for transformative digital health opportunities, while mining deeply to embed proven solutions into practice.

Closing Thought

Digital disruption will not slow down for healthcare, or for any other sector. The leaders who thrive are those who embrace duality. They recognise that disruption demands both the curiosity to explore and the discipline to deliver. Both the humility to listen and the courage to decide. Both the patience to mine value and the energy to prospect for what’s next.

The future belongs to leaders who can blend these behaviours seamlessly, turning disruption from a threat into a catalyst for lasting transformation.

We’ve all been in meetings where the same voices dominate the room. The confident speaker leans forward, the extrovert fills the silence, and the leader nods along. Meanwhile, quiet voices, often rich with insight, remain unheard.

Silence in these moments isn’t golden. It’s costly. It robs organisations of innovation, blinds decision-making, and fosters cultures where only the loudest perspectives matter.

If you’ve seen how silence can signal distance or disengagement, you’ve already tasted the danger first-hand (as I explored in “Read the Room: Why Team Silence Is a Red Flag Leaders Can’t Ignore”). This article builds on that urgency, but shifts the focus from noticing silence to opening space for every voice.

As leaders, it’s our job to make engagement not a privilege of the outspoken, but a responsibility shared by all.

Why Engagement Matters

Engagement is more than just “getting people talking.” It’s about ensuring equal participation, where every individual feels safe and supported to contribute in a way that suits their personality and strengths.

When leaders fail to cultivate balanced engagement, three things happen:

• Ideas are lost. Brilliant solutions sit quietly in someone’s head because they don’t feel invited to share.
• Teams fracture. Dominant voices start shaping culture, and others withdraw, feeling invisible.
• Decisions weaken. Leadership acts on incomplete perspectives, missing the richness that diversity of thought brings.

Gallup research shows that engaged employees are more innovative, more productive, and less likely to leave. Yet engagement doesn’t just happen, it must be nurtured, especially for those who aren’t naturally inclined to “hold the mic” in a crowded room.

The Challenge of Quiet Voices

Not everyone is comfortable with public speaking, quick-fire debates, or being put on the spot. Introverts, deep thinkers, or culturally reserved colleagues may disengage when the environment only rewards volume and speed.

But silence doesn’t equal lack of insight. In fact, quiet voices often come with:

• Analytical depth – carefully thought-out ideas.
• Unique perspectives – lived experiences that differ from dominant voices.
• Stability and balance – the ability to observe patterns others miss.

The NeuroLeadership Institute points out that leaders often misinterpret silence as disengagement, a bias known as the “false consensus effect.” In reality, quiet employees may simply prefer to process before contributing or share their insights through other channels. Leaders must create channels where these voices can thrive.

Practical Ways Leaders Can Foster Equal Participation

1. Redefine What Contribution Looks Like
   Not every idea needs to be delivered as a speech. Written feedback, one-to-one discussions, or digital collaboration tools allow quieter team members to share on their own terms.
2. Use Structured Rounds
   In meetings, invite each participant to offer thoughts in turn. This reduces the risk of voices being drowned out and signals that every perspective matters.
3. Create Psychological Safety
   People speak up when they feel safe from judgement. Leaders who listen without interrupting, acknowledge input, and build on contributions set the tone for openness.
4. Leverage Technology
   Tools like anonymous polls, digital brainstorming boards, or chat features in hybrid meetings give introverts a voice without the pressure of “performing.”
5. Model Inclusive Behaviour
   Leaders should avoid always turning to the same people. By intentionally drawing in quieter voices, “I’d love to hear your perspective on this” they shift the balance of conversation.
6. Reward Engagement, Not Just Performance
   Recognise and celebrate those who contribute thoughtfully, even in small ways. This shows that speaking up is as valued as delivering results.

The Role of Leaders in Engagement

Leadership isn’t just about setting direction. It’s about creating the conditions where people feel they belong, where every idea can surface, and where silence isn’t mistaken for agreement.

Engagement is a two-way street: leaders must invite it, and employees must trust the invitation. When both sides meet in the middle, the result is stronger collaboration, more innovation, and higher trust across the organisation.

