Adeptify

Leading Clearly Series

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A Program for Leadership Development

The Problem with Self-awareness

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Problem with Self-Awareness

Jonathan Reams

Part One. Setting the Context

I’ve long advocated for self-awareness as the core of leadership development. I’m not alone in this either, as you can find more people, whether academics of coaches or consultants, even leaders, describing the importance of self-awareness. So why do I want to write today about the problem with self-awareness?

I’m going to do this in two parts. The first part is about the journey into the territory. While this will be applied specifically to the topic of self-awareness and leadership, I believe it also applies more generally to encounters with a topic, theme, concept or practice in general. This description came to me as I began writing this piece, as I notice I have a habit of long framings to situation myself in relation to a topic before getting into it. I’ve learned that making context explicit can be useful.

The second part will explore the topic itself. There I aim to outline several perspectives I have come across that can at least begin to map out issues with the way I at least perceive self-awareness being used in general, and then in relation to leadership development in particular.

Landscapes

When I was young, I was enthralled reading about explorers in the early days of European settlement in what became Canada. Alexander McKenzie, (who reached the Pacific over land about 15 years before Lewis and Clarke did), David Thompson and others captured my imagination. Then there were the early fur traders, then European settlements, the inevitable conflicts. (Although not as bloody as in the US, there was conflict. Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear is a masterful exploration of the nuances of this from inside multiple perspectives). This fascination carried over into my focus on studying history in college.

During those studies, my attention turned to the history of ideas, in particular how Western intellectual history evolved. I studied classical Athens, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, (at least that’s how it was framed, and in hindsight many questions could be asked about how ‘enlightening’ it was), into more recent explorations by people like William James. I remember my history thesis class professor joking that I used history as an excuse to study philosophy.

Thus my interest in the metaphor of a landscape, and phases of one’s journey into it, while having its roots in physical landscapes, has really been about conceptual landscapes. Our encounters with ideas offer ways to shift our lens for seeing the world, and from that for how we act in the world.

The Journey into Conceptual Landscapes

If you spend long enough in any landscape, you begin to notice many layers in your journey of navigating the territory. Here I’ll focus on navigating conceptual landscapes as a way of setting the stage for part two.

You might begin with the enthusiasm that comes with discovery, as a new vista is opened up through finding people who speak your language. Something that has been inside you, vague and unarticulated suddenly comes into focus. It's like when I was younger and got a new prescription for my eyeglasses and details came into focus that had been fuzzy and hard to make out.

You find mentors and guides in the territory, those who came earlier, maybe even pioneered and laid claim to particular ways of describing the landscape. You learn to make more distinctions and have a finer grained language to describe what’s going on. This is also often accompanied by a phase of proselytizing, where you are maybe (only in hindsight) a bit overly eager to share with others the importance of the ideas, insights and views you have found and are learning.

Eventually, we might gradually mature and stop annoying everyone we meet with our latest and greatest insight that they just have to care about as much as we do. That’s if we are lucky and have reasonable self restraint. If you are like me, it took some hard knocks, difficult feedback or even losing a valued relationship before the message got through. Not everyone wants or needs to hear about what is so important to you.

Another layer we might encounter, that I think can come after the initial over sharing, or can be a parallel route for those more inclined in this direction, is to see this as esoteric knowledge, not to be shared with the masses. You feel grateful to have been initiated into the realm of those granted this knowledge and you guard it carefully, to the point where you might even avoid sharing it with those who are genuinely curious and eager to find their way into the territory.

If you persevere long enough, you might settle in this territory, and find your own niche in the landscape. You find your neighbors, you learn more about who knows bits that fit with your understanding and make it more robust, and who might help you extend your horizons. You might also get to the stage of sharing this knowledge with the outside world in a more skillful manner, and use that to add another layer, the phronesis, or practical wisdom that takes your ability to be helpful for others to another level.

Eventually, you might even start to see the shadows in the landscape. The bright lights of insight and enthusiasm don’t dominate attention anymore, allowing you to notice things that might not have been visible at first. Things that might have challenged your understanding and curbed your enthusiasm.

I’ve described all this as a way of generalizing my own relationship to the concept of self-awareness, especially as it connects to leadership and its development. 30 years ago I took up the academic study of leadership, wanting to bridge things like spirituality and consciousness into the field of leadership. Now, having left formal associations with academic work, but still curious about the ways in which how we talk about leadership affects how we practice it, I thought I would share a little bit about what I notice in this particular area.

However, this context setting has rambled on long enough, so I’ll close here for now, and come back to describe what I see next week.

How to Begin

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

How to Begin

Or my First Writing Post

While I’m not a New Year’s resolution person, I am making use of the day to begin writing here. As part of my transition from primarily writing academic pieces to something that can communicate to a different audience, I’m going to experiment with using this Substack platform to share various thoughts over time.

I’m not sure what it will become, but I intend to have fun with the process and make sure to learn along the way. I do have an initial focus, to elaborate on some of the foundations of various projects I’m working on. I expect I might expand this later, but for now, it's necessary to just begin.

AI and the Writing Process

While I have not used AI in this post, I want to be explicit about how I’m using it in the series to come. Having had bits of time on my hands over the last couple years, I’ve been able to explore how several people are approaching this. My main take away is that it can be a good tool in many ways, requires work on both ends, (preparing prompts and editing drafts), and that being reasonably transparent about this is the responsible thing to do.

So far I would characterize my writing process like this. I begin with a need of some kind. At the moment, it is to have a bit more outflow, to share things I’ve learned with those who might find it useful. As well, a more specific focus is to elaborate on how I’m approaching the design of learning activities focused on skill building for leaders.

Next, I’ll take the topic and draft a prompt for Gemini (my main LLM). The prompt will include some context I think might be useful and then a specific task. My favorite part of the prompt is to ask Gemini to ask me clarifying questions as the first step in the task. This helps me take the messy implicitness of how I described things and communicate it better. An added bonus I have discovered by doing this is that it often asks me questions I haven’t really thought about. They might be how the topic looks from a lens I don’t usually consider, or provide some information relevant to the topic I wasn’t aware of.

The result is generally a much improved output from Gemini. However, I love to play further, so now I have taken to asking Gemini how to set up a good system instruction for Gemini in the Google AI Studio. This itself requires a substantial back and forth to help me understand what will be useful as ongoing context for it and how to shape the role and foundational approaches it will take. While I can be more conversational in Gemini inside my browser, I can set tighter constraints in the AI Studio version.

Another bonus is the long context it has, so I played around by feeding it articles relevant to what I wanted to work on, as well as several articles and book chapters of my own. This enabled me to construct a role for it to use in drafting that could to at least some degree reflect how I might approach writing about the topic.

Iterations

Then it was back to the strategic conversational Gemini in the browser, to explore what might be a good set of topics for a series to explore this project. More back and forth, ending up with an initial set of seven themes for essays that later expanded to nine. Then finally, a first draft of the first theme from AI Studio Gemini. I was initially impressed. A first read through gave me the feeling that it had managed to make a reasonable draft that did three key things. One, it felt enough like my voice that I didn’t need to throw it away and start over. Second, it stretched me, as I had instructed it to write in a non-academic style. While I felt a bit of discomfort at some of the phrasing, I also want to experiment with how I communicate ideas and know that just doing what I’ve always done the way I’ve always done it won’t make the cut.

The third thing it did was stimulate me to dig in and edit. This wasn’t just to correct it, (although this was needed at times), it was that I got glimpses of connections I hadn’t seen before and inspiration to make those connections explicit. While my initial hope that the hours of set up would generate ready to go text was deflated, the next two hours of editing (which I always find much easier than the initial drafting) was fun for me. I felt much better about the outcome now.

Of course that wasn’t the end of it, as I then fed my edited version back to Gemini with the task of analyzing the differences to update its understanding of how I wanted it to write, as well as make suggestions for improvements. This led to the second essay, a similar round of editing and feeding it back into the system and so on. Along the way I realized a need for the two additional pieces that were not in the original outline and now have a complete set of essays to launch.

My final round was to feed the entire set of essays to Gemini and have it check for consistent use of metaphors, gaps in places like transitions and other areas to enhance the cohesiveness of the series. As of posting this on New Year’s day 2026, the job of using the recommendations Gemini provided to make a final pass through the texts is still awaiting me.

The Importance of Having Fun

Well, after putting this off for a long time, I now see the text flowed and I actually had fun. I am aware that this was easy work as descriptive narratives are generally easier (at least for me) than figuring out how to communicate complex abstract theoretical concepts in a useful way.

This feeling of it being fun is important. “If it isn’t fun, it isn’t worth doing” was a phrase I remember some of us using a few years back when working on what could easily be a not so fun project. This mantra served as a kind of compass, a check point that enabled us to keep from losing energy by taking things too seriously. That perspective kept things in perspective and helped us avoid getting bogged down in minutiae that could suck the life out of us.

So I’m aiming to keep this project of posting here fun. Where the fun is located might not always be apparent to you as a reader, but I hope it leaks between the lines and makes the coming essays enjoyable.

Designing Development

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Designing Development: Entering the Laboratory

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

Before we dive into the mechanics of the Learning Loop, we must establish the "laboratory conditions" required for growth: a client-centered, experience-based approach that uses emotional cues as fuel and iteration as the engine of mastery.

In the first three essays of this series, we explored the territory Adeptify is exploring to support learning and development. We looked at why the old industrial maps—the "conduit" models of training—are failing us. We examined how the "weather" of our internal condition shapes the environment for those we lead. And we touched on the neuroscience of predictive processing to understand why our brains are wired to resist the very changes we say we want to make.

With that lite overview of some of the foundations, now it’s time to outline the structure of the laboratory we are building. Before we start adjusting dials and mixing ingredients—before we dive into the specific steps of Learning Loops—I want to pause and provide some orientation. I want to share the principles that guide how we are experimenting with this work at Adeptify.

First is to acknowledge that as bricoleurs, we are indebted to those we have learned from. We stand on the shoulders of giants like Theo Dawson (whose Virtuous Cycles of Learning inspired much of this) and Kurt Fischer (whose Dynamic Skill Theory provides the bedrock), as well as Michael Mascolo whose conversations have inspired much of our experimentation. Conversations with colleagues, clients and students too numerous to mention have helped build out a more robust network of critical little threads of connection between concepts and practice.

