The Last Moment of Doubt

I am descending. The surface is a shrinking pale disc of light above me. My music takes over my consciousness.

At around 40 metres, something shifts. Not in the water. In the mathematics of the situation. I am quietly passing the ‘last moment of doubt’.

Beyond this point, if something goes wrong, instinct and ‘trying hard’ will not save me. The surface is now too far away. What happens now is entirely a function of what I did before I entered the water.

My great coach and friend Andrea Zuccari understood this better than anyone I have ever met. Andrea and Marco Nones changed freediving together. They coached and supported me to 101 metres. Marco coaches me still at his centre in Sharm El Sheikh. Andrea died in the beautiful Red Sea that he loved. The ocean is not cruel. She is utterly, absolutely, indifferent.

Leaving my emotions aside (and there are plenty): Andrea made a very uncharacteristic error in his process and preparation before he entered the water. There wasn’t a way back from the error.

Some say that organisations don’t have ‘Last Useful Moments’ before they ‘commit to the dive’. There is always time to recover. They are playing an ‘Infinite Game’.

I believe my clients’ work (and particularly in the defence sector at present), is far more important than that. There are critical decisions. Hurdles that must be cleared by the leaders. Jobs to be done. Consequences.

The question is not whether you will reach a last useful moment. You will. Every leader does. You must commit and go.

The question is what you do between now and then. What decisions you take, what authority you devolve, what trust you build, what honest evaluation you run — before the depth tests your preparation and process.

Your prep isn’t a strategy deck. It’s the organisation you optimise to deliver it.

What the Dark Teaches

At 101 metres, the human body does things that feel profoundly wrong. But they are not wrong. That tension must be held as we deliver the objective.

The lungs compress to the size of a fist. The diaphragm rises into the chest. The heart rate drops, in elite divers, to fewer than thirty beats per minute. The mammalian dive reflex begins pausing non-essential systems. Blood migrates from the extremities to protect the heart and brain.

You do what dolphins do. I dare you to not be amazed at how incredible you are – and how close a sibling to one of the world’s most beautiful inhabitants!

As your body shifts, you must remain mentally still and in total physical relaxation. Otherwise, the barotrauma injury will be life changing.

You cannot think your way into surrendering to the ocean in this way. You definitely cannot ‘respond’ your way through it or use strength. You have to have prepared to go through it — long before the moment arrives.

As a helicopter pilot, I would use exactly the same language about an autorotation when the engine fails. I have done many hundreds of autorotations in practice. Now my mentor can turn off our power mid-flight without warning and I’ll land the aircraft safely.

When genuine uncertainty hits an organisation — not managed risk, but real uncertainty — the executive team that has not built its Second Strategy: the pre-taken decisions about how it will and will not behave in order to deliver the Enterprise Strategy through its people will do exactly what the unprepared diver does.

It will panic and operate heroically.

Panic, at depth, is lethal because it consumes oxygen at a catastrophic rate. You burn through your reserve in seconds. The thing that was going to get you home is gone.

In organisations, that oxygen is trust. The unprepared leadership team burns through it in the first quarter of the crisis — through contradictory signals, accepting escalated decisions without boundaries in place – decisions they said were delegated long ago, and leaders quietly retreat to what they know.

The Diver’s Paradox

Elite freediving is not an ‘adrenaline sport’. The deepest dives are the calmest.

The divers who go deepest are not the bravest. They are not the most reckless or the most driven. They are the most still. The most prepared.

At depth, stillness is not a personality trait. It is a conscious trained skill. It is a performance variable. A competitive advantage.

Every unnecessary movement, every spike of anxiety, every unresolved question burns oxygen. The diver who goes deep has learned — through relentless preparation and brutally honest evaluation — how to be still when everything around them is saying: move, fight, get out.

This is the insight that can be missing in leadership under pressure.

The leaders I see burning out, freezing up, or reverting to micromanagement under transformation pressure are not weak. They are moving too much. Calling too many meetings. Reversing too many decisions. Checking in where they should be trusting. Permitting escalation without boundaries.

Each intervention feels responsible. Each one costs oxygen. Each re-inforces parent-child escalation and destroys accountability.

The executive team that goes deep and comes back up transformed is the one that has done the preparation work — not the strategy deck, but the living Second Strategy. The hard conversations about authority and accountability before the emotions of uncertainty across the organisation demanded them. The decision-rights architecture agreed before uncertainty made it feel too risky to delegate. The trust built before it was needed as a survival resource.

They prepare to go deep. They go there still and calm. They come home transformed.

The ocean does not grade on effort. It punishes a ‘reversion to heroics’ hard.

Ditto the market when speed of execution is required.

Book of the Fortnight

Relentless — Tim Grover

Grover trained Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant for a combined three decades. He watched the best performers in the world at the moment of maximum pressure — and his overall conclusion is straightforward:

They weren’t choosing. They had already decided.

Not in the fourth quarter or in the Finals: but in the gym. When nobody was watching and nothing was at stake except the quality of the preparation.

Grover’s framework – Coolers, Closers and Cleaners – is a diagnostic.

Most organisations are built for Coolers: solid, reliable, performing well when conditions support them. Closers sit in the middle. They can rise to the moment. They deliver under pressure when it matters. But they still feel the weight of the decision. They still negotiate internally. They can switch it on — but it costs them. 

The rarest category, the Cleaners, have removed the internal negotiation entirely. The question of whether to act, how to act, and whether the cost is worth it was answered long before the moment of pressure arrived.

A Strategy is a series of pre-taken decisions to hit the goal. This is the DARE Loop at its most unforgiving. A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions — can we make those Decisions, Actions, and the rationale behind them so deeply practised that under pressure they require no thought at all.

My Fortnight

Triton Partners is a unique and dynamic private equity firm. I was happy to be invited to a meeting of their portfolio CEOs and Chairs in their founding City of Stockholm to speak on ‘The Need For Speed – and How to Deliver It’. A fantastic event and very stimulating dinner conversation in a room of fast-moving European CEOs from a wide range of sectors and backgrounds.

LinkedIn invited me to close the London edition of their ‘Talent Connect” Series. A wonderful team and a world-class production, I was invited to speak on “The Courage to turn Vision into Reality”.

I am writing to you on the plane to speak in San Diego and will send you a postcard in my next newsletter.

In the confidential part of my work, my biggest reflection this fortnight has been on boundaries:

Allowing ourselves to breach our own boundaries in order to “help” by grabbing the wheel and allowing others to breach our boundaries by permitting escalation.

It is intimidating for leaders to put these boundaries in place. We’ve been navigating that intimidating work to accelerate execution through others.

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim