The world is changing so fast – often chaotically – that organizations need to have systems of pace and scale that are simultaneously strong and flexible so that leaders can navigate how products, services, and experiences meet the needs of communities.
According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), uncertainty is the defining theme of global risks predictions for 2026 (over 50% of respondents to their survey said the short- and long-term outlook looked “stormy” and “turbulent). Achieving pace and scale within these turbulent times means accelerating the speed of execution while simultaneously expanding the reach, volume, or impact of an initiative. Great leaders understand that chaos and change cannot be controlled by speaking in “real language” or adding emojis to company-wide emails. The Leslie Knopes and Raymond Holts of real-life-leadership create the clarity, trust, and conditions people need to navigate uncertainty. They build systems that help people change pace without losing the plot. In my experience, three systems matter most: safe connection, learning that travels through the work, and flexible processes that serve outcomes.
These systems reinforce one another, too. Safety without learning can become comfort. Learning without process can become skills and capabilities that goes nowhere. Process without trust and learning can turn judgment into permission-seeking and bog down innovation by blindly following the rules.
Safe enough to tell the truth
Psychological safety is sometimes mistaken for being nice or lowering standards. I’ve always seen it as the way to unlock a team’s potential. Cultivating psychological safety is means that everyone – especially the newest, most junior team member – tell the truth about performance soon enough and publicly enough to improve outcomes in the moment and over time. Psychological safety is one of the most important systems that leaders should enable on their teams so that problems are surfaced before they become showstoppers.
One time, I inherited work that looked collaborative on paper but depended on hallway knowledge and heroic individuals to move things along. I did not start by announcing a new value or restructuring the team. What we did was make the work visible to everyone (not just the core team), created regular places to raise uncertainty publicly, and clarified that disagreement before a decision was useful, but reopening a settled decision by stealth was not.
That distinction matters. Teams need enough trust to surface a risk, question an assumption, or admit an error. They also need clarity about when debate ends and commitment begins. Research associates psychological safety with information sharing, learning, voice and team performance, although much of that evidence is correlational. The practical point is not that safety guarantees results. It is that candour and coordination are harder without it.
Buurtzorg, the Dutch home-care organization, offers a useful, concrete illustration of psychological safety. It scaled small, autonomous neighbourhood teams through a clear professional purpose, shared information systems, visible performance data and coaches who supported teams without taking over their decisions. The lesson is not “remove managers.” What Buurzorg concretely demonstrates is that autonomy at scale requires coordination enabled by trust and safety across teams.
Learning that changes the work
Once people trust each other and know how to collaborate amidst uncertainty, the next question is whether the team can do anything useful with such superpowers.
A learning system is not a library of content. It is how a team converts experience into better performance. At some point in my career, I realized my team, like every other learning team in every other organization, was treating every learning experience as something people left work to do. We had useful courses and capable facilitators, but the pieces were not yet operating as a system.
We began connecting capability gaps to curated learning, applied practice, peer knowledge-sharing, and all of it was in service of business outcomes. The design question changed from “What training should we offer?” to “What must people be able to do differently?” and “How will the work itself help them learn it?”
That shift moves attention from participation to application. Research on team learning points to practical behaviours: asking questions, seeking feedback, experimenting, reflecting on experiences all the time, and discussing errors or things that didn’t go as expected. Well-run debriefs are one concrete mechanism. They work best when they are developmental rather than punitive, focus on specific events and draw on more than one source of information.
Elite sport makes the mechanism visible. Research-informed rugby teams, like the New Zealand All Blacks, have used a clear performance vision, player critique, leadership groups, weekly review rhythms, and realistic practice to develop shared mental models. This is not motivational theatre. It is a disciplined way to build common understanding while preserving the ability to adapt in play.
Learning is not what happens before or after the work. In adaptive teams, learning is one of the ways the work happens.
Process as a handrail
The third system of pace and scale is process that serves outcomes. A process should be a handrail, not a hamster wheel or a maze.
I use a simple framework on my teams: outcomes, guardrails, and loops. Outcomes clarify the value we are creating, for whom, and what evidence would show movement. Guardrails define who decides, what is fixed policy or regulatory constraint, what can vary, what risks are unacceptable, and when work must escalate. Loops help people see progress, coordinate, learn, and change course as needed. I borrow from a lot of systems thinking practices, but the Waysfinder Model is a core design element of the processes I create to enable pace and scale.
One leadership group I worked with had no shortage of discussion and debate, but lacked a reliable way to know when discussion had become a decision. We introduced a simple discipline: name the decision, record the commitment, identify the owner, and specify what would cause the decision to be reopened.
It did not make every decision easy. It made ambiguity harder to hide. It put accountability front and centre.
Good process standardizes the interface, not every human action. The shipping container scaled global trade because ships, trains, trucks, and ports could rely on common dimensions and agreed-upon hand-offs, not because every container transports the same thing in the same way. Organizations can do something similar with reusable decision rules, clear ownership, escalation triggers, visible work, and lightweight review rhythms. Standardize what enables coordination and protects people; preserve judgment and enable personalization where context matters.
People-first and digital-first
This is also how I think about technology. People-first and digital-first are not opposite choices. The useful question is whether technology increases human capability, connection and judgment (or merely accelerates existing confusion) when we’re seeking to achieve pace and scale as a community.
Reusable digital components, shared data, and automation can remove friction and make work visible. They can also scale a weak process, obscure accountability, or exclude people whose needs were not considered. We’re more likely to succeed by applying common tools and standards combined with evidence-based research, iteration and ongoing learning, accessibility principles, responsible data use, and empowered teams.
The future-ready organization will not be the one with the most processes or the fewest rules. It will be the one that knows what to make common and what to keep adaptable.
Good systems let trust carry difficult information, let learning travel into performance and organizational design decisions, and they let process carry coordination without carrying away judgment. That is how I try to lead and build teams: not by becoming the centre of the system, but by helping to create a system that can keep moving when I am not in the room.
