There’s a particular kind of leadership moment that doesn’t come with a briefing pack.
No handover
No documentation
No tidy list of priorities waiting to be picked up and progressed
All I had was a role, some expectations, and a real sense of urgency to get up to speed quickly.
That was the situation I stepped into when I took on one of my leadership roles.
Moments like this reveal more about an organisation’s strengths and weaknesses than any formal strategy document. So, if you don’t start with information at your fingertips, what do you do next?
‘A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way’ - John C Maxwell
The Illusion of ‘No Information’
On the surface, there was no visibility.
No single view of work in progress
No shared roadmap
No clear articulation of priorities across teams
But over time, I’ve learned something important: organisations rarely lack information - what they really lack is connected information. With that in mind, I considered where to begin building that connection.
The knowledge was there. It just wasn’t in one place.
It lived in conversations, in individual team backlogs, in half-formed plans, and in people’s heads.
When information is scattered like this, leading becomes a guessing game. So it’s critical to choose your starting point carefully.
‘Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers’ - Tony Robbins
Where You Start Matters
There’s a natural instinct in these situations to go hunting for artefacts: plans and reports, dashboards, anything that gives a sense of control.
But artefacts without context can mislead just as easily as they can inform.
So I started with something far more reliable: people; and this shifted the entire approach.
I met with each manager individually. These weren’t formal interviews or status checks, but conversations meant to build a clear picture.
I asked three simple questions:
What is your team working on now?
What’s coming next?
What’s on the horizon for later?
And then I asked the question that tends to unlock everything else:
Why do these things matter?
From there, the conversation naturally expanded:
What are your timeframes?
What’s getting in your way?
What are you worried about?
What do you need from me?
What came out of these talks wasn’t just a list of tasks. It was context. It was intent. It was pressure points.
And importantly, it was the beginning of alignment.
This alignment would prove crucial to navigating uncertainty and driving organisational progress. But what made these conversations more valuable was their impact beyond discovery.
More Than Discovery
At face value, this might look like a simple discovery, but it’s more than that.
This is where real leadership begins to take shape.
Because in asking those questions, a few things happen simultaneously:
Teams begin to clarify their own thinking.
Priorities become visible beyond Leaders, and Leaders also notice where work overlaps, where conflicts arise, or where gaps exist or are left.
It’s not a workshop, it’s not a framework rollout.
It’s actually much more practical:
A shared understanding forming in real time.
If you compare this to formal practices, it’s similar to Agile portfolio thinking:
Surfacing work
Understanding value
Spotting dependencies
But in reality, it doesn’t start with tools, it starts with a conversation.
The First Signals of Risk
As these conversations progressed, patterns began to emerge.
Some were expected:
Teams focused on their own domains.
Limited visibility of cross-team dependencies
Competing priorities without a clear mechanism for alignment
But there was something, the kind that never appears in a report but sits just below the surface. just beneath the surface.
There was an issue that multiple people were aware of.
Not urgently discussing, not actively progressing. Just… aware.
And in complex environments, that’s often where the real risk lives. Moving from shared awareness to real ownership became essential.
Shared Awareness Isn’t Ownership
‘In life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action’ - Tony Robbins
One of the more subtle challenges in leadership is recognising the difference between:
Something that is known, and
Something that is owned
Because those are not the same thing. In fact, they can sit dangerously far apart.
What I was beginning to see was a pattern of distributed awareness without coordinated action.
No one was ignoring the issue, nut no one had fully stepped up to resolve it either.
And without making that shift from awareness to ownership, time quietly slips away. This made me realise the need for visibility before seeking solutions.
Creating Visibility (Before Creating Solutions)
Before jumping into solutions, I needed a way to make the emerging picture visible. Not just for me, but for everyone. So I created a simple, physical representation of what I was hearing:
A Now / Next / Later view of work across the function.
Nothing complicated, no tooling, no formatting perfection. Just clarity. Making this visible invited feedback and sparked collaboration.
I put it on the wall in my office and invited people in:
“Come and have a look. This is what I’m seeing - tell me what’s missing” and something interesting happened:
People engaged
They challenged it
They added to it
They connected dots
What started as a personal sense-making tool became a shared artefact of alignment.
It didn’t stay physical for long. As it became clear that more people needed access, especially hybrid team members, we moved to a digital version using our existing tools, but the principle stayed the same:
Make the work visible, and conversations improve.
Before the Problem Fully Reveals Itself
At this point, I had something I didn’t have before:
A cross-functional view of work
A growing sense of priorities
Early signals of risk
But the full shape of the problem hadn’t revealed itself yet. That came next, and it came quickly.
A Thought to Leave You With
Stepping into a leadership role without context can feel like starting from zero. But it rarely is.
The information is there
The signals are there
The risks are already in motion
The essential question is: how quickly can you turn scattered knowledge into shared understanding?
Because that shift, from scattered to shared understanding, is when leadership moves from being reactive to intentional.