So, put on your lab coat. Here are some considerations I think are worth sharing about how we design the experiments.

Assessment as Discernment

I like to think of assessments as snapshots. They reveal something about us through a specific lens. They are an opening for conversations of discernment.

Recognizing that we are always already in the middle of things, an assessment can be a starting point for a new turn, a step back to get our bearings, or even the start of a new journey.

In the corporate world, this often looks like taking a 360-degree assessment or a personality profile. Those of us in the adult development field might use tools like a sentence completion test to get a sense of a personal ‘action logic’ or underlying structure of sensemaking. My own experience is informed by using Lectica’s LDMA (Leadership Decision Making Assessment) to support this process. While these tools can give us rich data, data alone is not development.

I like to think of assessment less as a judgment and more as a starting point for discernment. It is a sort of compass pointing out a direction worth taking.

This is where the art and science of a developmental conversation meet. The science gives us a form of technical precision—research-backed frameworks informing assessments, providing a lens to help us identify a specific behavior or competency (skill) relevant for the person in focus. But the art lies in the process of exploring the territory together. It lies in finding the language that resonates with your lived experience.

When I debrief an assessment with a client, I’m acting like a tuning fork. I’m listening to their language, their tone, body language and energy for resonance. I am listening for the moment when the data on the surface stops being about a score or the judgment we make about it and starts being a story about their life, where they are and where they might want to go.

I’m looking for salience. A learning goal only works if it has contextual relevance that brings emotional resonance. It must matter to you, help you solve something important, not just now, but in future situations as well. If the learning goal you are assigned is just something HR thinks you should fix, your brain’s prediction engine will likely treat it as noise. But if the learning goal connects to a deep frustration, a burning ambition, or a genuine curiosity, it becomes fuel for the entire loop.

The Emotional Engine

This brings us to the heart of the matter. In previous essays, we talked about vulnerability factors—the stressors that shut down our capacity to be present, curious and engaged. But emotion isn't just a barrier; it is also the engine of motivation.

We cannot learn without feeling. The brain stamps "IMPORTANT" on memories that are emotionally charged.

In our laboratory, we take care to attend to the emotional tone. Our aim is to help relax the reflex of defense to enable a natural curiosity. When we encounter a gap in our skills—a moment where we stumble—our instinct is often to "armor up." We defend our ego. We blame the context.

But what if we could lean in? What if we could cultivate a genuine curiosity about why the gap exists? When we shift from judging ourselves to studying ourselves, the friction of the prediction error becomes the traction for growth.

A Working Definition of Skill

I realize I have been using the term ‘skill’ a lot without elaborating on the specific meaning it has in the context of dynamic skill theory (DST). As with many broadly used terms, skill accumulates a lot of associations.

In everyday usage, we often treat skill like a ‘thing,’ a tool we pick up or we download on our computer to solve a specific problem. If you have the 'coding skill' or a skill for 'public speaking,' you simply 'use' it.

We also say someone is skilled at something, indicating they can perform a task adequately in a range of contexts. They are past the phase of learning the skill through trial and error.

Skills are sometimes seen as innate. Leadership is often seen as something one is either born with or not (that’s a topic for another time). This can be related to Carol Dweck’s distinction between a fixed or growth mindset and how we view a particular skill in this regard can have a lot of impact on learning and development.

In the Adeptify lab, we use a definition from DST that shifts the meaning of skill from a static tool, integrates several of these commonly held ideas and further refines the concept; “... a skill refers to the capacity to control elements of acting, thinking and feeling within particular contexts and psychological domains” (Mascolo, 2020, p. 91).

This shift in meaning is subtle but massive. It means a skill isn't just a behavior you perform; it is an active coordination. It’s the way you weave together your thoughts, your racing heartbeat, and your actions in real-time. It’s not just what you do; it’s how you organize yourself to do it.

This takes us back to our ‘inner balcony,’ or what is called ‘metacognition.’ The “capacity to control elements” comes from beyond those elements themselves. From this inner balcony we can observe, and at times intervene to regulate our internal environment and how it translates into the external world of action.

This 'inner balcony' is where a leader can stop being driven by their own weather and start observing it. When you can observe your own 'elements of feeling,' you gain the agency to change the climate. This creates clearer weather that supports others in bringing more of their resources to a given situation.

The Guiding Lights: Four Principles

But now back to how all this applies to the specific steps of a Learning Loop. In the coming essays, I will dive deeper into each step of how we approach Learning Loops. As we go through them, keep these guiding principles in mind. Think of them as the walls that hold up the roof of our laboratory.

1. Client-Centered (Your Context Matters)
There are no one-size-fits-all templates here. Your development must be tailored to your unique context. The challenges you face, the people you lead, the culture you work in—these are not distractions; they are the raw material for your growth. A Learning Loop designed for a CEO in a crisis might look very different from one designed for a new manager building a team. We design with you, not for you.

This does not mean there aren’t Learning Loops that are common. While Adeptify is developing programs with a common set of learning goals that can enable scaling, how each person contextualizes and applies the learning goal will vary according to many factors. The instructions here are designed to help this personalization process.

2. Experience-Based (Transformation Through Action)
You cannot learn to swim by reading a book about fluid dynamics. You have to get wet. The Learning Loop is grounded in the understanding that true transformation happens through direct experience combined with reflection. We don't just want to fill your "bucket" with information; we want you to grapple with real-world challenges. We want you to run experiments in the wild and see what happens.

3. Iterative (The Cycle of Virtuosity)
Development is not a straight line; it is a spiral weaving back and forth, up and down, even taking tangential sideroads to make important discoveries. We design loops, not lists. We observe, we act, we reflect, we adjust, and we act again. We don't aim for perfection in the first attempt; we aim for a continuous cycle of experimentation and ongoing refinement. We encourage you to view every attempt as a data point, not a verdict on your potential.

4. Distinctions & Connections (Tuning the Instrument)
This is the subtle magic of the process. We help you notice the fine-grained details of your experience that you usually ignore. We help you make distinctions—e.g., noticing the difference between "listening to fix" and "listening to learn.". And we help you make connections—e.g., seeing how your anxiety about a deadline is connected to your micromanagement of a peer. By tuning your attention to these nuances, you gain the leverage to change them.

A Typology of Loops

Finally, it is important to know that these loops come in all shapes and sizes.

Sometimes, we design micro-skill loops—tiny, "in-the-moment" practices, like pausing for one breath before responding to a snarky email. These are "skill snacks," quick and easy to digest. At the same time, because they are so small, quick and automatic, they can be hard to notice!

Other times we might focus on mini-skill loops. These might be done in minutes or even daily. They are a common size, easier to identify and focus on. They might be about learning to re-framing a "why" question into a "what" question, or practicing reducing the impact of cognitive biases in a conflict.

Other times, we might embark on skill adventures—broader, exercise-based loops that might involve shifting a team's culture from "blame" to "learning" over several weeks during a product launch.

Whatever the scale, the mechanism is the same: Identify the learning goal, make relevant distinctions, experiment with them, reflect and revise to do it over and over.

Setting the Compass

I hope this overview has set the stage with a bit more context for understanding how we approach learning loops. In the next essay, we will pick up the first tool: The compass of discernment. We will look at Step 1: The learning goal, and explore how to move from a vague sense of "needing to do better at …" to a clear, actionable, and emotionally resonant target.

Until then, keep your lab coat handy.

The Reflection Loop

Check Your Resonance: Think about a developmental goal you currently have. Does it feel like a "should" (external pressure) or a "must" (internal desire)? On a scale of 1-10, how much emotional salience does it really have for you?

Notice the Context: Look at your calendar for tomorrow. Which meeting or interaction offers the best "laboratory" for you to practice a leadership skill? Why that one?

The Curiosity Check: Recall a recent mistake. Did you "armor up" (defend/justify) or did you "lean in" (get curious)? What would it look like to treat that mistake purely as data?

The Problem with Self-awareness

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Problem with Self-Awareness

Jonathan Reams

Part Two. More Groundwork

I thought I would finish this topic today. Oh how deep self-deception goes. Today’s installment will merely lay out a bit more of the groundwork for examining the problem with self-awareness. I realize that age has brought an accumulation of layers, of interconnected perspectives, to hopefully find a vista point in the landscape where a shared view can be seen.

To get started today, I did a quick google search for "self-awareness + leadership development" as well as one in google scholar. In google, I only went 10 pages deep to see the combined topic terms are used extensively by university leadership programs, coaches and consultants. The inevitable AI summary told me “Self-awareness is the cornerstone of effective leadership development, acting as a "superfood" that improves decision-making, emotional intelligence, and team relationships.” Sounds good and I think most of us can get behind that.

Google scholar, being a bit more constrained by my use of quotation marks and the + sign, still returned 53 items. I even used one of my favorite academic tools, Consensus, and it summarized its findings like this: “Self-awareness is widely viewed as a foundational leadership competency and a core element of emotional intelligence. Recent work links it to better decision making, ethical behavior, team performance, and successful leadership development across sectors and cultures.” Again, easy to agree with.

So why do I want to point out problems? I have read some excellent articles on the topic over the years and I’ve advocated for and used various means to support the development of self-awareness in leaders. I have even used the phrase ‘awareness based leadership development’ to describe my own work. Going back to the landscape metaphor from part one last week, I’ve been around long enough to have some of the shadows related to this come into focus. I’m hoping that shining a light on them will be useful.

This comes from having become more sensitive to how underlying assumptions, worldviews etc., will shape how we conceptualize a given term. These aspects are seldom explicitly elaborated – that is why they are assumed. I have encountered how these iceberg-like deep layers of meaning can collide, even while the visible, explicit tips appear to be aligned. This is the direction I want to take, to see if others find my problematizing of self-awareness useful.

