What Changed My Mind This Year?

At the end of each year I try to write down the things I believed at the start of the year that I no longer believe, or no longer believe in the same way. It is an uncomfortable exercise. The list is never short. But the discomfort is useful — it is a reliable indicator that actual thinking has happened, rather than just the appearance of it.

Here is this year's honest version.

On speed in hiring

I used to believe — and argued for, to clients — that moving faster in executive hiring almost always improved outcomes. Faster time-to-close, faster candidate evaluation, faster decision-making. The reasoning was straightforward: vacancies are expensive, the best candidates are often off the market quickly, and deliberation has diminishing returns after a certain point.

I still believe the speed argument is often correct. What changed my mind is a set of placements this year where I watched fast decisions produce bad outcomes that could have been avoided with slower, more deliberate evaluation. The failures were not random — they clustered around a specific failure mode: hiring for capability and missing on character and fit, because those dimensions are harder to evaluate quickly.

The updated view is more conditional: speed matters on questions of capability, where the evidence is more legible. Speed hurts on questions of judgment and fit, which require more time to surface accurately. I had been applying a uniform speed argument where a differentiated one was needed.

On the value of consensus

I used to believe that consensus — getting the team or the clients or the relevant stakeholders to agree — was an important input to a good decision. Not the only input, but a meaningful signal: if smart people who care about the outcome all agree, that tells you something.

What changed my mind is watching several decisions where the consensus was wrong in ways that were visible before the consensus formed. The people in the room had a shared frame of reference that made certain kinds of errors invisible to all of them. The dissenting view — which was there, in quieter form — got overridden not because it was wrong, but because it was uncomfortable and did not have a champion.

The updated view is that consensus is a proxy for confidence, but not a very reliable one. The relevant question is not "do people agree?" but "are the people agreeing from independent analysis, or from social pressure toward alignment?" These produce superficially identical outcomes and very different reliability.

On what ambitious people need

For most of my career, I believed that ambitious people primarily needed better opportunity — better access to the roles, the networks, the resources that would allow their capability to compound into outcomes.

I still believe the access problem is real and significant. What changed my mind is working closely with people who had access and still did not reach the outcomes they were capable of — not because the opportunities were wrong, but because something in how they related to uncertainty, to feedback, to the gap between where they were and where they wanted to be was working against them.

The limiting factor was not structural. It was internal. And this is not a rare case — it turns out that a surprisingly large number of capable people are held back less by the absence of opportunity than by patterns of response to difficulty that were adaptive in earlier contexts and have stopped being so.

I have updated toward believing that the most important interventions for ambitious people are not just access-creating but capacity-building — specifically, the capacity to stay in difficult situations long enough for the difficulty to produce the growth it is capable of producing.

The meta-update

The thing I updated most fundamentally this year is my confidence in my own diagnostic framework.

I have a set of lenses I use to understand situations — models for why things work and why they fail. These lenses are real and useful. They are also, I have come to see more clearly, partial. They were built from a specific set of experiences, in specific contexts, and they produce systematic blind spots in situations that do not fit those contexts.

The update is not to distrust the lenses. It is to use them as hypotheses rather than conclusions — to stay in the question longer before arriving at the diagnosis. The lenses point somewhere useful. They do not always point exactly right.

Holding that with appropriate humility, while still moving and deciding, is the balance I am working to find. This year showed me how far I still have to go.