THE LEAFLET
October 30 2025
the volley tree, go-to moves when you inherit a team, business plan: chaos mode
THE VOLLEY TREE
We’ve shared here several ways to delegate by default, so that you’re continually training the people who report to you to take on bigger responsibilities. These are ways to build a bench of great leaders, rather than a dutiful, limited cohort of followers.
One of the approaches I use in my own coaching and recommend to other leaders is the volley tree. For those with a law school background, it’s easy to think of this as a friendly version of the Socratic method. For those with a teaching background, you can think of this as improving the think ratio in your meetings.
I’ve mapped the approach in the flow chart above. When a report comes to you with a challenge or question, you help them identify the answer by prompting them to model your thinking. Delivering the answer outright, with no provocative questioning, doesn’t elevate your report’s thinking or capability, much. It keeps you as “answer-haver” instead of the more useful role you can play: “growth-promoter”.
Simply put, before giving an answer, you ask the report how they think you would answer this question or handle this situation. You prompt them to spell out the reasoning for that answer. You go even further to ask them what they could do to sort this out without your help the next time.
The point of this isn’t to swat them away – it’s to enhance their ability to solve problems the way more senior people at the organization can and do. You’re helping them build skills and richer perspective. You can tell them that directly to allay anxiety they may have that there’s some other game afoot.
-ben
Read the rest here.
GO-TO MOVES WHEN YOU INHERIT A TEAM
It’s so convenient when an org chart remains a symmetrical, stable picture with each bubble representing a growing, happy, talented person ready for bigger challenges. Very often, that ain’t how it goes. People quit, get fired, go on parental leave. The organization scales really fast or seizes a new, weird opportunity. When any of these occur, it’s pretty common for a leader to inherit a team, temporarily or unexpectedly.
Here are a few go-to moves to consider if you find yourself with such an inheritance:
Hold short 1:1 conversations with as many individuals on your new team as you can. Record or take good notes in these conversations. Make explicit reference to them in team-wide communication.
Identify as quickly as you can the narrow set of claims you can make with confidence. If your situation is super chaotic, this might not be more than “we have a 15-min daily stand up at 1000a ET.” With more stability, you might be able to claim more.
Avoid apologies and over-promising.
Find your “no complaining” boundary and tell your team what it is. This is the thing that we’re not going to allow ourselves to complain about – we’re dedicated to ignoring it or solving it, instead. Sometimes, this “thing” can be an abstract condition, like “how quickly things change around here” or “unexpected new responsibilities.”
Run a goal or performance cycle in miniature. In other words, get reps with this team doing what this team does.
When I look at this full list, I see it as a sketch of trust-building. You carefully give your word on a small number of things. Then you keep your word on those things. When this goes well, you earn the chance to do it again, with higher stakes and a larger number of things.
-eric
Read the rest here.
BUSINESS PLAN: CHAOS MODE
In the early days of a venture, a few things might be true:
You’re eager to find and satisfy your audience/community
You’re open-minded about how you deliver that satisfaction
You’ve got some early users/customers/community members who like you and what you offer
If those conditions hold for you, it’s worth considering a business plan that can seem really diffuse and un-strategic. Ask those early users what they want you to offer next. You might get a goofy range of answers. Instead of rolling the dice on a single one of those answers, consider doing…all of them. This is business plan: chaos mode.
Yes, eventually, you probably have to focus and simplify what you do so you can make that thing exceptionally good and make a whole bunch of it. It’s hard to scale something complicated and complexity is expensive.
But the opportunity to scale might not be a good problem you have yet. That good problem may only exist for you once you find a thing that your people are in love with. And you might only find that by doing as many of the things they say they want as you can.
-ben and eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Keen observer Joan Didion on a California cast of mind:
We were seeing one more enthusiastic fall into a familiar California error, that of selling the future of the place to the highest bidder, which was in this instance the California Correctional Peace Officers Association.
Poet W.S. Merwin on noticing:
Years from now / someone will come upon a layer of birds / and not know what he is listening for
these are the days / when the beetles hurry through dry grass / hiding pieces of light they have stolen
Political scientist James Scott on the limitations of categories:
The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions … can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric