John Wilson


Having had the extreme good fortune to attend all the previous Fast Flow Confences, which I have described before, and still maintain, are the best - pound for pound - conferences in the world! This time around it was my absolute privilege to be a speaker at this year's conference in my home town of

Jan U. Hagen and Bin Zhao

Middle managers—those crucial conduits between strategy and execution—feel less psychologically safe than both their bosses and their teams. New research shows that fear of failure, lack of peer support, and weak modeling from senior leaders are silencing the very people responsible for transmitting vital information up and down the organization. To restore learning and agility, companies must redesign accountability systems, normalize fallibility from the top, and build stronger communities of practice for the middle layer.

Rebecca Knight

Recent data shows that discontent is a growing problem in today’s workplaces. While budget constraints, corporate policies, and market conditions are often beyond your reach, you can control how you lead. Stay attuned to your team members’ frustrations, ask for their input on decisions that affect their work, and pay attention to their career progress and well-being. Small, consistent actions matter more than grand gestures. Remove obstacles where you can, and treat people like they matter. You won’t solve everything, but you might just make work feel a little less miserable.

Amy Brann

Most leaders rely heavily on one key region of the brain: the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is responsible for high-order functions like focus, planning, self-regulation, and decision-making. But the PFC has limits. It fatigues quickly, struggles with overload, and is highly sensitive to distraction and stress. This isn’t a personal failure but a systemic design issue. We’ve structured work in a way that demands nonstop performance from a part of the brain that was never meant to run continuously. To truly support better thinking, leaders must go beyond individual hacks and start redesigning the environments they work within—especially the spaces that drive attention, behavior, and collaboration.

Ron Carucci

Most people are familiar with the language of fight, flight, or freeze to describe the body’s instinctive survival responses to perceived threats. There are three additional, less-known threat responses: please/appease (sometimes called fawning), attach/cry for help, and collapse. We unconsciously carry our survival strategies into adult life—including work. The responses can result in disruptive behaviors, which could signal that psychological safety is lacking. Your task as a leader is to read these behaviors as valuable data about how someone may be experiencing your team’s climate.

Muriel M. Wilkins

Everyone has a set of beliefs that help them as they make decisions and interact with others. And while some can be helpful, others can hold a leader back — beliefs known as “hidden blockers.” One such blocker is the idea that “If I can do it, so can you,” in which a leader assumes that employees or team members can take on the same tasks they do—and at the same high standard. While leaders who have this blocker often believe they’re being motivational, this belief is deeply rooted in the self and may blind them to the unique combination of skills, experiences, and work styles of the person in front of them.

Emily Webber

This post is the write-up of a talk I gave at Fast Flow Conference in October 2025, about Communities of Practice through the lens of learning, knowledge, and ideas flow.

Joost Minnaar

A new paper by Arianna Marchetti and one of my favourite academics, Phanish Puranam, just dropped in the Strategic Management Journal.

John Cutler

“We have to simplify!

Jeff Gothefl

Here’s an easy approach to determining success criteria for AI powered systems