Work’s Too Complex for Command and Control

Twenty years ago, a leader could genuinely know most of the answers in their domain. The work had enough boundaries around it, the pace slow enough, the expertise centralised enough that being the smartest person in the room was possible. You could gather the information, make the call, and tell people what to do. It worked.

That world is gone.

If you built your career on being the person with the answers, this is disorienting. The very thing you were promoted for—your ability to know, to decide quickly, to have certainty—is now the constraint. And nobody taught you how to lead when you can’t know everything.

The technical knowledge is too specialised now, the pace is too relentless and the problems too interconnected. No single person can hold all the context, spot all the risks or see all the opportunities. The complexity of modern work has outpaced the capacity of any individual brain to manage it.

I talk to many leaders who are still trying to lead like that world exists. And they’re exhausted, isolated, and wondering why their good people keep leaving.

The Strategic Problem

When the work is too complex for one person to navigate alone, you need distributed intelligence. You need someone who spots the integration issue three weeks before launch. You need the junior person who feels it’s ok to say “wait, are we solving the wrong problem?” You need people who are thinking ahead, connecting dots that you can’t see and offering up solutions before problems become crises.

This isn’t about being nice or creating a pleasant workplace (although, why not?). In complex work, one brain can’t see all the angles anymore. You need the collective intelligence of people who are genuinely invested; people who bring their sharpest thinking, their toughest questions and their half-formed ideas that might turn into something brilliant.

Many leadership frameworks miss this because you can’t demand that level of investment. You can’t mandate caring. You can only create the conditions where people choose to bring their best thinking, or where they learn to hold it back.

That’s what I call energetic safety. And it’s different from what we usually talk about.

Energetic Safety

We’ve made progress on psychological safety; creating environments where people can speak up without fear of punishment. But speaking up is just the beginning.

Energetic safety asks a different question: Is it safe to invest my energy, my creativity, my best thinking here? Or will it be wasted, dismissed, or used against me later?

You can have a team where everyone feels safe to voice concerns in meetings, but no one volunteers for the hard projects anymore. They’ll tell you what’s wrong, but they won’t give you their best thinking to fix it. They’ve learned that going above and beyond doesn’t matter, or even worse, that it backfires.

That’s psychological safety without energetic safety.

And most bosses are facing problems too complex for any one person to solve and trying to navigate complexity with one brain when you desperately need twenty.

What Energetic Safety Looks Like, When You’re Solving Complex Problems

In a team with energetic safety, people don’t just comply, they think.

They volunteer for hard problems because they trust the work will matter. They bring half-formed ideas to the table because they know messy thinking is part of solving complex problems. They push back on your direction because they’re invested in getting it right. They’re thinking three steps ahead instead of just executing what’s in front of them.

A junior manager I worked with once interrupted a planning meeting to say, “Wait, I think we’re solving the wrong problem here.” She was right. The solution she’d been quietly working through was smarter than the approach the senior team had mapped out.

Six months earlier, she wouldn’t have said anything. She’d learned at her previous company that challenging direction got you labelled “not a team player” or worse a “blocker”. So, she would have let us waste three months building the wrong thing, then watched us scramble to fix it.

That single interruption saved us months of wasted effort. All because she trusted that her thinking mattered.

That’s what energetic safety unlocks: access to the distributed intelligence you need when the work is too complex for any one person to see the whole picture.

What Makes This Possible: Trust at Three Levels

Distributed intelligence doesn’t happen just because you ask nicely. It requires trust, and not just one kind.

People need to trust it’s safe to speak up and bring incomplete thinking. They need to trust that feedback to and from each other will be fair and useful, not weaponised later. And they need to trust in the purpose and direction enough to invest deeply rather than hedge their bets.

Without all three layers of trust, you can’t access the distributed intelligence complexity demands. You might get one or two, but that’s not enough. People will speak up but won’t invest, or they’ll invest but won’t challenge. Or they’ll do both but only on work they think will survive the next strategy pivot.

