I've spent twenty-five years leading teams. The last fifteen in SaaS, building and scaling go-to-market organizations in emerging tech categories. Before that, I managed restaurants. Opened Boston Chicken stores in the mid-nineties as a twenty-year-old. Ran a Hooters, where fifty front-of-house staff and fifty kitchen workers taught me more about group dynamics than any psychology class would. The job was the same one I have now, just without the laptops. Read the room. Set the tone.
The answer was never on a clipboard. It was never in the pipeline either.
The mistake I made was thinking managing and leading were the same thing. I operated that way for years, optimizing things that didn't need optimizing while ignoring what was actually running the room.
Collective intelligence turns out to be less about who's in the room and more about what's happening between them. Teams sync physiologically. Brain activity aligns during real communication. The body knows before the org chart does. The science exists. What's missing is the practice.
The deeper I went into what creates that field, the more I had to turn the lens on myself. What happens when twelve people are in a room together. What's happening inside the person leading it.
I completed the Vital program in psychedelic studies to understand what happens when people stop believing their own story, and have to figure out who they are without it.
Field Notes is where I'm working it out. The questions before the answers.
Also an ordained Dudeist priest. Takes it exactly as seriously as it deserves.