When the Strategy Is Complicated but the Energy Is Simple

Welcome to The Executive Energy Journal, where we explore a side of leadership few talk about: the subtle energy we have, live in, and how it impacts clarity, decision-making, and performance.

How EEJ works

What's measurable: what research and observable mechanisms support What's unknown: where evidence ends, and interpretation begins What I do pragmatically anyway: the simplest reliable practice I use with clients Your role: take what is useful and leave the rest

In this issue

• Why the state a team is in can matter as much as the quality of its strategic analysis
• How listening and presence can help people regain orientation and see more possibilities during change

Last week I wrote more directly than I usually have about how I perceive subtle energy and use energetic information in my work.

This week I want to continue with another example, this time from an organisational setting.

The situation itself was complicated. There were changes ahead, several possible routes for the small business, and plenty to consider strategically and tactically. But under all that complexity, what I perceived from the team was much simpler.

It was mostly fear.

1. A truly complicated situation

A person I was speaking with was facing changes within their small business.

There were several possible routes forward. Each had advantages, risks and implications for the organisation. There were strategic questions, practical questions, questions about timing and questions about the people involved.

The person was trying to make sense of all of it and work out how they should deal with the situation. As I listened, I could follow the complexity. There really was a lot going on.

At the same time, I was also paying attention to what I perceived energetically around the team and the situation.

What came through most strongly was fear.

There was fear of what might happen next, but there was also something slightly different underneath it. The team, including the business owner, did not seem to know exactly where they were anymore. When something familiar is changing, that question can become surprisingly difficult to answer.

• Where are we now?
• What is still true?
• What has already changed?
• What are we losing?
• What are we becoming?

The strategic conversation branched in many directions. The energetic information I was getting was considerably simpler. The team was frightened and disoriented.

2. The forest knows where you are

The situation reminded me of a poem I first heard years ago at a company meeting when I was working at Razorfish, during the height of the digital revolution and the internet boom.

It was David Wagoner’s poem Lost. Near the end, he writes:

“Stand still. The forest knows where you are.”

The poem begins with another zen-adjacent idea I like just as much: wherever you are is called Here. 

There is so much in that image.

You may have no idea where you are in the forest, but that does not mean you are nowhere. You are still in a particular place, surrounded by something real. Before finding the route out, it may help to stop long enough to become aware of where you actually are.

Organisational change can create a similar experience. People may be asked to think about the future while they have not yet located themselves in the present.

When that happens, another strategy deck, another scenario or another discussion about possible outcomes may add information without necessarily creating orientation.

3. Listening became more important than solving

What became useful for the person I was speaking with was listening and being present with the team. And I know that written down like that, it sounds almost too simple and obvious.

In practice, it can be quite demanding.

Listening in this context means allowing people enough space to reveal what they are actually responding to. They may be afraid of losing a role, competence, influence, relationships, identity, certainty, status, belonging, or something they have spent years building.

Some of those fears will be realistic. Some may be based on assumptions. Some may not yet have been articulated at all.

If the conversation is mainly about solving or reassuring, much of that information can stay as an undertone in the discussion, never surfacing.

There is also research suggesting that presence has practical consequences during organisational change. In a study of employees facing restructuring and possible layoffs, increases in managers' active listening were associated with lower job insecurity. The mechanism was particularly interesting: employees reported greater perceived control. The uncertainty itself had not disappeared, but their relationship to it had changed.

More recent research on organisational change has looked at team mindfulness, meaning present-focused, nonjudgmental attention to what is happening within the team. It found links with psychological safety and greater openness to change, with mindful leadership strengthening parts of that relationship.

That comes quite close to what I mean here by presence. You do not necessarily need to know the destination. Being able to stay with what is happening now can give people enough orientation to think again. 

Presence creates a different possibility that allows people to begin to locate themselves. Once they know more accurately where they are, they may also be able to see possibilities they could not see while most of their attention was occupied by uncertainty.

4. Fear changes the options we can see

There is research that describes something very similar from a different angle.

A recent McKinsey article on organisational strain looks at what happens when organisations operate through continuous disruption. It describes how repeated transitions can increase fear around certainty, influence, team cohesion and identity. Under constant pressure, that strain can show up as defensiveness, rigidity, polarisation, disengagement and impaired capacity to think and act. 

