Thought Of The Week

“We don’t resist change. We resist the loss as we walk away from the old”

When you leave the comfort zone, to build your future, you lose the things that are keeping you safe.

The Tarot card symbolising change is, after all, “Death”. We don’t want to go to rehab because it is, literally, the death of the only way of living we have known.

Change = saying goodbye to something deeply dear to us to build something we HOPE will be better. Saying goodbye is the hardest part

The CRO doesn’t pursue the high-value clients their competitors pursue because they fear losing the small clients that currently pay the bills.

The CEO won’t empower the Exec to own decisions and create a fast competitive organisation because she fears losing the illusion of control.

The CIO doesn’t courageously propose an AI-Enabled Business Strategy that changes the business model because he fears losing the ‘they just tell IT what to do’ comfort blanket (so we just build a me-too ‘AI Strategy’ to reduce contact centre headcount and we can say we’re ‘adopting AI’).

We remain in the comfort zone because of our fear of loss. Which is greater than our desire to secure our future. 

Kahneman and Loss-Aversion

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision making in uncertainty. For those of us who create, or advise the CEO to create, change: he is required reading.

An element of his prize-winning work is the discovery that we are all more ‘loss-averse’ than we are ‘gain-positive’.

You fear loss of the way things are today more than you fear failing to build your long-term security in a disrupted world.

We don’t resist change.

We don’t fear failure.

We resist and we fear the loss of what is currently working for us. What we have built up to now.

And so do the people you are leading.

When understood, this changes your entire approach to your change, your emotional regulation, your decision making and your leadership.

Let’s look at that with your upcoming strategic AI decisions.

AI and your potential blind spot

When the internet came along there were internet strategies and internet-enabled business strategies.

An internet strategy = playing within your comfort zone with no emotional block and nothing lost. Eg: Retailers opened an online version of their store or they went bust.

An Internet-enabled business strategy = a MOONSHOT: using new technology to change the operating model and capture value in a new way. It involves leaving the comfort zone and its comfort blanket behind.

· Netflix moves from posting DVDs to streaming (you must shut your route to market to do this).

· Banks move transactions online and close physical branches (you must shut your routes to market to do this).

· Amazon is born to defeat Barnes and Noble’s limited stock capacity (you must leave a high-paying hedge fund job and become poor and actually start coding up an online bookstore).

Internet-enabled business strategies demanded walking away from the comfort zone – not playing within it.  They were emotionally challenging to execute.

Today’s big questions:

1. Do you have an AI Strategy? Or an AI-Enabled Business Strategy?

2. What do you lose if you move from the comfort zone? What is the ‘comfort blanket’ that gets taken away.

3. How can you make intellectual decisions – not loss-averse fear-driven decisions?

If you want help with this, drop me a line.

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My Fortnight

Change Happens in your Calendar. Which means losing stuff from your calendar. Which makes the Tiger roar.

I have big changes afoot and this week the decision was made that the only way to do that is to be far less present onstage for the first quarter of 2026 in order to execute those changes excellently.

The challenge, of course, is that this is a significant portion of how I fund my family.  So Kahneman is large in my mind this week as I navigate intellectual decision making while my Tiger roars at me.

I shall, however, maintain all of my boardroom advisory clients and can accommodate two more.

Thank you to all who invited me to events this week and last. Each was very special.

A highlight however, as a Dad who is heavily invested in a secure future, and has also visited our viciously attacked European border in Ukraine, was supporting leaders working hard to ensure NATO’s underinvested defence capabilities are brought back in line with the threats faced. I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Today to Istanbul and a dynamic leadership team in a fast growing pharma company who are in the middle of creating, successfully, a re-invention of their entire business model.

See you at LHR T5 if you’re travelling through today.  

Book Of The Fortnight

Thinking Fast and Slow: Daniel Kahneman.

I have said all I need to above I think. There are a number of books that work in this field. Tim Gallweys’ Inner Game of Tennis’ is astonishing. Guy Claxton’s “Hare Brain – Tortoise Mind” (thank you Neil Mullarkey for the recommendation) and of course the work of the behavioural economists from Cialdini to Thaler.

But this one is foundational if you want to understand leading change.

And leading yourself!

Write YOUR story 🖋️

Jim