“The straight line was a circle. Yeah, the straight line was a lie.”

The Beths weren’t singing about organizational change, but they could have been.

If you’ve ever led a complex system through change, you know the feeling: progress, resistance, circling back, and the loneliness of carrying it all.

I’ve lived it in chemical synthesis labs, supply chain experiments, and executive roles. Sometimes the system snapped back. Other times, the change took root and transformed the culture.

Here’s what I’ve learned about why improvement rarely follows a straight line—and why the long way is still worth it.

In 1998, after a two-hour reprimand from my boss, I sat down at my computer and drafted my resignation. I was angry, hurt, and ready to walk away.

Before I pressed “send,” I called a trusted friend. Instead of job leads, he asked me questions—hard questions that made me pause, reflect, and rethink.

That coaching conversation changed everything. I didn’t quit. I grew.

Sometimes the right questions keep us from making decisions we’ll later regret.

Sometimes leadership lessons don’t come from boardrooms or strategy decks. They come from a week of ER visits, a business trip gone sideways, and a church board meeting where nothing seemed to go right.

In this post, I share a story from 2001 that taught me a lot about stress, fatigue, and what Richard Boyatzis calls the Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA). Spoiler: when NEA hijacks you, even the best leaders make questionable choices.

Leaders today aren’t struggling because they’re lazy.
They’re struggling because the complexity of the work has outpaced their capacity to handle it.

That mismatch—the Complexity-Capacity Gap—shows up in decision bottlenecks, wasted energy, and teams that feel stuck.

The good news? You can close the gap. By:
• Eliminating confounding complexity that adds no value
• Growing individual leaders’ capacity for complexity
• Building cohesive leadership teams that multiply capacity

In my latest post, I unpack the three types of complexity and share how leaders and teams can bridge the gap.