Their argument is that leaders need to help organisations maintain enough coherence and relational stability to keep thinking while disruption continues. 

A 2025 study of managers looked specifically at defensive decision-making under uncertainty. The researchers defined defensive decisions as choices that are personally safer for the decision-maker rather than necessarily being in the organisation's best interest. In their experimental study, the combination of low psychological safety and low authentic leadership increased defensive choices. 

In short, fear and uncertainty can affect the quality and range of decisions people make. Environmental uncertainty is often out of our control. How a team responds to it is not entirely out of our control.

5. Sometimes the useful information is about the state of the system

In this case, I did not perceive which strategic route the organisation should choose. What I perceived was the state from which the team was trying to deal with the choices in front of them. That can be very useful information.

If a person, team or relationship is operating largely from fear, the available options can look different. Risk becomes more salient, and familiar solutions can become more attractive or even "self-evident." Ambiguity is harder to tolerate. Possibilities that require experimentation or trust may simply disappear from view.

And I want to point out that the factual analysis can be perfectly competent, but:

 The state in which the analysis is carried out is also relevant.

Research on interoception shows that information from the heart, lungs and other bodily systems can influence what we perceive and how we process information, including in tasks involving emotion and decision-making.

So, instead of asking only “What is the best decision?”, we need to also ask “What state are we making this decision from?”. Awareness of that state does not tell us what the correct decision is, but it gives us another important piece of information about the decision-making process.

This is one of the things energetic information can sometimes show me quite clearly, and rapidly. The visible question may be about strategy, structure, a relationship, a decision or a practical problem, while the energetic information tells me something about the condition of the person or system trying to answer it.

Sometimes that layer is complicated too, but quite often it is surprisingly simple.

6. What becomes possible when we know where we are?

I think this is one reason listening and presence can have more practical value than they initially appear to.

They allow more information into the system. People can notice what they are afraid of, what they are assuming, what has already changed, what they are holding on to, and what is still important to them. 

While this doesn't remove uncertainty, it can make uncertainty easier to work with and live in.

And there is a meaningful difference between looking for opportunities while your attention is tuned in to threat, and looking from a place where you are sufficiently present to notice what is actually there.

What happens then is that the forest may still be unfamiliar, but you are somewhere in it. And sometimes knowing more accurately where you are is what makes the next step visible.

For my client, the situation did eventually resolve. The business changed ownership, the previous owner chose to make a lifestyle change, and as far as I know, most of the team stayed with the business.

Those results were far from obvious while they were standing in the middle of the uncertainty. They did not need to know the eventual route before they could begin finding their bearings.

What does this bring up for you?

Have you ever been in a situation where the facts were complicated, but underneath them the emotional or energetic reality felt surprisingly simple?

Or where people kept trying to solve the future before they had really understood where they were in the present?

You can send me a DM here on LinkedIn, or email me separately. I'm interested in the questions, observations and reactions.

And if there is a situation in your own life or work where you could use a different perspective, this is also part of what I do in my work. You are welcome to contact me about that too.

Until next Sunday,

Niina

References

• Artinger et al., Coping with uncertainty: The interaction of psychological safety and authentic leadership in their effects on defensive decision making, Journal of Business Research, 2025.
• David Wagoner, Lost. The poem appears in Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems. 
• Kriz, T. D., Jolly, P. M., & Shoss, M. K. (2021). Coping with organizational layoffs: Managers’ increased active listening reduces job insecurity via perceived situational control. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(5), 448–458. https://doi.org/10.1037/ocp0000295
• Lavoie, Srinivasan, Lyons & Rabhan, How leaders can help their organizations metabolize strain, McKinsey & Company, 2026. 
• Lopez-Martin, G., Caparco, A., van Steenoven, C., Leganes-Fonteneau, M., & Galvez-Pol, A. (2026). Interoceptive rhythms and perceptual experience: Mechanisms, contexts, and strategies for real-world research. NeuroImage, 325, 121650. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2025.121650
• Ni, D., Zhang, M., & Zheng, X. (2025). Be mindful in organizational change: Team mindfulness and employee openness to change. Journal of Business Research, 199, 115551. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115551
• Sarkar, S., & Osiyevskyy, O. (2018). Organizational change and rigidity during crisis: A review of the paradox. European Management Journal, 36(1), 47–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2017.03.007