Concepts of Self

One place to explore is what is meant by ‘self’? Such a common term will inevitably suffer from diverse meanings being implied. I see the same with terms like love, or consciousness. We all have a felt sense, or lived experience of these things, yet when people try to define them, we immediately find ourselves in a veritable Tower of Babel. I recall being on the Journal of Consciousness Studies listserv in the late 90s and encountering this diversity and noticing how much work, patience and skill, (which I was lacking), was needed to truly inquire and reveal these deeper layers of the territory.

I can describe many ways I have observed people appear to use the term ‘self’. Some of these are informal while others come from more of a rigorous research orientation. One is to equate self with the body. People study biology, genetics and neuroscience to understand self. Psychologists often focus a bit more on the subjective and talk about self as ego. Think of Freud and how we have come to recognize the impact of our subconscious mind and various aspects of it on our behavior. Combine these and you have Alan Watt’s notion of ‘skin encapsulated ego.’

Others point to how there is something missing from this equation. For example, David Chalmer’s formulation of the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness studies described that while physical sciences can describe immense amounts about physical brain processes, it cannot say anything definitely causal about how these brain functions create a sense of self that has subjective experience.

Another version of this came from the physicist David Bohm, who posited that if we do not allow for there to be something that exists beyond the ‘system of thought’, (in terms of a holistic, comprehensive set of neuro, cognitive, emotional and physiological aspects), then we become doomed to live out our existence inside a system that can’t actually change itself.

This line of inquiry takes us towards the realm of transpersonal psychology, or the existence of something beyond self-actualization. It also takes us into the realms of spirituality, where notions of essence, soul, atman etc., have been used throughout history to distinguish between ‘skin encapsulated ego’ and something else, sometimes designated by a Self with a capital S. I have observed many variations on how people attempt to make such a distinction and generally end up back at the question of what is implicitly being assumed?

Concepts of Awareness

I want to pause here, to shift attention to the second half of the equation, awareness. What is it to be aware, and what are we aware of? Again, there is a veritable Tower of Babel, with a wide range of uses of the term, and close associations to other terms like consciousness. Wikipedia links self-awareness closely with consciousness. Common usage will depend on many things, while there is again a spectrum of approaches depending on the discipline and paradigm one is coming from.

My own leanings and investigations have gone in the direction of questioning many of the more materially grounded approaches to defining awareness. I have aimed to understand it from a more phenomenological point of view. What is experience prior to mental conceptualizations? Here it is easy to encounter a conundrum, where using words and concepts are inherently limited. Yet they are the tools we have, at least in mediums like this.

The challenge, in my view, is that it's all too easy to forget this, to only focus on the finger pointing at the moon, and have our attention constrained to the thoughts we use to be aware. Here, many people have pointed to this, such as Eckhart Tolle, or A.H. Almass. I find the book title from Alex Pattakos describes it well, how we can become Prisoners of Our Thoughts. The idea that we exist (a ‘self’) prior to our ‘thoughts’ is indeed a thought or concept itself. David Bohm made the move here to say that if we can posit that there can be something outside of this system of thought, it is possible to change the system. Otherwise we are stuck inside an endless loop, like Escher’s hands drawing themselves.

Source: Wikipedia

To round off for now and foreshadow where I want to head eventually on this topic, I’ll leave you with what I wrote ten years ago in this article as a description of awareness as “the experiential realization of the virtuality of self.”

Inquiry-in-Action

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Inquiry-in-Action: Leaving the Harbor

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

Habits are low-energy expenditure "autopilot" modes that resist change; to rewire them, we must treat new behaviors as "prototypes"—low-stakes experiments where we expect clunkiness, welcome prediction errors, and use "dual awareness" to observe the data without judgment.

In the two previous essays, we stood on the shore. We oriented ourselves with a compass (the goal) and used a sextant to map our coordinates (distinctions). We have a direction and a plan.

But a map is not the territory, and as the saying goes, a plan is only good until our first encounter with reality. To actually learn, we have to leave the safety of the harbor and encounter the weather on the high seas. We have to step into the messy reality of a Tuesday morning meeting and try to do something different.

This is Step 3 of the Learning Loop: Experimentation, or what I like to call inquiry-in-action. We go into the laboratory of our everyday life as a bricoleur, where can see lessons all around us. We get out our lens of curiosity, an attitude that reframes problems as prediction errors we can learn from.

While it all sounds nice to read about, the moment you try out your new skill, you can just as likely hit a brick wall as a home run. You might feel the rush of successfully breaking an old habit or performing a new skill. You might also feel a strong, almost magnetic pull to go back to the way you’ve always done things.

While the feeling of success is nice, we typically feel bad when we fail. However, this isn't a failure of character.

The Challenge of the New

Remember, your brain’s main job is keeping you alive. To do that, it focuses on energy-conservation. Your old habits—your "automatic autopilot"—are efficient. They run on well-myelinated neural pathways (well paved roads, compared to dirt bush tracks) that require almost zero effort or cognitive load. They are the "system 1" fast thinking that gets you through the day without burning out.

Your new skill, however, is expensive. It requires "system 2" effort. It demands that you override the habits that served you for years.

When you try to introduce a new behavior—say, "pausing for three seconds before answering"—your brain’s prediction engine screams in protest. “This feels weird! This is taking too long! Just give the answer!” It tries to pull you back into the habituated, low-energy expenditure state of your old habit.

In the previous essay we discussed downward assimilation. Here I want to take a moment to see how it contributes to the challenge of trying new things and how it can help explain the ‘knowing doing gap.’

Let’s be clear, we really intend to implement our plan. Our will is strong. However, we often fall prey to a form of self-deception. We confuse our intellectual understanding of a term for the actual capacity to execute it. We mistake our map for the territory. This low-resolution map ends up cutting off all the bits of high-resolution reality we actually don’t know about.

Then we go into action and ‘do’ what we intend and find we are lost in a gap that has suddenly opened up between knowing and doing. We receive a prediction error. Maybe many of them. Our knowing was limited and thus so was our doing.

It is here that maintaining an attitude of curiosity becomes so important. If we receive the inevitable prediction error as a failure of performance, we negatively judge ourselves, others, or the situation. If we receive it with humility and curiosity, we can decode the error signals to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

We can stop focusing on "performing" and start prototyping.

The Prototyping Mindset

In design thinking, a prototype is not a finished product. It is a rough draft. It is meant to be tested, broken, and refined.

When we treat our attempt at a new leadership behavior as a prototype, we lower the stakes. We aren't trying to be the perfect leader today; we are running a 5-minute experiment to see what happens if we change one variable.

This shifts us from a "performance mindset" (where errors are humiliating) to an "inquiry mindset" (where errors are data for humble inquiry).

We want to "fail fast"—to catch the prediction error quickly so we don't waste time on a strategy that doesn't work. We also want to "learn slow"—to take the time to deeply encode the new neural structure so it becomes robust.

The Clunkiness Factor

Here is a litmus test for a good prototype: It should feel clunky.

Remember the example from a previous essay about learning to tie your shoes? At first it was clunky; slow, awkward and full of mistakes. (I remember creating some knots my mom had to cut with scissors). If your new behavior feels smooth, natural, and easy, be careful. You might be slipping into a form of downward assimilation. You might be giving an old script a new title.

Real learning feels awkward. It feels like writing with your non-dominant hand. It feels like the "fog" we talked about earlier—moments of uncertainty where you aren't quite sure if it’s working.

Embrace the clunkiness. It is the somatic signal that you are actually rewiring the machine. Tune in to the signals from your body (what is called interoception). Do you feel flush in your face? A tightness in your throat? Tenseness in specific muscles? Learning to decode these signals can be a tremendous asset.

One more thing here. Clunkiness can also be quite subtle. It can be difficult to pinpoint a specific sensation in your body. Sometimes prototyping a new skill can feel clunky because it is touching a deeper nerve and disrupting the coding of your identity. Your stable sense of self becomes more malleable, and this can be disconcerting. Take heart, it’s a good sign that important growth is happening.

Dual Awareness: The Balcony and the Dance Floor

To run these experiments effectively, we need to cultivate dual awareness.

On the Dance Floor: You are in the meeting, asking the question, pausing, interacting. You are the actor.
On the Balcony: Simultaneously, a part of you is observing. You are the "navigator," watching the interaction from above.

You are asking: “What is happening right now? I feel the urge to interrupt—that’s the old model. I am choosing to wait. What is the impact on the room? Is the other person relaxing? Are they speaking more?”

This split attention is demanding. It burns energy. That is why we keep the experiments small. We don't try to overhaul our entire leadership style in a week. We use micro-loops that last for one conversation, or even one exchange.

The Anomaly Effect

Be prepared for one other challenge. The people around you are also running predictive models. And their models predict that you will act the way you have previously acted.

If you have acted in a controlling manner for five years, and suddenly you try a collaborating move, they might not even notice the new behavior. Or they might misinterpret it. For example, they might interpret your silence as disapproval rather than opening a space for collaboration.

This is the anomaly effect. Your new behavior is an anomaly in their data set. They are not being difficult just to spite you. Any system tends to maintain itself, and their prediction models are efficiently navigating the situation by using prior experience of the old you to predict what is happening now.

Do not let this discourage you. Treat it as data. “Interesting. I changed my input, but the system hasn’t changed its output yet. My signal wasn't strong enough. Or maybe I need to be explicit about what I am doing.”

Designing Your Prototype

So, how do we build our prototypes for running experiments? We have a variety of ways to do this. Here is one simple script to design an experiment.

1. Select the Lab (Low Stakes)
Do not try your first experiment in a high stakes meeting. In such an environment your vulnerability factors can be high enough to outweigh your resources. Pick a low-stakes lab: a routine 1-on-1, a weekly stand-up, or even a dinner conversation at home.

2.The Script
Write it down: "I will [apply specific distinction] during [specific context] and notice [specific response]."

Example: "I will count to three (distinction) after asking a question in the weekly team update (context) and notice if more people speak up (response)."

3. The Aikido Check
If the experiment goes "wrong"—if you get interrupted, or if you feel awkward—don't judge yourself. Use the Aikido move. Remember to stay curious and pivot from "I failed" to "What is this telling me?"

Maybe the distinction was too big. Maybe you were too tired (low resources). Maybe the context was stormier than you realized. This might look something like: "The current is stronger than I predicted; I’m adjusting my heading, not abandoning the voyage."

