Over the last few weeks we have been on a university tour with my baby girl as she plans for what comes next. On a recent trip we were at a theology college which was good, the overall degree is solid and its a russell group university .

My wife asked me what I thought, at first I held back, its not my university its not my experience i have had my time this is about my daughter but she was not giving much away. She said she liked it and like the course and what it offers which i already hence why we were there but I wanted more so when my wife asked that question I went a different direction.

I laid out every reason this wasn't the right move. Wrong time. She could study theology properly later, after she'd had the full university experience somewhere else first. I gave her the case against, point by point, the way I'd build a case in a boardroom. I wanted her to push back. I wanted her to come at me with the reasons she actually wanted this, because she hadn't given me any, and I thought if I took it all away from her she'd have to go and find them.

We had to cut the conversation short as the next part of the tour was starting.

My wife leaned over. "You do realise that by giving her that negative energy, you're not helping her."

That was not what I wanted to hear and it was not negative energy, i was helping her make the right choice and decision and forcing her to think with my approach. There is a method to my maddess I told myself it was all for her good and if she had shared more I won’t have to do this.

As the tour went on with my wife’s statement ringing in my ears. when I could I whispered to my daughter the reason I said all of tha is because I want you to push back and tell me why i am wrong. She looked at me and said "Dad, that's not helpful for me. You might be doing it for the right reasons, and I hear that, but what I need from you isn't that. I need something different."

She hadn't made a decision yet. There were still more universities to see and what she needed was a father with an open mind, someone to think out loud with. I'd given her a closing argument instead. I'd meant well but I'd been three steps ahead already, living in the version where she'd regret it and I'd warned her and she hadn't listened. None of that was where she was standing. She was trying to work out what she felt, in real time, and I handed her a verdict from a future I'd already decided on.

I see this pattern constantly in the founders and senior leaders I work with. Not the dramatic failures. The quiet ones. The person who cannot understand why their team is always slow. The leader who keeps having the same conversation with the same person and getting nowhere. The executive who says the people around them just do not get it. The problem is rarely what they think it is. It almost never is. What I see underneath those complaints is almost always the same thing.

They got there first. Again.

This is what complexity does to you over time. You have spent so long living three moves ahead, because the business demanded it, because someone had to hold the whole picture while everyone else held their piece of it, that arriving early has stopped feeling like a choice. It has become how you exist. You walk into a one to one already knowing where the conversation ends. You walk into a hiring decision already knowing who you will pick. You walk into your own kid's bedroom already knowing what they should do with their life.

You are usually right, too. That is the part that makes this so hard to see. You are not wrong about where things are heading. You are just early, and the people around you are not where you are yet, and they cannot get there if you keep handing them the destination before they have taken a single step.

The chaos you are navigating is real. The complexity is not invented. The cost of carrying it the way you carry it is that the people around you stop reaching for their own conclusions, because why would they, when yours always arrives first. They stop bringing you half-formed thoughts. They start bringing you finished positions, because they have learned that is the only thing you will engage with. Somewhere in there, you lose the very thing that made them valuable to you in the first place. Their own read on the problem.

I wanted my daughter to fight for her own reasons. Looking at it honestly, that was never really about her. That was me wanting to see her conviction, on my timetable, in a conversation that had maybe twenty minutes before the next group came through. She did not owe me conviction in twenty minutes. She owed herself the space to work it out. I was meant to be holding that space open. I closed it instead.

This week, before you give someone your honest read on something, find out what they are actually asking you for. Not what you think they should be asking. What they are asking. If you do not know, that is the conversation to have first.

• Who on your team has stopped bringing you a half formed thought, because they learned you only engage with finished ones?
• Where are you running three moves ahead of the chaos in front of you, and calling the distance between you and your people clarity?
• If your team described what it costs to think out loud with you, would they use the word you'd use for yourself?

See you next Monday.

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