In leadership, advice is abundant. Insight is scarce.

Leaders are inundated with leadership content—habits, hacks, “seven steps,” and simplified models of resilience. It’s tidy, marketable, and easily repeated. But under real pressure, most of it do...

Field Notes.
By Kristen Tolbert

Most leadership books are written for managers inside stable organizations. The assumption is that leaders operate with the buffer of budgets, teams, and institutional support. Even when things get tough, the system...

Not all rooms are created equal. Some environments look lively but produce little growth. They are filled with intensity, validation loops, or posturing. People talk a lot, but the ideas don’t compound. These are low-exchange rooms: they consume ener...

Abstract 

Burnout has traditionally been addressed through two primary lenses: as a failure of individual resilience or as a failure of organizational systems. Both perspectives contribute valuable insights but remain incomplete. This paper proposes...

You’ve probably noticed it. The raise that once felt life-changing soon feels routine. The promotion you worked years to earn becomes your new baseline. The house, the car, the recognition—what was once extraordinary becomes ordinary, and the expecta...

In business and leadership, the difference between progress and stagnation often comes down to agency. High agency leaders refuse to accept circumstances as fixed. They don’t wait for perfect conditions. They absorb the complexity of reality, then ...

Leadership assessments are everywhere. They promise to identify who will thrive in complex roles and who won’t. While these tools can surface useful data points, the truth is more uncomfortable: they rarely predict who will actually succeed in a le...

The Law of the Instrument describes a bias as old as expertise itself: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It’s a simple idea, but in practice it distorts entire fields. A physician sees symptoms through the frame of their spe...

Confidence Misunderstood

In leadership circles, confidence is often equated with certainty, flawless execution, or the absence of doubt. Yet these associations are misleading. Over time, they fuel anxiety, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism—partic...

 But much of what is labeled as self-awareness is actually self-description. People can articulate their tendencies, reference their attachment style, even recite insights from therapy or coaching. But the deeper question is: how does that awarenes...