This isn't failure. It is the raw material for the next iteration of the loop.

Turning the Key

We have a compass. We have a map. We are ready to prototype.

Now, let’s turn the key. Let’s step out of the theory and into practice. Let’s be willing to be clunky, to be imperfect, and to be curious.

In the next essay, we will look at Steps 4 & 5: Reflect and Revise. We will explore how to take the messy data from these experiments and use it to update our maps, using each little experiment weave another connection making your new skill more robust.

The Reflection Loop

The Clunkiness Audit: Think about a new skill you tried recently. Did it feel smooth or awkward? If it felt smooth, challenge yourself: Did you really change anything, or did you just rename an old habit?

The Energy Check: Before you start your next experiment, check your "battery." Do you have the cognitive energy to maintain Dual Awareness? If not, can you pick a smaller, simpler prototype?

The Observer: In your next conversation, try to spend 10% of your attention on the "Balcony." Watch yourself talking. What do you notice that you usually miss?

Leaders Create the Weather

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Leaders Create the Weather: How to Build a Container for Growth

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

We cannot "self-transform" in isolation because human capacity is context-dependent; to reach our highest level of performance, leaders must move beyond the "solo hero" mindset and learn to create a "Holding Environment" that co-regulates the nervous systems of those around them.

There is a phrase I often use, almost as a mantra: "Leaders create the weather."

It sounds poetic, perhaps a bit vague. But I find the metaphor speaks to something we all know deep down.

Think about a time you walked into a meeting where the leader was visibly anxious, defensive, or wanting to prove something. Maybe their insecurities led them to show up needing to appear as the smartest person in the room. You could feel it, couldn't you? The air pressure dropped. The fog rolled in.

In that environment, your brain’s predictive processing (which we discussed in the last essay) immediately shifted gears. It stopped scanning for creative possibilities and started ‘armouring up’ (to use Brene Brown’s phrase), anticipating threats and preparing defences to be close at hand. You likely shifted from engaging in your ‘best thinking’ to a more habituated reactive thought pattern. You played it safe. You survived the meeting, but you didn't grow, and you certainly didn't innovate.

This is the reality for leaders: Your internal condition—your "weather"—is not private. It affects everyone around you. We might think our inner life is totally private, yet while people are not exactly reading our minds, our brains (including the ones in the gut and heart) are always reading several types of signals, both obvious and subtle. Your weather creates the atmospheric conditions in which your team either withers or thrives.

If we want to close the gap between what we know and what we are able to do, we have to accept a fundamental truth that runs counter to several cultural assumptions. We do not exist as pure individuals; we exist in relationships: We don’t develop in a vacuum.

The Myth of the Solo Performance

In the previous essay I noted how the empiricist, materialist scientific worldview tends to break things into independently existing pieces. This influences how we tend to view leadership as a "solo performance." Related to this, we think of skills as things we possess—little packets of competency that we carry around in our backpacks ready to deploy at will. If I am a "Level 4 Leader," I should be able to walk into any room, under any conditions, and perform all of the competencies used to describe Level 4.

The more holistic view of Dynamic Skill Theory—the rigorous developmental science that underpins our work at Adeptify—tells a different story. It tells us that skills are context dependent.

For example, above I noted that if we sense ‘stormy weather,’ we often ready ourselves to use well habituated defences. The situation activates ‘vulnerability factors’ that can overwhelm our resources, including skills we have practiced with good intentions to use. This is our unconscious, Automatic Level response—when we don’t think, we just react from some deeply ingrained place.

If we have our wits about us a bit more, and the balance between vulnerability factors and resources is even, we might think first and ready a less reactive approach. This is a Functional Level. It is what you can do with minimal support in moderately challenging situations.

Now think about a time when a leader walked into a meeting with a calm focus. You could sense, even if you didn’t think about it, that their heart was at peace in that moment. This energy tunes into something deep inside. It aligns with and activates your resources. Your vulnerability factors recede for the moment. As well, if you slept well, didn’t fight with the kids, exercised etc., you are much more likely to contribute to the meeting at your Optimal Level.

While operating at our optimal level feels great, sometimes life presents us with challenges that are more than all our resources can manage. We need help. This can take many forms; a mentor giving advice, a YouTube video from someone who has been through this, your favourite AI / LLM filling in gaps in your knowledge, or a coach helping us process some limiting vulnerability factor we need to work through. Just like when working at a height beyond our reach, (like painting the second story of a house), we need some scaffolding. The Scaffolded Level of performance is where we can use support to experiment and gain new resources that we can later deploy on our own.

Think of a parent teaching a child to ride a bike. The parent runs alongside, hand hovering near the seat, lightly touching when needed to subtly stabilize their balance. The parent isn't pedalling. The parent isn't steering. But the parent’s presence and light touch—the scaffold—creates an environment that allows the child to experiment and eventually find their balance on their own.

As leaders, we often think we are supposed to be the ones riding the bike perfectly, popping wheelies while everyone watches. Or worse, telling others how to ride the bike without any kind of supportive process. The deeper work of leadership is becoming the hand hovering behind the seat. It is creating the Holding Environment.

Creating the Holding Environment

The term "Holding Environment" comes from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to describe the physical and emotional space the primary caregiver provides to children as they grow up. Later, the term was adapted by Ronald Heifetz to help distinguish leadership from management and authority. He describes leadership as holding a psychological space that is safe enough to hold the pressure of difficult, adaptive work, but charged enough to prevent complacency.

How do we create this environment? It isn't about buying comfortable chairs or having "nice" conversations. It is about co-regulation.

This brings us back to leaders creating the "weather." As human beings, we are open systems. Our nervous systems are constantly tuning into one another.

In my conversations with clients, I often use the metaphor of a Tuning Fork. If I strike a tuning fork and hold it near a guitar string tuned to the same note, the string will begin to vibrate. It resonates.

As a leader, you are the tuning fork. If you are vibrating with the anxiety of "I need to be right" or "I need to fix this immediately," you induce that same vibration in the room. We often limit our focus and reasoning to the prefrontal cortex part of our brain that focuses on abstract reasoning through conceptual language. Yet research shows that the brain in the heart senses emotional energy, supports empathy and connection. The brain in the gut processes integrity and safety and supports intuition, or ‘gut feelings.’ (Although how these can be misinterpreted by the prefrontal cortex, i.e., cognitive biases, is a matter for another essay).

If you create stormy weather, people tend to seek cover. Their heart disconnects and their gut feeling is to prepare to defend integrity and boundaries. Vulnerability factors are in the foreground and resources a bit more distant. Your team's best thinking is lost in the fog.

To create a healthy holding environment, your first step is to calm the inner weather.

A short example. I remember reading Edgar Schein’s work on "Helping," where he described how when someone asks for help, our instinct is to immediately show how clever we are by giving the answer or advice to fix the situation. But true help begins with suppressing the need to be the expert and instead asking genuine questions to understand the person and their needs. We need to lead with curiosity and apply ‘humble inquiry.’

When you regulate your own need to look clever, be right, or your anxiety about a deadline, you act as a grounding force. You clear the fog. You allow the people around you to access their resources. You allow them to ride the bike.

The Learning Loop as a Container

This brings us to the practical application. What does all this (and more) mean for how we at Adeptify are working to support leader development?

In the previous essay, I briefly introduced the high level structure of Learning Loops. I connected them to the notion of natural learning, done in the middle of everything. It is designed to be a structured process to scaffold learning and development. You can take it as a holding environment for finding your growth edge (to borrow Jennifer Garvey-Berger’s term) and taking good risks to experiment and expand your resources.

When you engage in a Learning Loop—setting a clear goal, making distinctions, experimenting, and reflecting—you are essentially building a portable holding environment for yourself.

The Goal anchors you, so you don't get taken off course by stormy weather.
Making Distinctions helps you notice where you might already have some foundational resources and where you need to fill in gaps.
Experimenting is safer when you have a structure guiding you.
Reflecting and Revising allows you to process the "prediction errors" without shame, turning failures into data you can use to continually refine the process.

Walking Together

I have days where I am the source of the bad weather. (Just ask my wife). I have moments where my need to be "the expert" overrides my capacity to be the scaffold.

Adeptify is an experiment to apply this to ourselves, with the aim to understand how to be helpful for others. We want to hold the space for ongoing practice and inquiry.

Development is a team sport. We grow through the eyes and presence of others. We expand the horizons of our web of skills (resources), aided by others holding it steady.

So, as you move through your week, pay attention to the weather. Are you bringing the storm, or are you clearing the fog?

The Reflection Loop

Notice the Weather: In your next meeting, try to sense the "atmospheric pressure" in the room. Is it high-stakes and anxious? Is it low-energy and checked out? How might your own internal state be contributing to that?
Identify the Noise: What is the specific internal vibration that keeps you from being present? Is it the need to be right? The fear of looking incompetent? The urge to "fix" it quickly?
Find a Scaffold: Who or what helps you perform at your best? Is it a specific colleague, a quiet hour in the morning, or a structured process? How can you lean on that scaffold this week?

The Art of Making Distinctions

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Art of Making Distinctions: The Navigator’s Lens

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

Big leadership concepts are often taken in by the brain as fuzzy abstractions that hide the path forward; by making more granular distinctions, we clear the fog and create a map detailed enough for our "will" to navigate.

In the last essay, we talked about finding the "will"—that shifts from a socialized "I should" to an intentional, energized "I will." We established a compass heading. We know where we want to go.

Imagine a captain, setting out to sea, with a willful determination to cross the Atlantic. They have passion and the vessel, but when they look at the night sky, they see ‘stars’ but don’t have knowledge of constellations to tell the North Star from the Andromeda galaxy or a wandering planet.

During the day, they can see the sun (hopefully) and the horizon. To find direction, just eyeballing it will be hit and miss. They need a sextant—a tool that allows them to take that big, abstract chunk of light and turn it into a granular, mathematical point of orientation. A captain navigating across the open ocean is a type of bricoleur, learning to use whatever tools are at hand to make their way through the challenges the open sea brings.