How to Kill Energetic Safety, And Why That’s a Strategic Problem

I’ve watched energetic safety drain out of teams. I’ve also been the one doing the draining. Three things will destroy it every time, and in complex work, each one makes you strategically worse.

You ignore their effort.

I worked with someone who spent three weeks on a customer experience proposal. Good work and exactly what had been asked for. Then priorities shifted so it got shelved. No explanation, no conversation, just “thanks, we’re going a different direction.” She nodded in the meeting, said “no problem,” went back to her desk. Never volunteered like that again. Six months later she quit. Her exit interview? “My work didn’t matter here.”

In complex work, you need people thinking ahead, connecting dots you might not see, volunteering solutions before problems become crises. When you ignore their effort, you’re teaching them to stop thinking beyond their immediate task. You’re training them out of exactly the behaviour you need to navigate complexity.

You keep moving the target.

When strategy changes every quarter, people stop going all-in because they can’t afford to. Last month’s priority is this month’s old news, so they learn to hold something back and hedge their bets. You end up with a team giving you 70% because that’s all that’s safe to give.

The work is too complex now for anyone to navigate it at 70%. You need people who trust the direction enough to invest fully, to build deep understanding, to spot problems early because they’re genuinely engaged with where you’re trying to go. Strategic whiplash doesn’t just frustrate people; it makes them strategically useless to you. They can’t build the deep context understanding you need them to have.

You punish people for caring.

I’ve seen someone push back on a decision because they genuinely wanted to get it right. They got labelled “difficult” in the next review. Everyone else learned the lesson: caring is risky. Better to keep your head down.

This is insane when the problems you’re facing are too complex for one person to solve. You need people who care enough to push back, to spot the flaw in your thinking, to say “wait, I think we’re missing something here.” When you punish that, you’re guaranteeing that you’ll make worse decisions. You’re ensuring you only get compliance, not thinking.

Why Leaders Keep Trying to Navigate Complexity Alone

Most leaders aren’t trying to be controlling. They’re trying to do what they were taught to do. What got them here. The problem is, what got you here won’t get you through what’s next.

We try to solve complex problems with command-and-control leadership, not because we’re incompetent, but because everything about how we work fights against distributed intelligence.

You think you need all the answers.

I was taught that credibility meant certainty. So, I learned to fake confidence even when I had no idea what I was doing. Fake it til you make it, right?

As you’ve transitioned into more senior roles you’ve learned that your job isn’t to know everything—it’s to create the conditions where people bring their thinking forward. But if you’re still trying to be omniscient, you’re signalling that their job is to execute your answers, not contribute their own.

You try to measure your way through complexity.

I’ve been in rooms where we treated metrics like gospel. But the problem is that we’re trying to reduce complexity to dashboards because that’s how we managed simpler work. The early warning signals you need: someone’s hesitation in a meeting, the question that doesn’t get asked, the energy draining from a team, those don’t show up in your metrics until it’s too late.

We try to measure energy.  We call it ‘engagement scores’, ‘innovation metrics’, ‘culture surveys’. But those aren’t the thing itself. They’re shadows. We’re measuring the residue, not the source. And by the time the dashboard tells you there’s a problem, you’ve already lost months of distributed intelligence.

Everything is urgent, so nothing gets understood.

When speed is the only thing that matters, there’s no room for depth. Complex problems need thinking time. They need people who understand context deeply enough to make good decisions without you in the room.

But if everything is urgent, people never build that understanding. They just execute frantically, waiting for you to tell them what to do next, which puts you right back in the bottleneck you can’t afford to be in. You become the constraint on your team’s ability to navigate complexity.

You’re isolated at the top.

Leadership is lonely. The feedback you get has been filtered through five layers of people managing up. When you have no one safe to think out loud with, it’s easy to fall into the trap of controlling everything too tightly because at least that feels like you’re doing something.

But in complex work, tight control is a fantasy. You can’t possibly know enough or move fast enough to control all the variables. When you try, you become the bottleneck. The constraint on your team’s performance isn’t their capability, it’s your capacity to make every decision. And that’s a losing game when the problems are too complex for any one person to solve.

How to Unlock Distributed Intelligence

You don’t have to keep pretending to be omniscient. What I’m suggesting might be a whole lot easier than what you’re doing now.

This isn’t about overhauling your entire leadership approach overnight. It’s about small, consistent moves that prove to your team ‘your thinking matters here, not just your compliance’.

Stop pretending you have all the answers.

The fastest way to build energetic safety is to model intellectual honesty. Say “I don’t know yet, let’s figure it out together” like it’s a complete sentence. When you’re genuinely uncertain, name it. When someone else’s idea is better than yours, say so publicly.

This isn’t weakness. In complex work, it’s competence. You’re signalling that you need their thinking, not just their activity.

Before your next project kickoff, spend most of the time on context:  the why, the constraints, what success looks like, what you’re explicitly not doing. Share what you know and what you don’t know. Name the uncertainties. When people understand the full picture, they can think independently. They can spot problems you don’t see. They can make good decisions without you in the room. That’s distributed intelligence.

Protect the capacity for deep thinking.

Before saying yes to new work, ask: “Do we have the actual capacity for this?” Not just time on the calendar. Real human energy to think deeply about complex problems.

Complex work requires deep context. It requires people who understand the problem space well enough to connect dots, spot risks, and see opportunities. If your team is context-switching every fifteen minutes, they can’t build that understanding and they could be reduced to executors waiting for your next instruction.

Kill one energy drain this month. Pick the meeting, process, or request that delivers minimal value and just stop doing it. Use that reclaimed time for deeper work on something that actually matters. 

Make the invisible thinking visible.

Don’t just celebrate outcomes. If you genuinely cherish distributed intelligence, make the effort to name the specific thinking, the noticing, the questions that made them possible.

Instead of “great job on the product launch,” try: “you spotted that issue three weeks before launch. That question you asked saved us from a major problem. That’s the kind of thinking ahead we need more of.”

Be specific. Name the behaviour. Connect it to impact. Do it publicly.

This is how you answer the question “Is it safe to invest my thinking here?” with evidence, not platitudes. When people see that their thinking matters, not just the outcome, but the thinking itself, they bring more of it. They start connecting dots you can’t see. They volunteer solutions to problems you don’t know exist yet.

That’s distributed intelligence. And in complex work, it’s the only way to win.

Build space for thinking, not just doing.

One team I know blocks Friday mornings for “thinking time”.  No meetings, no interruptions, just space to work on the hard problems that never feel urgent until they’re crises.

It felt indulgent at first. Within three months, their issues rate dropped by half. Turns out when you give people time to think deeply about complex problems, they spot issues before they explode. And it only works if people are invested enough to use that thinking time well.

Stop leading alone.

Find one peer leader you genuinely trust. Set a monthly hour to discuss what’s hard—not strategy updates or wins, but the messy challenges you’re facing navigating work that’s too complex for any one person.

And build trust with your team through small moments. Every single interaction either builds or erodes the trust account. The way you respond when someone brings bad news. Whether you follow up on what you said you’d do. How you react when someone’s idea is better than yours.

These moments are how people decide: Is my thinking valued here? Or am I just here to execute someone else’s answers?

I worked with a team that was hitting their numbers but the energy was flat. In meetings, people waited to see which way the wind was blowing before speaking. Ideas came with disclaimers. Nobody volunteered for anything that wasn’t explicitly assigned.

I asked one of the senior people what was going on. She said: “We’ve learned not to care too much. It doesn’t end well.”

The work was genuinely complex. No one person could see all the angles, but they’d been trained to wait for one person to have all the answers anyway.

I watched the new leader turn it around over six months with small, consistent actions: following up same day when someone raised a concern. Explaining why projects got shelved instead of just moving on. Saying publicly when someone’s idea was better than theirs.

About four months in, something shifted. A junior team member interrupted a planning meeting. “Wait, I think we’re solving the wrong problem here.” She was right. Six months earlier, she wouldn’t have said it.

That’s what energetic safety makes possible. And it started with one question the leader had to answer with actions, not words: Is it safe to bring my thinking here?