No Playbook
The Bird and the Thread
This morning I was walking my dog, Cosmo, along a creek in Miramón Park, near our house. It was drizzling but comfortable. The plentiful trees provided me with a pleasant canopy from their newly established leaves.
As I was walking, I had an idea for something I’d like to write about the We-dimension — how people work together — so I decided to pull out my phone and begin to record. I was deep into my thoughts, about 15 minutes down the trail, when I noticed a beautiful bird sitting on the ground at the base of a small bush. Nothing too surprising these days in the park that’s filled with birdsong and glimpses of various species in flight.
This one had white spots on its chest and several monochrome colors across its body. It warbled loudly several times but stayed put. I made sure that Cosmo didn’t bother it and made his way along the trail ahead. But as I continued to look at it, I noticed that there was a thread between it and the bush. It was caught.
I didn’t know what to do. I thought about trying to free it but I was worried that I might hurt it. I thought I could leave it for another bird to help it, but what could it do? So I decided to get closer and see if I could at least move the thread to free it. As I reached the bush, the bird flapped wildly in an attempt to escape. I tried talking to it and it seemed to calm down, waiting for me to unleash it.
But when I touched the thread, I realized that it was a fishing line or some other type of nylon. It wasn’t going to be so easy to break. The bird was still acting calm, so I found a rock and used its edge to saw at the line. It broke after a few seconds.
I thought the bird might immediately fly away, and I was worried that it still would have the string attached to it, but at least it could escape. But it didn’t move so I thought I’d better move back to give it room. Cosmo had returned as well and so I wanted to make sure he didn’t bother it.
I got my phone out to capture its flight. But as I filmed, I realized it wasn’t moving at all. I approached again and could tell — it was dead. It must have strangled itself with the line when I first approached to try to free it. My desire to help was its end.
It might have died anyway. Perhaps it would have suffered more. But it’s hard for me to not feel terrible about my part in the bird’s death. To cause harm to a creature like that is very painful for me.
I asked myself: what kind of metaphor is this? How my actions — with positive intent — caused the most negative impact on another?
Thankfully, it’s uncommon to have an experience like this that’s so strident. But it’s not uncommon to have a much milder version of something similar in our relationships with our colleagues. Let me explain.
That’s the territory of what I’ve come to call the We — the relational dimension of an organization. Whether we actually care about how the people we work with are doing. Whether we’re honest in our communications, even when honesty is uncomfortable. Whether the trust people have in each other is real, or performed. Whether the people doing the work believe the people next to them are on the same side.
I’ve published five posts on Evolutionary Business at this point. Three of them are on the I — the inner work, the inner shadow, the personal responsibility a leader owes themselves before they owe it to anyone else. One is on the leap from inner work to structural service at scale. The most recent one names the framework explicitly — the I, the We and the It — and walks through where Evolutionary Business sits among the neighbors that get parts of it right but don’t hold all three.
What I haven’t written about is the We.
And I’ll tell you why. I’m not very good at it. I have a few close relationships in my life and even with those I could probably do a lot better. I’m not someone who naturally fosters and cultivates the relational web around me. I work mostly on the It and on the I — those are the dimensions I think in, the ones I argue about, the ones I read about. The We is the corner of this framework I’m the slowest to develop, and that’s because I’m the slowest to develop in it personally. That admission probably belongs in the post itself, not just in private. So here it is.
What I’m trying to figure out is what good actually looks like in the We. My working answer is something like: a culture and a set of relationships that are aligned, sustainable, trustful. Solidarity. Psychological safety. The work of one-on-ones, of how teams talk across teams and up and down the org, of feedback that travels honestly in both directions, of whether the people across the company believe the work they’re doing together actually means something to the people next to them.
Most of the attention in my world goes to the I and the It. The We sits in the middle, and a lot of the time it gets neglected — until it cracks.
What I was actually thinking about, on the walk this morning before the bird, was a pattern I’ve watched repeat in founders I’ve coached. I’ll describe it through one composite — the details have been changed enough that the person who comes to mind first isn’t the only person it could be. The shape is what matters, and the shape comes up often.
He’s the kind of leader who is doing almost everything right — or as well as possible. He’s smart and emotionally intelligent. He cares about people, and doesn’t want to hurt them. He listens. He’s received feedback about his speed and the impact it has, and he’s adapted to some degree. People at the company truly adore him. The business is doing well — really well. By any conventional measure he’s doing a fantastic job running a successful company.
And yet.
He’s been doing more and more himself. Not because he wants to, but because the company has spent a long stretch in survival mode — and survival mode is when leaders revert to what they’re best at, which in his case is just stepping in and making the call. He’s so good at it that people trust him. They don’t always understand why he’s making a particular decision, but they trust him, so they go along. The trust is real and earned. The downside is that the velocity creates a kind of low-grade vertigo for everyone two layers out from him. They don’t always know which way the company is moving until he’s already moving it. By the time they catch up, he’s somewhere else.