Without knowledge of constellations or a sextant, their will to cross the Atlantic is hampered, as they are sailing blind. Without these distinctions, the brain’s prediction engine is starved of data. It cannot detect a prediction error because the 'map' for taking action is too low-resolution to ever be proven wrong. We aren't just looking for stars; we are looking for the leverage that comes from high-fidelity sight.

This is the problem we face with most leadership development. The ‘conduit model’ we discussed earlier implicitly encourages us to set goals that are big "chunks." Chunking is a brilliant efficiency mechanism of the brain. To save energy, the brain groups complex sequences of actions into a single, smooth unit. When you first learn to tie your shoes, you slowly concentrate on the details of each step. You make a loop, then swoop, and then pull. As each step becomes automatic, you just think "tie shoes." It becomes one chunk.

But when we want to learn some new concept, chunking can work against us. For example, a leadership concept like providing psychological safety comes from experts who have built up a robust understanding of the term over a long time. They have a rich and nuanced meaning to the chunked concept.

Then, when we first hear about it, it sounds great! Just what we need to solve our problems. Then we try to put it into action and quickly find ourselves lost at sea.

A term for this I have noted in an earlier essay is ‘downward assimilation.’ It explains the need for granularity. A highly chunked concept comes with a rich web of components that make it up. We can’t take it all in at first. To get started, we make connections to what we already know, or ‘assimilate’ it into our existing knowledge and skills. However, in doing this, we inevitably filter out components that are less familiar. At the same time, we don’t have the means to assess if what we already know is aligned with the concept. We also don’t know if what we leave out is central or peripheral to it. Often, we don’t even notice that we have left anything out.

Downward assimilation is like looking at the sun and saying, 'It's just a yellow circle.' You’ve simplified it to fit your current view. Making distinctions is the act of refusing that type of simplified assimilation. We can use a sextant to enable ourselves to see the exact 'arc' of the sun—or to see that 'psychological safety' isn't just a vague feeling. It is a specific set of sub-skills, like the art of the pause or the signal of vulnerability. We are accommodating the parts we accidentally filtered out, expanding the rich web of how we understand the skill.

In summary, to turn our "will" into action, we need to break down the skill. We need granularity. We need to make distinctions.

Now that we’ve identified downward assimilation, how can we use suggestive lists to prompt curiosity, exploration and experimentation? Our current approach is to not just give people a definition; we give them a palette of distinctions to see which one 'resonates' with their current Goldilocks Zone. This is where the 'art of making distinctions' becomes a collaborative inquiry.

The Tuning Fork of Perception

Step 2 of the Learning Loop is about fine tuning your attention. It is about taking that big, fuzzy goal (even though we already worked on refining it in step 1) and looking at it through a navigator’s lens—a magnifying glass that reveals the granularity in the map.

At Adeptify, we approach this process in two main ways.

1. Tuning into the Implicit (recognizing what you already do)

First, we use the tuning fork to resonate with what is already happening in your experience. Often, you possess sub-skills that you take for granted, or conversely, you have reactive habits that are so automatic you don't notice them.

For example, if your goal is "to be a better listener," we might ask you to tune into the somatic sensation of feeling the urge to interrupt. Do you notice a tight feeling in your chest, or your hands in a clenched fist? That is a distinction. Once you can notice and name it, you can work with it. It stops being "I'm a bad listener" and becomes "I am noticing the urge to interrupt."

2. Tuning into the Explicit (New Variations)

Second, we introduce new distinctions to help you see variations of an experience you didn't know existed. For instance, we might take the work of Karen Horney to help you understand different reactive tendencies. Her distinctions: moving toward (complying), moving against (controlling), or moving away (protecting) have been tremendously helpful to hundreds of students and clients I’ve worked with. While they provide a new level of granularity, the process often goes one or two layers of specificity deeper.

Another example is if you are working on communication and have refined the learning goal to asking good questions, we might distinguish between types of clarifying questions (seeking understanding) and opinion questions (disguised advice). Suddenly, "communication" isn't just a blob. It is a menu of specific choices.

Finding the Goldilocks Zone

Why do we go to this level of detail? Because we are helping you find your Goldilocks Zone.

In developmental psychology, this is often called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). It is the sweet spot where a task is challenging enough to engage us, but not so overwhelming that it triggers our defenses, activating our vulnerability factors and making us armored up.

If you read a piece in HBR, Forbes or hear a podcast that convinces you that you need to focus on creating psychological safety for your team, that’s great. It is truly important. Yet it also requires building a lot of subskills, some of which you may already have to a degree, some of which you might not. The list of 5-10 key points given in such an article to make it happen are themselves highly chunked.

The likelihood is that you need to do it quickly, as there are urgent issues to solve. Then you will inevitably downwardly assimilate the concept, the list of helpful points and in the end, feel it was just another fad that didn’t have traction.

But when we use the navigator’s lens to find a specific sub-skill—like 'notice when I ask a question that is actually a statement in disguise'—the sea change happens. This isn't just a 'tip'; it is a high-resolution coordinate. By slicing the goal this thin, we ensure it sits firmly in the Goldilocks Zone. It creates a signal so sharp that the brain’s prediction engine cannot help but notice when you drift off course. You are no longer trying to 'be' safe; you are practicing the specific, granular mechanics of safety. This is how we move from a vague hope of improvement to the precision required for actual transformation.

Scaffolding the Invisible

This process of making distinctions requires scaffolding. It is hard to see what you haven't seen before; your brain is literally wired to filter out what doesn't fit your existing "chunks."

In our programs, we provide "suggestive lists" of distinctions. Think of these as the constellation charts for the navigator. They aren't multiple-choice answers where you pick the "right" one; they are prompts designed to activate your inner balcony—your metacognitive ability to look at your thinking rather than through it.

When you read a list of potential distinctions—e.g., “Am I listening to fix? Am I listening to win? Am I listening to learn?”—you are essentially cleaning your navigator lens. You are not just picking a category; you are waking up your powers of observation. You are stepping out of your habituated prediction model (which assumes you are just "listening") and opening yourself up to notice prediction errors. You might realize, "Oh! I thought I was listening, but the list helped me see I was actually preparing my rebuttal".

That realization is the spark of development—the moment where the lens snaps into focus, the territory becomes clearer and the next step is obvious.

The Practical "How-To": Breaking the Chunk

So, how do we apply this? We take the "will" (the goal) and we look for the building blocks. Let’s say your goal is: "I will create more psychological safety in my team meetings".

That is a noble will, but it is still a big chunk. To find your Goldilocks Zone, you must use your navigator lens to find the sub-skills you can experiment with. For example:

Distinction 1 (Somatic Signaling): Am I leaning in (maybe creating pressure) or leaning back (creating space)?
Distinction 2 (The Temporal Map): How long do I wait after asking a question? Can I distinguish between a "pause" (brief) and "silence" (spacious)?
Distinction 3 (The Linguistic Pivot): When someone brings bad news, do I respond with "judgment" (Why did that happen?) or "curiosity" (What can we learn?)?

Now, instead of walking into a meeting trying to "create psychological safety" you walk in looking for one specific coordinate: "I will notice my lean-in" or "I will count to three after I ask a question."

From Map to Territory

We have set the compass (the goal). We have used the navigator’s lens to draw a detailed map of the immediate terrain (distinctions). We have cleared the "fuzzy signals" enough to see the first step.

But a map is not the territory. To learn, we have to step out of the planning phase and into the messy reality of action. We must test our map against the world.

In our next essay, we will explore Step 3: Experimentation, or Inquiry-in-Action. We will look at how to turn these granular distinctions into "Skill Adventures"—low-stakes experiments that allow us to fail fast, learn slowly and thoroughly, and build capacity without triggering our vulnerability factors.

The Reflection Loop

De-Chunking: Take a skill you think you are "good" at. Can you break it down into three smaller sub-skills? What are the tiny micro-actions that make up that larger competence?
The Navigator’s Audit: Think of a recent interaction that felt "off." If you were to look through a lens at your internal state, what specific distinction can you name? Was it a physical sensation? A reactive habit (Moving Toward, Against, or Away)?
The Goldilocks Check: Look at your learning goal from the previous essay. Is it small enough to practice in a 5-minute conversation? If not, make a distinction to slice it thinner until the signal is high-fidelity.

The Bricoleur’s Manifesto

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bricoleur’s Manifesto: Returning to the Rhythm of Natural Learning

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

The industrial "conduit" model of leader training—which treats knowledge like a packet to be downloaded—has a limited range of usefulness. To get a better return on investment, using a Natural Learning process can unlock deeper, more sustainable leader development. The result can allow us to navigate complexity with the same intuitive ease as breathing.

A friend and colleague recently described me as a "mad scientist."

We were recording a podcast, and he was introducing me to the audience. He talked about how I had recently stepped away from the formal structures of academia to build something new. That meant learning to ‘vibe code,’ to build a platform, to design a website and tinker with algorithms. It was a real compliment, painting a picture of a playful experimenter in a lab coat.

But as I reflected on that description later—while sweating through a workout at the gym, listening to a podcast about the "knowing-doing gap"—I realized I felt less like a scientist and more like a bricoleur.

A bricoleur is a French term for a handyman who makes do with whatever materials are at hand. Unlike the engineer who has a detailed blueprint and specific tools, the bricoleur looks at the messy reality in front of them—the broken fence, the leaking pipe, the complex human organization—and asks, "What do I have close at hand to try and make this work?"

For decades, I have been a bricoleur in the field of leadership development. I have gathered tools from developmental psychology, organizational change, neuroscience, learning, coaching, counseling and philosophy. I have drawn on theories from Robert Kegan, Kurt Fischer, Bill Torbert, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, David Bohm to name just a few. I have done this because what I observed over time is that the standard assumptions and methods behind most leader development programs are behind the times. They do give some people some value some of the time. However, they fall short of meeting the deeper needs of leaders.

We are all inundated with noise. Podcasts, LinkedIn think-pieces, 5-step frameworks for "transformational leadership." While there can be bits of value, it can be hidden behind a wall of static. We consume it, we nod our heads and feel the recognition of wanting to do better, and then we go back to our desks and do exactly what we did yesterday.

Why is there such a profound gap between what we know about leadership and what we actually do?

