The Anchor Point
Ideas that hold up under load
Hey Reader
There's a corner on the way to my physio that would put most people on edge. It's a blind bend on a 100 km road, so anything coming at you is already on top of you before you can see it. There's usually a car sitting on your bumper too, since it's a busy stretch, and the turn itself drops you into a narrow one-way driveway. For a few seconds, you've got traffic coming at you from three directions at once.
I've driven it so many times now that it barely registers. I check my mirrors. I already know if I need to pull left and wait. Most days, I've worked out my plan before I even reach the corner. Low cognitive load, because I've done it a hundred times before I get there.
A callout doesn't give you that head start. New location. New pilot. A team you haven't worked with much. And when you land, the situation isn't obvious yet either. Three unknowns, stacked on top of each other, before you've even worked out what's actually going on. I call it the triple whammy.
That's the moment repetition can't save you, because there isn't any to lean on. What you can lean on is a plan for how to think, not what to think. When I hit that spot, I go back to a set of leadership prompts I carry around in my head: twelve of them. Build relationships fast. Brief the team properly. Delegate instead of holding it all yourself. Find whatever's adding noise and reduce it. Just a few of the twelve.
They don't replace experience. They give you somewhere to start while experience is still catching up.
I've pulled all twelve into a one-page guide to get you started.
Grant
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