Unreliable Inspiration | Engage Others with Category Design Like Fosbury

Imagine your executives are adopting a dangerous belief: people only perform when threatened by crisis. When the building is on fire, performance soars. When competitors attack, teams mobilize. When survival is at stake, magic happens.

This point of view sounds plausible, but it should worry you.

Yes, crises can bring out extraordinary levels of commitment and sacrifice. But as a leader, you should be suspicious. Must your employees face an existential threat to deliver their best work?

Or is this just cynicism masquerading as realism?

Consider it an admission of leadership failure. Deep down, you don’t want to manufacture drama to fire people up. And you don’t want to hype fake urgency (“This is our make-or-break moment!”) just to get people moving.

Fortunately, there’s a source of “clean” inspiration available to you: perpetual category design.

Case in Point

Until the 1968 Mexico Olympics, the world accepted certain limits on high jump techniques. Jumpers went over the bar face-down, in variations of the straddle or scissors technique. Going head-first or face-up? Unthinkable.

In fact, USA Olympic coach Payton Jordan warned that such a technique would “wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers because they will all have broken necks.”

Yet a time traveller from the 1992 Olympics would be utterly confused. By then, 100% of jumpers were defying Jordan’s accepted wisdom, arching backwards over the bar in what became known as the Fosbury Flop.

What had happened?

Dick Fosbury created a new category of high jump. Working almost alone as a high school student, he experimented with an approach that took advantage of recently introduced foam landing pits. Over time, he transformed from a mediocre athlete into a 1968 gold medallist who revolutionized his sport forever.

And no, there wasn’t a crisis afoot. No Olympic committee threatened to eliminate high jump. No injury forced his hand. He was simply a college student on track to become a civil engineer, competing in an era when track and field offered few monetary rewards.

He innovated because the possibility excited him.

Your Employees Want This

In your organization, there’s a special kind of employee who understands this possibility. They’re frustrated because executives don’t. You’ll hear them complain that leadership thrives on the adrenaline of surprise disruptions, that short-term firefighting crowds out long-term thinking.

They’ll point out something more troubling: crisis-addiction actually creates more crises. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Consider the pattern: organizations that lurch from emergency to emergency often discover their problems took years to develop. The talent shortage that hits during a critical launch. The technology debt that cripples during expansion. The cultural dysfunction that surfaces when pressure mounts.

These weren’t surprises. Someone saw them coming. Someone raised concerns. But leadership was too busy fighting the last fire to prevent the next one.

Category Design as Alternative

What if those organizations had practiced category design instead?

Category design is a strategic planning method for achieving breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements. It involves creating and dominating brand new business categories, rather than competing in existing ones crowded with rivals. By seeking to make a fundamentally different kind of impact, a new category unlocks fresh value.

Some organizations are forced into new categories others define. Think of how Netflix forced Blockbuster to reckon with streaming, or how Tesla pushed traditional automakers toward electric vehicles. These transitions are painful when someone else designs the new category.

A tiny few don’t wait for crisis or competitive pressure. Instead, they design new categories proactively, committing themselves to long-term transitions. With pre-emptive actions, they craft a new landscape while others are still defending the old one.

Perpetual Category Design

However, there’s a tendency for companies to over-focus on single innovations, treating competitive advantage as if it were a one-time occurrence. The best companies think differently.

They always have a 15-30 year vision and strategy in play, working behind the scenes where competitors can’t see it. As soon as they accomplish a major milestone, they revise their plans and set new targets.

This is the only way to transcend the human tendency to leap big hurdles, then lose the capacity to imagine further obstacles. Without perpetual category design, organizations stagnate after victories, endlessly reciting prior successes. Their constant chest-beating gets in the way of fresh thinking.

To help your organization avoid this trap, follow these steps inspired by the Category Pirates:

Name the current category game. What category are you and your competitors playing in today? What are its defining rules and assumptions?

Dive deep into unmet needs. What do your customers or stakeholders truly need that no one is adequately addressing? Where is everyone solving the wrong problem?

Frame a new point of view. What different lens or perspective reveals new possibilities? What becomes possible when you reject conventional wisdom?

Name your new category. Give your different approach a memorable name that captures its distinctive value.

Build a long-term vision and strategy. Map the 15-30 year journey from here to category leadership. Make it concrete enough to guide decisions.

You may not replicate the high energy of crisis response. Few can sustain that.

But you will have defined something more valuable: a sustainable, renewable source of motivation. When done well, it creates immediate action that feels as urgent as emergency response—without the accompanying disaster.

Crisis creates urgency by making the present unbearable.