And in that pace, he’s started seeing things in the team that he wouldn’t see if he were moving slower. He’s started to notice that some people aren’t keeping up — and that he’s not sure they could, even with help. He hasn’t fired anybody on the spot, the way some founders famously do. He knows what that would cost. He cares about not doing it. But he’s started turning over a question he didn’t think he’d be turning over: should I just let this person go if I don’t think they are the right fit?
I don’t disagree with the question. The leadership canon has been making this argument for decades — Marcus Buckingham in First, Break All the Rules, Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the right-people-on-the-bus framing that has gotten passed around so many times it’s almost folk wisdom. You can be the best leader in the world, and if you don’t have the right people, you don’t get where you said you were going.
But here’s the it-dimensional pull, and it’s strong. From a purely structural perspective, what a company needs is execution. Execute hard, execute fast, execute efficiently. Have the right people, replace the wrong ones, keep moving. That’s the cold logic of the It. It’s the logic of private equity, where the time horizon is two to four years and the ownership has no stake in what the place feels like to work at. It’s the logic Elon Musk has been celebrated for — fire whoever isn’t pulling, do not slow down, the mission is too important.
I want to take Elon’s case seriously, because the right way to engage with this is honestly. He’s doing things the world arguably needs — alternatives to gas cars, more capacity to use space without destroying the planet, robotics, neural implants. There’s a charitable reading where the ends justify the means and the work is so important that the speed is required. People argue this both ways and they should. I’m not going to pretend I have the verdict. Elon may be right. We won’t know for a while. It doesn’t seem right to me — I think how you build matters, not just what you build — but I want to keep the question open instead of dismissing it.
What strikes me about Elon, though, is that he treats humanity broadly but not individually. He cares about the species, in some sense, but the individual person sitting in front of him losing a job at Twitter or feeling humiliated in a public post is a rounding error in the larger calculation. There are individuals and there is the species, and the relational layer between them — the team, the community, the people in the room — collapses. The We doesn’t really exist in that shape.
The opposite extreme has its own logic. I worked, twenty years ago, with a very large company — many tens of thousands of employees, well known, extremely successful — where the culture was not what most people would call kind. People swore at each other. They yelled at each other. They were brutal. That was the culture, it had been the culture for a long time, and the company had built a great deal of value on top of it. I went in to do some early facilitation work, and one of the groups effectively turned on me before I had even started — they hadn’t been aligned on having me there in the first place, and the dynamic was confronting in a way I wasn’t ready for in my early days as a coach. I survived. The company is still doing very well. So you can’t say the culture didn’t work.
But it’s a culture I would not choose to be a part of. People who thrive there thrive on it — Eights on the Enneagram, Challengers, people who experience direct, blunt confrontation as honesty rather than as harm. People like me — Sevens with a Six wing who don’t want to be in a fight — opt out. The company doesn’t need someone like me, and it does fine without me. I can’t tell you that what they built isn’t real. It is. I can only tell you that I couldn’t do my work in that We, and I’m not the only one who couldn’t.
So the question isn’t whether you can build a successful company on the brutal end of the spectrum or the maximally-careful end of the spectrum. The answer to both is yes, you can. You also lose people in both directions. The brutal end loses the people whose contribution requires a different kind of room. The maximally-careful end loses the kind of accountability and pace that lets a company actually serve its customers.
The question is whether there’s a both-and.
I think there is, and I think it’s harder than either extreme.
It looks like this. When you, as a leader, see that someone isn’t going to make it in the role they’re in, you do not fire them on the spot. You also do not stay quiet because you don’t want to disturb the peace. You have a conversation. You name what you’re seeing. You ask what they understand of the role they’re in and how they think they’re doing. You offer help. You ask what help they would actually use. You suggest, if it fits, a different role they might be a better match for. You consider whether part of the role can come off their plate. None of these moves is fast. All of them are uncomfortable. Done well, they are vastly less harmful than firing on the spot, and they’re more honest than letting someone quietly figure out they’re not wanted and quit on their own.
Anyone who joins a company built on that kind of culture has to know what they’re walking into. The accountability is real. The conversations are direct. The clarity is not optional. That’s part of the deal. It’s not a gentler workplace, exactly. It’s a more honest one, but not brutally so. Done at scale and over time, it becomes the culture, and the culture is the thing that protects the people inside it from being undone by a quarter, or a downturn, or a founder who’s been stretched too thin to remember what kind of company he was trying to build.
I’ve watched a couple of versions of this go wrong at scale. The most public one this year is Apple. Tim Cook is retiring. The conversation about his legacy is, predictably, mixed — he is one of the best operators ever to run a public company, and his record on the financial side is extraordinary. But what you hear from people who care about Apple as a company and not just as a stock is that something went out of the place after Steve Jobs died and Jony Ive left. The phrase that keeps coming back is “lost its soul.” Cook didn’t break Apple. He ran the company he was built to run. But the company didn’t innovate at the pace it had under Jobs, and the talent that gave it its design DNA went somewhere else — Ive started a hardware company with Sam Altman that OpenAI acquired for billions, and is presumably free of whatever pulled him out of the Apple orbit. Maybe none of that has anything to do with the culture; maybe it has everything to do with the culture. I think you have to assume it has something to do with it. The new CEO is going to inherit a company that has to figure out what its We actually is now, and whether it can rebuild what was let go or evolve further.
The opposite story, the one most worth studying, is DaVita. Kent Thiry took over in 1999, when the company was effectively bankrupt. He didn’t change the product. He changed the culture — the language, the rituals, the relational layer of how the company worked. They started calling the company “the village.” They referred to people as “teammates.” They built an obsession with internal trust and accountability that lived alongside the business performance. The numbers followed. [Here’s the Stanford GSB Case Study — it’s worth a read.] What Thiry did at DaVita is the cleanest example I know of someone deliberately rebuilding a company’s We and watching the It follow.
The other example — closer to home, literally — is Mondragon. Forty-five minutes from where I sit. A federation of cooperatives founded in a small Basque town in the 1950s by a Jesuit priest, and now one of the largest companies in Spain, with around seventy thousand workers, no outside capital, a salary band controlled democratically by the workers themselves, and a staying power that has outlasted multiple Spanish recessions. Mondragon’s structure is structural — it’s an It-dimension story. But the structure works because the We holds it. Worker-owners who participate in the governance don’t show up to vote because they read about it on a wall. They show up because the relational layer of the place — the rituals, the cooperative culture, the way the village works — has been built and kept up for seventy years.
You can’t build a Mondragon by drafting bylaws. You can’t build a DaVita by hiring a Chief Culture Officer. The We isn’t a memo. It accumulates slowly, in the small honest moves people make when they could just as easily have done the easier thing — and it survives only when the structure of the company keeps those moves possible at scale.
So back to the founder.
If I were to do a diagnostic on his company across the three dimensions, I’d say his It is going very well, his I is going pretty well, and his We is reasonable. Not bad. Not great. But there are cracks. Somebody on his team is burned out and on extended leave. Somebody else is about to go on leave for similar reasons. Those are signals. That’s the canary in the relational mine. The We hasn’t been tended to enough. The pace of the company is too high for the relational layer to absorb without somebody breaking.
Burnout is the slowest-motion disaster a company can have, because by the time it shows up at scale, it’s already been there for a while. People left their margin behind months ago. They can’t say so without sounding like they’re quitting. So they don’t say so. They go on leave. They come back. They do it again. Eventually somebody actually quits, and the founder finds out about a whole stretch of erosion that had already happened.
Speed and care don’t have to be opposites. But you have to want them not to be, and you have to slow down enough — once in a while, on the things that matter most — to do the work that keeps the relational layer alive. Have the conversation. Offer the help. Reroute the role. Tell the person what you’re seeing while there’s still time for them to do something about it. He already knows all of this. He’s a smart person, an emotionally intelligent person. The work isn’t to teach him the moves. The work is to slow him down enough to actually make them. And to help him recognize the benefit of doing so, and how that aligns with his personal values and the company’s values.
My view of the bird story could suggest that it doesn’t matter if a leader wants to help or not — we just don’t know the long-term effect of our actions. All we can do is try to make the right decision and then learn from the experience.
Elon may be right. We won’t know for a while. It doesn’t seem right, but it might be right. Was dropping the atomic bomb right?
If I encountered that same situation with the bird again, I would try to save it again. I would try to do it differently though. And the same thing might happen. But I think I would still feel it was the right thing to do.
That’s because of my moral compass and my belief that doing something is better than nothing. Is that selfish, because I couldn’t live with myself leaving that bird there tied up? Or is it selfless, because situations with dying or trapped animals make me uncomfortable? Or perhaps some of both?
Leaders have to make their own decisions about this. There is no playbook of the only way to do something, or the right way to do something. Our world is too complex for that most of the time.
Founders in this bind have to weigh all the elements. The honest ones bring it to me. They tell me their deepest beliefs. They contemplate their next steps. They’re in a very tough spot, between people and a business. If they care.
Is there a middle path they can find that doesn’t compromise but actually improves the results for each and all?
That’s the goal of Evolutionary Business.
Geoff Graber is the co-founder of Evolution, a coaching and leadership development firm that has worked with hundreds of companies including Slack, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Spotify, Dropbox, and Uber. He has spent 35 years at the intersection of business, capital, and human development. Evolutionary Business is his life’s work. He lives in San Sebastián, Spain.