THE LEAFLET

August 07 2025

you control the momentum, futurecast to untie knots, highest impact use of the last 90 seconds of a 1:1

YOU CONTROL THE MOMENTUM

I think it's insufficient but absolutely necessary for every effective organization to feel positive momentum. This usually happens best when leaders spark the feeling of momentum for each individual performer they manage. 

Inertia has a grip on your team and you want inertia cutting in your favor. If you're feeling deceleration, you continue to decelerate. If you're feeling acceleration, you're biased towards continuing that. This is something that leaders are in control of to an extraordinary degree, yet they don't know it a lot of the time.

To put this in teacher terms: the best algebra teacher, the one who inspires extraordinary gains among kids who have struggled with math for years, is going to write out an agenda on the board: classroom warmup, introduction of new skill, guided practice of skill, independent practice of skill, assessment at the end—that's the basic structure.

The best teacher takes this even further: they break down "warm up" into six different things. Warm up becomes: take out your binder, take out your pencil, write your heading at the top, solve your first problem, solve your second problem. So five minutes into the session, the teacher can go, "Hey, kids, check it out. You did this, you did this, you did this, you did this. We're only five minutes in. What are we going to do next?"

Kids feel accomplished, you lose far fewer of them to petty distractions, and you build automaticity and speed into routine, transactional parts of a lesson that are normally slow, boring, and costly. When you make this happen consistently, you get the powerful forces of culture and identity ushering you and your people forward. It becomes less a pro forma case of “this authority figure is making me do x” and more a proud case of “I’m the kind of person who does x” and “around here, we do x.”

Leaders are so in control of whether people feel momentum or not that I think it's an inherent responsibility they bear. Do not think of momentum as a mere nice-to-have. Near-term goal-setting and regular growth-tracking (and growth celebrating) are cheap levers to pull to create it.

-ben

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FUTURECAST TO UNTIE THE MOST STUBBORN KNOTS

I worked for a long time within bureaucratic structures that people were convinced hemmed them in. The animating question other teams tried to answer was usually something like, “How do we get a hundred kids to grow two grade levels of reading in one year?” Pretty much nobody answered that question well. They chose old disproven answers or gave up.

When I prompted the team like this we had a lot more success: “It's the end of the year. We are popping champagne bottles because all of our kids grew two grade levels in reading. Journalists and experts and authors are here to ask us ‘How on earth did you do this?’ What do we say?” 

Futurecasting like this eliminated impossibility as an escape hatch from pragmatic, creative thinking. Often the smartest teams limit themselves with the weight of their knowledge. Instead of investing energy in carving the likeliest path to success, they get stymied by their awareness of all the obstacles. 

Futurecasting can have a miraculous effect for organizations when it becomes standard practice. I coach leaders to make this part of the culture, so teams do it for small and large scale goals. Plan backwards from the success that seems elusive or improbable, rather than planning forwards from the constrained and historically-weighted present.

-ben

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THE HIGHEST IMPACT WAY TO USE THE LAST 90 SECONDS OF YOUR 1:1

I've been talking recently with a bunch of leaders who are valued by their employees for their internal knowledge base and expertise in their company's domain. Their one-on-one meetings typically look like this: reports come in having a bunch of things they're blocked on, or having a bunch of ideas they feel certain they've gone the distance on and they now want the boss's take on how to level it up.

And so I watch the boss expound and profess, and be genius-y and brilliant. It's meaningful. It's a good use of one-on-one time. Their employee is freed up by it, inspired by it, and walks away.

Then they both repeat the whole process again a week later.

Here's the advice I want these bosses to take: What if you took 90 seconds at the end of this 1:1 and said, "What did I offer that you didn't have already? If you subtract what you came in with from what I gave you, what is left? Can you name it? Can you meta-stamp it? And if I challenge you next time to come in with the answer to the question, 'What is my boss going to say when I present this thing?' already scripted, or already thought through. Could you do it?"

Asking that and getting the answer takes less than 90 seconds.

If leaders added that into their meetings, they get people within their current roles, with their current salaries, needing less of the leader’s time and feeling proud of themselves for growing. Often working for you is one of the major reasons they want to be there, and that's because of your brilliance. Now they're gaining some of that brilliance to wield on their own.

That regular, small conversation is its own cultural ecosystem - a feedback loop that conveys “what we value and how you get ahead around here”. Just making that 90-second move.

I hypothesize that the reason why most people might not do this — even if they'll do it while I'm observing and I force their hand and they're glad of it — is that they worry about what happens when the brilliant analysis isn’t their solely owned IP or value-add anymore. I think deep down, they're protective of their expertise and worried they'll feel meaningless without their employees needing to ask for it.

Fortunately, there is an excellent use of the new bandwidth a leader gains when their reports are leveling up and acquiring what was previously leader-only expertise. Leaders now get to level up the organization as whole, spending time on the questions that only they can really take responsibility for.

-ben

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Poet William Blake on embracing ephemerality:

He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise

Mini-forest innovator Dr. Akira Miyawaki on living:

Nothing is greater than living. Then what is the reason for living? It is to do something anyone can do anywhere for our tomorrow. I want everyone to do what they can do. Let’s plant trees together.” 

Critic and novelist Teju Cole on objects:

Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action. This is in part because of the respectful distance that a photograph of objects can create between the one who looks, far from the place of trouble, and the one whose trouble those objects signify. But it is also because objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric