What You Carry Forward

The Seeds You Planted Decades Ago

What were you obsessed with as a child? Not what you were good at, or what your parents encouraged. But what captured your imagination so completely that you'd lose hours without noticing?

My wife, Kate, endlessly rearranged furniture in the attic of her childhood home. Today, she’s an interior designer. I put Dewey Decimal System spine labels on my unimpressive book collection and hand-wrote catalogue cards (remember those?) for each book. I was a nerd then, but today I still organise and synthesise others’ thoughts.

These weren't random fascinations. They were signals of deeper capabilities that our adult selves might have buried under "practical" concerns. I think about these childhood obsessions not literally, but as meta capabilities:

• The kid who collected everything might have been developing systems thinking and pattern recognition

• The one who built elaborate fantasy worlds was practicing scenario planning and creative problem-solving

• The child who took apart every appliance was developing reverse-engineering and first-principles thinking

• The young person obsessed with fairness was cultivating ethical frameworks and justice-oriented leadership

These weren't hobbies, they were habits. They were our mind's way of developing core operating systems that still exist within us.

So, for all of us, the intriguing ‘sliding doors’ questions are, “If not this career, then what? If not this industry, then where?” The answer often reveals capabilities you've developed but haven't fully leveraged. A person’s childhood obsessions and alternative paths often point toward meta-skills that transcend their current role:

• The systems thinker trapped in execution roles

• The creator compelled to be a bureaucrat

• The natural teacher buried in technical work

• The connector forced into individual contributor positions

• The builder stuck in maintenance mode

The uncomfortable truth is that your most powerful capabilities might be the ones you learned before you knew you were learning. In mid- or late-career especially, the question isn't whether you can develop new skills. It's whether you can remember and reactivate the meta-capabilities you've been carrying all along.

Question: Which of your earliest seeds can you sprout from today?

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The Test

Qantas was once Australia's most trusted brand. By 2022, they were the 6th most trusted in the country. And, by the end of 2024, they had switched league ladders, and were now the fifth least trusted.

This wasn't gradual decline. This was reputational freefall.

The causes are well documented: selling flights that didn’t exist, sacking workers illegally, with the former CEO signalling his own mistrust of his company by off-loading millions of shares before he ‘voluntarily’ departed. What the Qantas case reveals is another uncomfortable truth: trust isn't something you can simply decide to have as a corporate value.

Trust is the consequence of thousands of micro-interactions, decisions under pressure, and how you behave when no one is watching. You build it through keeping promises when it’s expensive to do so. By owning problems before customers have to escalate them. And, by making decisions as if your reputation depends on every interaction (because it does).

The barometer of ‘trusted brands’ in Australia is Roy Morgan and its CEO notes, "Once distrust takes hold, it is very difficult to curtail. We saw it with AMP and the big four banks following the Royal Commission." The first step in rebuilding trust isn't creating trust — it's eliminating distrust.

So, do this thought experiment: If I asked your biggest customer, key partner, or most important employees right now, "Are they good to deal with?”, would they answer immediately, positively and enthusiastically?

Or, would they pause and think about recent frustrations?

That pause is where reputation dies.

Question: Are you “good to deal with”?

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Learning Strategy from Geo-Politics

I picked up Hugh White's "Hard New World" this week, not because I'm a defence policy nerd, but because the subtitle, “Our Post-American Future” promised to settle something that’s been nagging me about the patterns I'm seeing with clients.

White argues brilliantly that we're all going to have to learn to live in a multipolar world again — and frankly, we’ve forgotten how.

He explains clearly and beautifully how the American-dominated world I grew up with isn't normal. We've cycled through different power structures before. The European powers in the 19th century were multipolar: Britain, France, Germany, Russia all jockeyed for influence through complex alliances (and occasionally shot at each other). Then came the Cold War's stark bipolar us-versus-them divide. And, since 1990, we've had a unipolar world: American hegemony shaping everything from trade rules to military alliances.

But now? We're heading back to multiple power centres — USA, China, EU — each building their own spheres while middle powers like India and Turkey pick and choose their allegiances.

What struck me is how perfectly this maps onto organisational dynamics.

I know of a university that had been unipolar for decades: the Vice-Chancellor's office made major strategic decisions, faculties implemented them. Then as international student numbers (and the revenues they brought) dropped, three things happened simultaneously: the Business School started chasing corporate partnerships independently, the Medical Faculty began positioning itself (not the University) as the world-leading research entity, and the Arts Faculty launched its own First Nations initiatives.

No one was "in charge" anymore. The magnetic pull of the centre had weakened considerably.

Initially, this was chaos. The Chancellery was furious about "brand inconsistency" and "unauthorised commitments." But within two years, they were pulling in more diverse revenue streams than ever before. Each faculty had become a power centre, forming their own external alliances while still needing to coordinate with the others — and with the ‘centre’.

Is this multipolarity messy? Yes. But is it effective? Yes again.

The best organisations I work with acknowledge their shared power distribution early. Sometimes that’s expertise scattered across departments, resources controlled by different divisions, or influence flowing through informal networks. Whichever it is, these organisations tend to navigate change far better than those that cling to hierarchical org-chart fantasies.

Question: If your organisation suddenly lost its single strongest power centre tomorrow, would you collapse into chaos or evolve into something more resilient through your distributed networks?

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Lastly, here’s a nice podcast version of today’s 5 Minute Strategic Mindset. It takes just two minutes longer, but it’s worth it. Let me know in the comments what you think.

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That's your strategic workout for the week. Three ideas to chew on while you're stuck in traffic or pretending to listen in to your next budget meeting.

If any of these landed differently than expected, hit me up with a message, here or privately. And, if you found yourself nodding at any point, the little heart button would welcome a click.

Until next Friday,

Andrew

P.S. Hugh White's essay is genuinely excellent if you want to understand why the world feels increasingly unstable. Fair warning: it won't make you feel better about anything, but it will make you feel smarter about everything.