I believe that one key reason is because we have forgotten how to learn. Or, more accurately, we have let a rigid, industrial model of education suppress our Natural Learning capability.

The Illusion of the "Conduit"

In the academic world, and by extension the corporate training world, we often fall prey to what linguist Michael Reddy called the "conduit metaphor."

This points to one of the fundamental assumptions in play here. An empiricist, materialist worldview has shaped much of how modern science interprets data. Everything gets reduced to material parts. One result is that we treat knowledge like a physical object. We pack it into a box (a lecture, a book, a PowerPoint deck, a TEDx talk, a podcast) and we send it down the conduit to the receiver (the student, the leader). If the receiver opens the box and doesn't "get it," we assume the problem is with them. They weren't paying attention. They aren't smart enough.

However, if we change our starting position, (assumptions, worldview), we can open up several new avenues for how we approach training and development. (More implications of this in later writings). For example, I’ve learned a lot from diving deep into Dynamic Skill Theory, a framework for understanding how human abilities actually grow in context. It shows clearly that knowledge is not conveyed through a conduit. You cannot simply "download" knowledge about how to navigate a complex political conflict or manage your own reactive emotions and expect to suddenly have new capacities to act on this knowledge.

When we try to force-feed leadership skills through this conduit, it feels unnatural. We might want to be good learners and do our best to adapt and figure it out, but it ends up feeling like holding your breath. It creates a kind of cognitive indigestion where we are full of concepts but starved for capacity.

The Neuroscience of Learning

Natural Learning is different. It is as fundamental to your biology as breathing, walking, or eating. You were born with a brain designed to navigate the unknown, not by absorbing abstract data, but by engaging in a dynamic cycle of prediction and refinement.

Modern neuroscience, specifically the theory of Predictive Processing, suggests that our brains are not passive receivers of information. They are active prediction engines.

Here is a simplified version (though the science is beautifully complex): At every moment, your brain is generating a model of the world. It predicts what is about to happen. When you walk down the sidewalk, your brain predicts where other people coming towards you might go, (like bumping into you if absorbed in their phone), and seamlessly guides your movements to avoid collisions and get where you want to go. Likewise, when you walk into a meeting, your brain predicts the social dynamics, tensions, potential under the surface agendas and the likely outcomes based on your past experiences.

When you act, you are testing that prediction. If the meeting goes exactly as expected, your model is reinforced. But if something unexpected happens—a colleague snaps at you, a strategy falls flat, or your adversary suddenly takes your side—your brain registers a "prediction error."

This error is not a failure. It is the raw material of growth.

With Natural Learning, we take that error and we use it to update our internal model. We adjust. We refine. We try again. This is how you learned to walk. You didn't attend a seminar on "The Physics of Vertical Equilibrium." You stood up, your brain predicted balance, gravity proved you wrong (prediction error), you fell, and your brain updated the model. Tilt less to the left next time.

This process is fluid. It flows like water. It doesn't require brute force; it requires attention.

The Learning Loop: A Structure for the Flow

The project I am building—and the invitation to participate with us that I am extending to you through this series of essays—is an attempt to operationalize this natural rhythm. At Adeptify, (the brand we are using for this project), we call it the Learning Loop.

The Learning Loop is not a corporate tool or a productivity hack. It is a scaffold, a structured process to slow down predictive processing enough to notice, begin to understand, and refine your predictions.

It follows a rhythm that mimics the brain’s natural cycle:

The Goal: We set a compass heading based on key fundamental skills everyone uses (for cohort programs) or what resonates with you in your context (for personalized assessments and debriefs. Not what HR says you should fix).
Distinctions: We tune your attention (like a tuning fork) to notice more subtle granularity in your experience.
Experimentation: You engage your curiosity by testing out some small aspect of the goal in your everyday context. Opportunities are all around you!
Reflection: You look at data from your experiments, especially the prediction errors, and update the model to refine the goal and loop through the cycle again.

Invitation to be a Bricoleur

I am constantly running these learning loops to understand the process. I’m very much in the middle of it all, looking to keep moving in the direction of the goal of democratizing development by making something that can work better for more leaders. My early attempts at applying these theories were certainly crude and mixed with many of the assumptions about learning and development I noted above. It's an ongoing struggle to bridge the gap between the rich set of theories and the messy reality of designing and delivering a leader development program that can work on scale.

What has helped me a lot, and motivated me to start publishing these essays, is the ongoing conversations and feedback from the little community of inquiry and practice Adeptify is hosting. My default tendency is to hide in the lab and play mad scientist, but the bricoleur tells me to take whatever I can find at hand now and apply the learning loop process to share more explicitly what has been going on in the lab.

In the coming essays, I want to play tour guide and walk with those of you interested in coming along through the territory I’m exploring. The plan is to examine a couple more fundamental background topics, like what is optimal support for learning and going into more depth on the neuroscience of learning. Then I plan to walk through each step in the Learning Loop process in more detail.

By the time we journey through this territory, I’m hoping we will have generated a deeper appreciation of the adaptive challenges in going beyond the conduit model of leader training, mapped out some preliminary markers in how we might apply natural learning in this context, and have fun along the way!

I invite you to join me in the adventure and share this with others you feel it might resonate with. Let’s see what we can build with what we have at hand.

Reflection Loops

Where in your leadership life do you feel the "conduit metaphor" at work—where you have received information about what to do, but find yourself struggling to actually do it?
Think of a recent "prediction error"—a moment where a meeting or conversation didn't go as you expected. Did you treat it as a failure, or as data to update your internal model? (Think fixed versus growth mindset).
If you were to approach your development like a "bricoleur" (using whatever is at hand) rather than waiting for a blueprint, what is one small experiment you might try tomorrow?

The Compass of Discernment

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Compass of Discernment: The Art of Finding Your Growth Edge

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

A vague learning goal creates a "fuzzy" predictive model that cannot detect error; to trigger the brain’s natural learning cycle, we must move from abstract "shoulds" to specific, behaviorally observable "musts" that create a high-fidelity signal for growth.

We have all been there. It’s New Year’s Day, or perhaps the end of a yearly performance review. We sit down with a fresh notebook and write: "This year, I want to be a more strategic leader." Or perhaps, "I want to improve my executive presence."

It feels good to write it down. It feels responsible. It feels like we are taking charge.

But fast forward three months. Has anything changed? Usually, the answer is not so much. The notebook is buried under a pile of urgent papers, and we are back to reacting to emails and putting out fires, just as we were before.

Why does this happen? Is it a lack of discipline? A lack of willpower?

I don't think so. I think it is a technical failure of the signal-to-noise ratio.

In our previous exploration of the neuroscience of learning, we discussed the brain as a prediction machine. It learns by creating multiple models of the world, placing a bet on one model, acting on it, and then updating the modeling algorithm based on "prediction errors," the moments where reality clashes with our expectations.

Here is the catch: You cannot perceive an error if your prediction is fuzzy.

If your goal is to "be more strategic," what does that look like on a Tuesday morning at 9:00 AM? It is too abstract, too broad. Because the goal is vague, your brain cannot generate a specific enough prediction about what should happen. Then there is no clear mismatch when you fail to do whatever it might be. There is no signal error. There is only noise.

To turn the learning engine on, we need to move from fuzzy good intentions to high-fidelity signals. We need a compass heading and a next step, not merely a wish to be "elsewhere."

The Bricoleur’s Approach to Discernment

Finding this compass heading isn't a technical exercise. It isn't about picking a competency off a generic HR menu. It is a messy, human process of discernment.

When I work with clients, whether in deep 1-on-1 coaching or designing digital tools for multiple users, the core task is the same. We are trying to find what is "alive" for the learner. We act as bricoleurs, sorting through the noise of their current modeling of challenges to find the signal that matters.

This involves a specific kind of listening. We are helping the learner make connections to their existing understanding of a skill. Remember, a skill isn't a packet of information you download; it is the capacity to control elements of thinking, feeling, and acting within a specific context.

Finding the right elements, at the right scale, that are on your ‘growth edge,’ is about breaking down these fuzzy goals. They are fuzzy because we tend to get caught up in popular intellectual abstractions (we should be a transformational leader) that are loaded with highly chunked and implicit meaning. While they might resonate with us, they are seldom at a level of granularity right for us.

To find the signal through the noise, we have to start with what is already clear to you. We have to find the hook in your existing web of experience where the new skill can develop from.

This is described in various ways, for example the ‘zone of proximal development’ or in a more colloquial version, the ‘Goldilocks Zone.’ Put simply, it is a skill just on the edge of our capability, in our peripheral vision so to speak. It is recognizable, yet difficult to bring into focus and do on our own.

Situating the Skill in Context

This brings us back to the "Weather."

Often, when I ask a leader for their learning goal, they give me a "socialized" answer. They say, "I need to be better at networking," because they think that’s what a leader should do. They have a vague hope that learning this will solve some difficult problems for them. Their brain is anticipating the expectations created by the "stormy weather" of their leaders. They are navigating the corporate culture—and trying to armor up against it.

But a goal born from "should" rarely survives. It is an external imposition, not an internal drive. The emotions associated with armoring up are grounded in fears of … you name it. The curiosity needed to learn isn’t anywhere to be found.

To find a robust goal, we need to situate the skill in your specific context. We ask:

Where does the need for this skill show up in your work?
Can you identify specific meetings, conversations, or decisions that elicit the need for this skill?
What happens when you don't use it?

We are looking for the specific conditions that trigger the need for growth. We are moving from the abstract concept of "networking" to the concrete reality of "I freeze up when I have to make small talk with the VP of Finance."

This more granular and situated need for a skill situates it in a tangible context you can work with.

The Emotional Anchor: Finding the "Will"

Once we have a direction and a context, we need the fuel. A learning goal only functions if it has salience. It must have contextual relevance and emotional resonance.

The brain is an efficiency machine, with the primary job of ensuring our survival. A key part of this is maintaining our body’s energy budget. The brain will not expend energy rewiring its prediction models unless it sees a compelling reason to do so. If the goal is just a "nice to have," the brain will lose the signal and filter it out as noise the moment pressure rises.

We need to move from "should" to ‘will.”