Closing Thought

Silence might be golden in music or meditation, but in leadership, it can be dangerous. When only the loudest voices are heard, organisations lose balance, creativity, and truth.

The best leaders don’t let silence speak for their teams. They make space, draw out every perspective, and ensure that quiet voices shape the conversation just as much as the confident ones.

True engagement isn’t about volume, it’s about inclusion.

Vendors are supposed to be partners. They provide the systems, services, and expertise that keep your business running. The reality many leaders overlook is this: in many organisations, vendors often know more about the inner workings of the business than the leaders running it.

Yes I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s real. This isn’t just outsourcing. It’s outsourced intelligence, where the knowledge, insights, and leverage that should belong to you sit in the hands of a third party. If left unchecked, it can erode control, weaken decision-making, and leave your organisation exposed.

As research on commercially sourced intelligence notes, more organisations are relying on vendors to provide critical insights. But with that reliance comes a hidden cost: intelligence shaped and controlled by external providers.

How Vendors End Up Knowing More

• Data ownership and visibility: Vendors hold and analyse your operational data, from system usage patterns to customer behaviours. They often see trends before you do.
• Technology dependence: When critical systems are outsourced, your vendor understands the technical landscape, limitations, and risks better than your internal team.
• Cross-industry insights: Vendors work with multiple organisations. They compare, benchmark, and spot weaknesses you might not even recognise in your own operations.
• Shadow knowledge: Over time, staff may defer to vendors for answers. Institutional memory shifts outward, and suddenly your vendor is the one with the full picture.
• People and relationships: Vendors learn how your leadership team reacts to different situations. They observe which issues trigger urgency and which get pushed aside. Over time, they know when to push back, when to apply pressure, and when to let go. In some cases, vendors understand your leaders’ decision-making style better than their own teams do.

A case study called the Politics of Outsourcing shows how vendors can even set agendas in public IT projects, influencing outcomes more than the bureaucrats funding them.

Why This Is a Risk

• Strategic blind spots: If you don’t know what your vendor knows, you can’t make fully informed decisions.
• Dependence without leverage: The vendor has knowledge power, making negotiations and accountability harder.
• Compliance exposure: Vendors may hold sensitive data that you’re ultimately responsible for protecting.
• Erosion of expertise: If your internal teams lose touch with systems and processes, you weaken resilience and self-sufficiency.

This is a textbook case of information asymmetry, where one side in a business relationship holds significantly more knowledge than the other. Research into B2B negotiations shows this imbalance gives suppliers leverage that can undermine buyers’ ability to negotiate fair terms.

Knowledge asymmetry isn’t partnership, it’s dependency. And dependency hands power to the vendor.

Taking Back Control

So how can you rebalance the knowledge gap without damaging the relationship?

1. Demand transparency
   Require vendors to share usage data, performance metrics, and system insights in ways your teams can access and analyse independently.
2. Strengthen internal expertise
   Invest in training and upskilling. Ensure your teams understand the systems they rely on, not just how to operate them but how to challenge them.
3. Document everything
   Don’t let knowledge sit solely with vendor staff. Insist on process maps, system documentation, and clear escalation paths that live inside your organisation.
4. Establish governance
   Use steering committees, review boards, and audits to ensure vendors remain accountable and knowledge is shared, not hoarded. Established frameworks for third-party management highlight how operational, reputational, and compliance risks can only be mitigated through structured oversight.
5. Rotate perspectives
   Involve different internal stakeholders in vendor discussions. Broader engagement reduces dependence on one channel of communication and builds a shared knowledge base.

Vendors as Partners, Not Proprietors

The goal is not to shut vendors out. They bring valuable expertise and insights. But they should never hold more knowledge about your business than you do.

A strong vendor relationship is built on transparency, shared accountability, and mutual respect. It’s about ensuring that what they know becomes what you know, so you can lead with clarity and confidence.

Closing Thoughts

If your vendors know more about your business than you do, the balance of power has shifted. And when that happens, you’re no longer managing the vendor, the vendor is managing you.