How do we find the "will"? We look for energy. Often, this energy shows up as frustration. In our design work, we sometimes jokingly refer to the "NBC" energy—Nagging, Bitching, and Complaining.

When a leader is complaining about their team, or nagging themselves about a failure, or bitching about a recurring problem—that is not just negativity. That is signal. It is a sign that something matters to them. It is a sign that the current internal model or core values are clashing with reality, and it hurts.

Our job is to take that frustration, make the Aikido move and transmute it. We take the energy of "I am so sick of my team not taking initiative" and flip it into a learning goal: "I will learn how to signal safety, so my team feels empowered to speak up."

Saying will rather than should sets a tone that gives the brain a plan with purpose and intention. It has more signal and less noise.

A Design Checklist for Your Goal

So, how do you craft this for yourself? Whether you are building a Learning Loop for a specific leadership challenge or just trying to get better at a hobby, run your goal through this calibration checklist:

1. Is it Clear and Specific?
Move from broad and general, like "communication skills," to something more specific, like "asking clarifying questions." Narrow the focus until it feels almost too small. The smaller the target, the clearer the error signal.

2. Is it Behaviorally Expressed?
What would a video camera see you doing? Instead of "understand my team better," try "spend the first 5 minutes of the meeting asking open-ended questions." We need observable behaviors, not just internal states.

3. Is it Observable?
How will you know if you did it? Is there tangible evidence of impact? A change in the room? A different response from a colleague? We need data points to feed the reflection process that comes later.

Setting the Stage

By doing this work—by moving from fuzzy intentions to a specific, context-rich, emotionally salient goal—we are setting our compass. We are telling the brain’s prediction engine exactly what to look for.

But knowing what we want to do is only the first step. To actually do it—to bridge the gap between our intention and our action—we need to be able to see deeper into the building blocks and nuances of the skill itself. We need to see the gears inside the machine.

In the next essay, we will explore Step 2: Making Distinctions. We will look at how to use the "Art of Making Distinctions" to help you connect to more granular skill components you already have at hand or can try out easily. We also use this step to explore differences in how a given skill might show up in different contexts.

The Reflection Loop

Audit Your Goals: Look at your current development goals. Do they feel like "shoulds" (external pressure) or "wills" (internal desire)? Which ones have energy?
Find the Frustration: What is one thing in your work week that consistently annoys or frustrates you? If you treated that frustration as a signal, what learning goal might be hiding underneath it?
Sharpen the Signal: Take one vague intention ("Be more present") and translate it into a specific behavior ("Put my phone in the drawer during the 10am stand-up"). Notice how that changes your ability to predict whether you will succeed or fail.

The Rhythm of Reflection

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Rhythm of Reflection: From Static Expert to Dynamic Process

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

Reflection is not just a review of the past; it is the active updating of the brain's predictive model, allowing us to see the "self" and its actions not as a fixed entity to be defended, but as a dynamic process to be refined.

In our last essay, we left the harbor. We took our compass (the goal) and our map (distinctions) and we sailed onto the high seas (the experiment). We embraced the clunkiness. We gathered data.

Now, the meeting is over. The adrenaline from trying an experiment is fading. The existing system of expectations takes center stage urging you to move on to the next task, be it a crisis, the next email, or the next fire to put out. This is the low energy consumption habituated path of the known and familiar. Part of the brain wants to wash away the disconfirming data you just collected and return you to the status quo. It’s inertia.

To maintain our momentum, we need to step back onto our balcony where we can observe the inertia and suspend it from hijacking our attention.

These are Steps 4 and 5 of the Learning Loop: Reflect and Revise. Here I am describing them together, as they can be highly intertwined. In other places I list them as distinct steps to elaborate on each more carefully.

While Step 3 was inquiry-in-action (noticing in real-time), this step is inquiry-on-action. It is the deliberate act of generating a slow-motion replay to see what actually happened. This might happen five minutes after a meeting, or it might be a quiet ten minutes of journaling later in the day. But without it, the experiment is just an event, not a lesson.

The Waterfall Flow of Reflection

How do we reflect without just ruminating? We use a structure I call the waterfall flow. It moves from the high-level intention down to the granular mechanics.

1. Why (The Will):
First, we check the compass. Did I stay aligned with my core intention? Did I remember why I wanted to practice this skill? Often, in the heat of the moment, our "will" gets hijacked by the socialized pressure to "look good" or "be right." We need to honestly assess if we stayed true to prototyping the experiment or reverted to ‘performing.’

2. What (The Data):
Next, we look at the data. What actually happened?
This is where we use the navigator’s lens to slow down the recall. We aren't looking for judgments ("I did a bad job"). We are looking for somatic markers and anomalies.

Did I feel tightness in my chest when I paused?
Did the other person lean in when I asked the question?
Did my silence create space, or did it create awkwardness?
Was there a mix of responses to sort out?

3. How (The Revision):
Finally, we ask: How do I update the model? This is where we intentionally reverse downward assimilation. If the experiment felt clunky, the brain’s temptation is to smooth it over—to say, "Well, that didn't work, I'll go back to the tried and true of my old way of doing that." Instead, we use the prediction error to update our "priors," (we touched on these in essays 1 and 3). We realize: "I predicted that pausing would make me look weak. The reality was that it made the other person speak more. My model was wrong."

The Virtuality of Self

Practiced long enough, this process of updating our priors can lead us to a profound realization, one that sits at the heart of adult development theory. It can give us an advantage, an edge in our development by enabling more flexibility and agility.

We often operate from a view of ourselves as fixed entities. We think, "I am an expert," or "I am a good listener," or "I am not good at conflict." We defend these components of identity because we believe they make up who we are.

But when we persistently engage in deep reflection, we start to see that these components of identity are just pieces of predictive models. They are constructs our brain built to navigate the world and survive.

This is the Virtuality of Self.

You are not a static statue, either born to lead or not. We often treat our identities like monuments to be defended, rather than software to be updated. This shift in metaphor allows you to see yourself as a dynamic process of meaning-making. Your identity is a collection of skills, habits, and predictions that are constantly evolving as they interact with the environment.

This concept can be incredibly liberating. If your "self" is virtual—if it is a map your brain drew—then it can be redrawn. You don't have to defend your "expertise" when you make a mistake; you can just update your map. You move from being the object of your habits to being the subject who authors them.

The Reset Routine: A Practical Guide

So, how do we operationalize this? How do we turn this insight into a Tuesday afternoon habit?

We use a simple reset routine. After your experiment, take a moment, just a few seconds, to notice what happened. Then, later when you have some time, take five minutes to answer these four questions. Do not do this only in your head; write it down. The act of writing forces the brain to encode the learning.

1. What was the Prediction?
"I thought that if I waited for three seconds, the room would feel awkward and I would look unprepared."

2. What was the Reality? (The Anomaly)
"I waited. It felt like an eternity to me (somatic marker: tight throat). But then Sarah spoke up and shared an idea when she usually keeps to herself."

3. What is the Distinction?
"The 'awkwardness' I felt was actually 'generative tension.' I need to distinguish between 'silence as awkward' and 'silence as spacious'."

4. The Next Coordinate (Revision)
"For my next experiment, I will try this in a 1-on-1 meeting where the stakes are lower. I will focus specifically on relaxing my shoulders while I wait."

Closing the Loop

By doing this, you have completed the cycle. You have taken a fuzzy intention, broken it down into distinctions, tested it and used the error to update your internal map.

You have not just "learned a tip." You have re-wired a neural pathway. You have expanded your capacity. You have cleared a little bit more of the fog.

This is your work as a Bricoleur. It is humbling, iterative, and endless. But it is a great way to truly grow.

The Reflection Loop

The Identity Check: When you receive negative feedback or make a mistake, do you feel like your self is under attack? What would it feel like to view that mistake simply as a "bug" in the code of your virtual self?

The Inertia Audit: Notice how quickly you want to "move on" after a meeting. Try to pause for just 60 seconds to run a slow-motion replay of your experiment. What is one detail you missed in the heat of the moment?

The Next Loop: Look at your "next coordinate" from the exercise above. When is the very next opportunity you have to run that revised experiment? Put it on your calendar.

The Way of the Bricoleur

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Way of the Bricoleur: The Courage to Be In-Process

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

The Learning Loop is not just a tool, but a return to our natural state of learning; by embracing the "Bricoleur" mindset of curiosity and iteration, we transform the "fog" of leadership into a clear path of continuous evolution.

We began this journey on the shore, looking out at the "Stormy Weather" of modern leadership. We talked about the exhaustion of the "Conduit Model"—the feeling of being stuffed full of concepts yet starved for capacity. We acknowledged the "Cognitive Indigestion" that comes from trying to swallow an ocean of complexity in one gulp.

Over the last eight essays, we have built a vessel to navigate these waters.

We began by laying some background foundations, examining notions of natural learning, how leaders create the weather and the neuroscience of learning.

We then transitioned to dive into each step of the Learning Loop process. We calibrated our Compass of Discernment, moving from the fuzzy "shoulds" of socialized pressure to the high-fidelity "will" of intentional growth.

We polished our Navigator’s Lens, learning to make the granular distinctions that turn a large chunk of experience into a map of actionable coordinates.

We launched our Prototypes, embracing the clunkiness of "Inquiry-in-Action" and learning to fail fast and learn slow.

And we stepped onto the Balcony of Reflection, using the "Waterfall Flow" to turn the raw data of our errors into the gold of updated mental models.

This structure—the Learning Loop—is not a new invention. It is a remembrance. It is an attempt to slow down and make visible the natural learning process you were born with. It is how humans grow.

The Infinite Game of the Error-Collector

As we close this series, I want to invite you to shift your perspective one last time.

In the industrial model of education, an error is a verdict. It says, "You are not enough." But in the laboratory of Natural Learning, an error is a gift. It is a "Prediction Error"—a signal from reality that your internal map needs an update.

To be an adept leader is to be a professional Error-Collector.

The Bricoleur—that handyman who makes do with whatever is at hand—does not fear the broken pipe or the leaking roof. They see it as the context where they practice their craft. In the same way, the "Bricoleur Leader" does not fear the awkward conversation, the failed strategy, or the moment of reactivity. They see these not as failures of character, but as coordinates for growth.

This shifts leadership from a "Finite Game" (where the goal is to win, to be right, to be perfect) to an "Infinite Game" (where the goal is to keep playing, keep learning, keep evolving).

The Courage to Be "In-Process"

This shift requires courage. It requires the courage to admit that we are not finished products.

Near the end of this series, I touched on the Virtuality of Self. We explored the idea that our identities—"I am an expert," "I am a tough boss," "I am a nice person"—are just predictive models. They are software, not monuments.

When we defend these monuments, we create the "fog" of self-deception. We justify our reactions. We blame the weather. We armour up.

But when we accept that the self is a dynamic process—a map that is constantly being redrawn—we loosen the grip of judgment. We can step onto the balcony and look at our own code. We can say, "Huh. That line of code caused me to interrupt my team member. Interesting. Let’s rewrite it."

This is the ultimate freedom. It means you are never trapped by who you were yesterday. You are always capable of being redrawn.

The Path to Leading Clearly

This work—the work of building the capacity to learn—is the foundation. But it is not the whole house.

At Adeptify, we believe that this capacity is the bedrock for three pillars of high-impact leadership:

Thinking Clearly: Moving beyond cognitive biases and "downward assimilation" to see reality with higher resolution.
Communicating Clearly: Transmitting that reality to others without the "noise" of ego or fear.
Connecting Clearly: Building the "Holding Environments" where others can feel safe enough to grow.

We call this Leading Clearly. It is the next horizon of our work. And just like the Learning Loop, it is not a destination you reach; it is a practice you inhabit.

The Permanent Laboratory

You now have the tools. You have the Compass, the Lens, and the Loop. The "Laboratory of Daily Life" is open 24/7. Every meeting is a petri dish. Every email is a test tube.

But while the laboratory is everywhere, you do not have to work in it alone.

Development is a team sport. We grow faster and deeper when we have others to hold the ladder, to check our math, and to remind us to breathe when the weather gets stormy.

This is why we built Adeptify. We have designed a set of Learning Loop programs and a dedicated platform to provide the scaffolding you need to make this growth scalable and sustainable. We want to be the "hand on the seat" of your bike, helping you find your balance until you are ready to ride on your own.

Whether you join us in a formal program or simply continue to apply these essays in your own life, my hope for you is this: Keep your balcony uncluttered. Keep your compass close. And never stop collecting errors.

The Bricoleur’s Blessing

Leadership is messy. It is human. It is frustrating and beautiful and hard.

But it is also the ultimate Art of the Distinction. It is the daily practice of noticing the signal in the noise, the "will" in the "should," and the growth in the error.

The laboratory is open.
Every conversation is a new prototype.
Every mistake is a coordinate.
Every breath is a chance to reset the compass.

Let’s see what we can build.

The Reflection Loop

The Rearview Mirror: Look back at the last few weeks. Have you noticed a shift in how you view your own "mistakes"? Do they feel heavier (judgment) or lighter (data)?

The Horizon: As we move toward "Leading Clearly," which of the three pillars feels most urgent for you right now: Thinking, Communicating, or Connecting? Why?

The Commitment: What is one "Micro-Loop" you can commit to running every day next week? (e.g., "I will take three deep breaths before opening my email"). Write it down. Make it a contract with your future self.

The Neuroscience of Learning

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Neuroscience of Learning: Turning Friction into Flow

Jonathan Reams

The "Big Idea" Summary

Formal education taught us to treat errors as failures to be avoided, but the brain’s natural learning mechanism—Predictive Processing—relies on "prediction errors" as the raw material for growth; we must learn the "Aikido move" of welcoming these errors to update our internal models rather than defending against them.

There is a feeling I often encounter when I hear people talk about leadership workshops. It’s a mix of exhaustion and skepticism. It’s the feeling of information overload, or "cognitive indigestion" combined with the burden of figuring out how to turn knowledge into action.

These leaders have read up on the topic and listened to podcasts. They have sat through seminars that might have given an injection of insight or enthusiasm in the moment, but felt it fade once back in the office. They have been pumped full of concepts—Transformational Leadership, Servant Leadership, Agile, Lean, Teal—but they are starved for capacity to translate this into action. They know a lot about how leadership ‘should’ look, but in the heat of the moment, when the pressure rises and the "weather" turns stormy, they find themselves reverting to old, reactive patterns.

Why does this happen? Why is the gap between knowing and doing so persistent?

In previous essays, I outlined the limitations of trying to force a "conduit" model of learning onto a human system that wasn't designed for it. We treat the brain like an empty bucket waiting to be filled with information. If we just pour enough data, information, or knowledge in, and give it the right ‘instructions,’ we assume wise actions and good decisions will naturally flow out.

But that is not how natural learning works. To better understand how to actually grow, develop or learn, we have so far in this series been looking at things like predictive processing, dynamic skill theory and explored how our performance can be affected by a dynamic balance between vulnerability factors and resources.

I’m going to take a moment now and get into some neuroscience, because understanding the why changes how we approach the how.

The Brain as a Prediction Engine

For a long time, we thought the brain was a passive receiver. We thought the eyes took a picture, sent it to the visual cortex, and the brain said, "Oh, that’s a cup of coffee."

Modern neuroscience, specifically the theory of Predictive Processing, suggests the opposite. It suggests that your brain is a proactive prediction engine. It is constantly modeling the world and projecting it outward. We don’t see the world as it is, but as we imagine it.

When you walk into a meeting, your brain isn't just waiting to see what happens. It is running a simulation based on your past experiences, your biases, recent signals that give clues as to what to anticipate, and your current internal state. It predicts: “John is going to be defensive,” “This agenda is a waste of time,” “I need to protect my turf,” or fill in the blank with whatever variation of this is familiar to you.

You don't just see the meeting; you see your prediction or a simulated model of the meeting.

This isn’t problematic in itself. Our brain’s predictive processing is super beneficial and efficient at most things that ensure our day to day functioning and even survival. It allows us to navigate complex environments without having to process every single pixel of data from scratch.

However, there are complicating factors that come into play at times. Part of the dominant materialist worldview includes the brain as the source of identity. It is seen to produce our subjective experience, our sense of being a person.

One result of this is that we can identify with our thoughts and from this, we can easily have a tendency to rationally justify the predictions the brain is making – despite any evidence to the contrary. This leads us to run up the ladder of inference (Chris Argyis’s lovely model), filtering out what doesn’t fit our predictions, or spinning the story to avoid facing unpleasant consequences.

The Gold is in the Error

So, how do we learn? How do we update the model?

We learn through Prediction Error.

A prediction error happens when reality (sensory input from the environment), clashes with your simulation. You predicted John would be defensive, but he smiled and asked for feedback. You predicted the strategy would work, but it failed.

Most of us were educated in the conduit or information transfer paradigm, the industrial model, to see error as failure. It’s a bad grade. It’s a sign that you didn't study enough. We are conditioned to equate error with failure.

So, when we encounter a prediction error in leadership (a conflict, a mistake, a misunderstanding), our vulnerability factors spike. We feel ashamed. We get defensive. We try to explain away the error to protect our ego (our internal model of being a "Good Leader").

We treat the error as noise to be filtered out.

But in Natural Learning, the error is not noise to rationalize away or tune out. It is the signal. It is the only raw material the brain can use to update its model. If you don't have a mismatch, you don't have the possibility for learning.

The Aikido Move

This is where the Learning Loop comes in. It is a structure designed to help us execute a kind of psychological Aikido.

In Aikido, you don't block an incoming strike; you blend with it. You take the energy of the attack and redirect it.

When we experience a prediction error in leadership—a moment of friction, frustration, or surprise—our instinct is most often to block. We defend our position. We blame the context. We fit the square peg of new data to fit the circle of our old model. ("John is just manipulating me").

The Learning Loop invites us to make an Aikido move. Instead of blocking the error, we welcome it. We say, "Huh. That didn't go how I expected. Interesting."

The Goal sets the compass so we know what we are looking for.
Distinctions tune our attention to notice the subtle signals we usually ignore.
Experimentation is us deliberately testing our predictions in the real world.
Reflection is where the update happens. We look at the gap between what we predicted and what happened, and we let that data update the model.

Cleaning Up the Signal

This brings us back to the "weather." If your internal condition is turbulent—if you are vibrating with anxiety or the need to be right—you cannot perceive the prediction error clearly. You will interpret it as a threat.

This is why we distinguish between "Growing Up" (adding new, robust skills to meet the complexity of your context) and "Cleaning Up" (removing the noise and bias that clouds our perception).

You cannot effectively "grow up" if you haven't "cleaned up." If your internal signal is noisy, you will miss the subtle data points that the world in all its forms is offering you. You will keep predicting the same old storms and wondering why you’re always getting wet.

A Laboratory for Your Leadership

My aim here isn’t to turn you into a neuroscientist. It’s to invite you to become a better Bricoleur of your own development.

The "mad scientist" in me loves the theory of predictive processing because it explains so much about the mechanics that make us amazing and amazingly stupid at times. The bricoleur in me loves it because it validates the messiness of the process. It tells me that my mistakes are not evidence of my inadequacy; they are the friction required for traction.

We are designing Adeptify to be a laboratory, an experimental holding environment where we work with prediction errors on many levels and scales. I believe I’ve heard people in the agile community talk about failing fast. This allows them to learn fast. In order to build this type of learning as a habit, we first need to help you slow down the automatic processing just enough to catch the error, do the Aikido move, and update the model.

We want to help you tap back into the natural, fluid way of learning that you were born with, before you were taught that being wrong was dangerous.

The Reflection Loop

Catch the Surprise: Look back at your last 24 hours. Was there a moment where something didn't go exactly as you expected (a "prediction error")? Did you brush it off, or did you get curious?

The Aikido Check: When you feel resistance or friction in a conversation, what is your default move? Do you block (defend/argue) or do you blend (inquire/explore)?

Micro-Experiment: Tomorrow, try to consciously make one specific prediction before a meeting (e.g., "I predict this person will push back on X"). Watch what actually happens. If you are wrong, treat it as a victory—you just found data to update your model.