Take back visibility, build internal capability, and treat knowledge sharing as a core condition of your vendor relationships.. Because at the end of the day, no one should understand your business better than you.

Technology has helped us move faster, track more, and manage with greater precision.
But if we’re not careful, it can also strip away the very thing that holds our teams together: Trust.

I’m not talking about the abstract kind. I mean the real, felt, day-to-day trust between people, the kind that makes a team feel safe, respected, and human. The kind that gets eroded quietly, by systems that were built for efficiency but not experience.

The truth is, most management frameworks don’t fail because they’re too complex.
They fail because they’re built around control, and not confidence.
So how can we fix this and what do we need to do?

We build trust into the loop.

Here’s how.

1. Start by Making Trust a Design Requirement

Most systems are designed for outputs, metrics, milestones and compliance.
But resilient, high-performing teams run on belief, not surveillance.

We should start by asking different questions during the design phase of any workflow, tool, or process:

• Will this make people feel trusted, or tracked?
• Are we solving a real problem or just collecting data to feel in control?
• Is this built for clarity or control?

When trust is treated as a measurable input, not just a hoped for side effect, culture stays in the room even when we’re not.

2. Automate for Efficiency, Not for Oversight

Technology should be used to remove friction, not create anxiety.
The problem is that too many dashboards, CRMs, and task boards are designed with one goal in mind: watching the team.
When every click is monitored, every delay flagged, and every dashboard turned into a leaderboard, people start working for the system, not the mission.

Here’s a much smarter approach:

Automate tasks, not trust.

• Let the system remind people of deadlines
• Let it surface blockers
• Let it optimise handovers

But don’t let it replace conversation, feedback, or recognition.

Those still need a human face.

3. Build Feedback Loops That Strengthen Relationships

Feedback systems often focus on performance, but they overlook connection.
Instead of annual reviews and faceless surveys, resilient leaders create trust-building loops:

• Weekly 1:1s focused on what’s working, not just what’s wrong
• Open retrospectives that invite perspective, not blame
• Team reviews that include: “What did we do well for each other?”

If your team only hears from leadership when something goes off track, you’re managing with reactivity, not relationship.
Feedback is more than improvement, it’s an opportunity to reinforce trust.

4. Visibility not Micromanagement

Visibility is critical. But when it crosses into micromanagement, trust evaporates.
Strong leaders don’t shy away from transparency, they just reframe how it’s used.

Instead of “I’m checking your progress,” use “Let’s make sure you have what you need.”
Instead of “Show me everything you’re doing,” use “What’s the best way to keep this moving together?”
Instead of dashboards as watchdogs, use them as collaboration tools that help people help each other, not cover themselves.

5. Design with People, Not Just for Them

The quickest way to erode trust is to roll out systems without involving the people who will use them.

Bring your team into the conversation early:

• Ask them what’s slowing them down
• Let them co-design workflows
• Build pilots and iterate openly

You don’t just build better systems, you build a team that feels part of the solution, not under surveillance.

6. Guard the Culture, Even When Pressure Rises

When things get tough, deadlines slip, priorities shift, execs start asking harder questions, it’s tempting to double down on control.
But that’s when trust needs protection the most.
Resilient leaders resist the urge to tighten the screws.

Instead, they:

• Stay visible
• Double down on clarity
• Lead with consistency
• Make space for people to speak freely, even when things aren’t going to plan

Culture doesn’t break in crisis, it reveals what was already weak.

If trust is already in the loop, the team holds together.

Final Thought: Systems Shape Behaviour, So Design Them Intentionally

Great culture isn’t built on posters, slogans, or pizza Thursdays.
It’s embedded in how work gets done.

Every system you design, every dashboard, meeting cadence, escalation route, and tool, either reinforces trust or undermines it.

Ask yourself:

• Are our systems enabling people, or exhausting them?
• Are we collecting data to understand, or to control?
• Are we making people feel seen, or just watched?

If you want better performance, start with better trust.
Put it in the loop, on purpose.