Category design creates urgency by making the future irresistible.

Go Deeper: LLM Prompts for Category Design

Prompt 1: Diagnose Your Crisis Addiction “I lead a team/organization in [your industry]. Help me identify signs that we might be addicted to crisis-driven performance. Ask me 5-7 diagnostic questions about our leadership patterns, planning practices, and team behaviors. After my responses, analyze whether we’re running on crisis energy vs. sustainable inspiration.”

Prompt 2: Map Your Current Category “I work in [describe your industry/sector]. Help me clearly define the category game my organization is currently playing. Ask me questions about: (1) what business we think we’re in, (2) who we compete with and how, (3) the rules everyone follows, and (4) what ‘winning’ looks like. Then show me the invisible assumptions constraining our thinking.”

Prompt 3: Discover Unmet Needs “Act as a strategic interviewer helping me uncover unmet customer/stakeholder needs. I serve [describe your audience]. Ask me probing questions about: what they hire us to do, what they settle for, what they complain about, and what they’ve stopped asking for. Help me see the gap between what we deliver and what would truly transform their situation.”

Prompt 4: Design Your New Category “Based on this context [paste your responses from prompts 2 and 3], help me brainstorm 3-5 potential new category positions for my organization. For each option: (1) name the new category, (2) explain how it’s fundamentally different from our current category, (3) describe the distinctive value it unlocks, and (4) identify the biggest obstacle to getting there.”

Prompt 5: Build Your Fosbury Moment “I want to create a ‘Fosbury Flop’ innovation in my field. Like Dick Fosbury, I want to question a fundamental assumption everyone accepts. In my industry [describe], help me identify 3-5 ‘sacred cows’—techniques, practices, or beliefs that everyone follows but no one questions. Then help me imagine what becomes possible if we challenge each one.”

Prompt 6: Create Your 15-Year Vision “Help me draft a compelling 15-year vision for category leadership. I want to shift from [current category] to [new category concept]. Ask me about: our unique advantages, the milestones we’d need to hit, the capabilities we’d need to build, and the legacy we want to leave. Then help me write a vivid 2-paragraph vision that makes this future feel irresistible to my team.”

This article is based on a column written for the Jamaica Gleaner.

November 9, 2025

Chronicles from a Caribbean Cubicle 2025-11-09 09:19:17

Why Playing It Safe Will Erase Your Leadership Legacy

The conventional wisdom says: stay focused, deliver on your core responsibilities, don’t overstep. But the leaders who’ll be celebrated a generation from now are ignoring that advice entirely.

Picture this: You’re running a major public sector organization. Every performance indicator is green. Your board loves your quarterly updates. Senior leadership regularly commends your results.

Yet when you walk through the communities you serve and talk to regular people, they describe the same chronic problems that existed half a decade ago.

“Nothing’s really changed,” they tell you. “The issues we complain about? Still there.”

Here’s what you know that they don’t: Many of these problems have simple tactical fixes. But implementing systematic, lasting solutions? That’s brutally difficult.

Why? Because the real challenges don’t respect organizational boundaries. They sprawl across multiple departments, agencies, and jurisdictions. Solving them requires something most job descriptions never mention: delivering results beyond your formal authority.

When Excellence Becomes the Enemy

The most dangerous trap in public sector leadership isn’t outright failure. It’s what we might call “compliant mediocrity.”

This happens when leaders optimize for their own metrics, hit their assigned targets year after year, and consider themselves successful—within narrow confines.

But something’s missing. Despite their achievements, they feel perpetually drained. Their work doesn’t inspire. While they collect their paychecks, their legacy quietly dissolves because the work that truly matters doesn’t sit neatly inside their control. Instead, it lives in the uncomfortable spaces between organizations.

These boundary-spanning problems—crime, economic stagnation, infrastructure decay, climate resilience—remain unsolved because government systems reward predictable, controllable ambitions over transformative ones.

A small group of public sector leaders, however, have discovered a different path.

The Cross-Agency Coordination Model

Consider a successful example: a national security coordination body designed to span multiple stakeholder organizations. Rather than operating as a single agency, it functions as a coordinating mechanism that brings together defense chiefs, police commissioners, anti-corruption directors, and senior civil servants in quarterly sessions that enforce collaboration and mutual accountability.

This sounds impossibly complex. Bureaucratic chaos waiting to happen.

The secret ingredient? A secretariat led by someone with deep institutional knowledge—decades of service across multiple ministries, connections throughout the civil service, and the credibility to cut through red tape.

Leaders like this see past surface-level problems. They understand that when infrastructure fails in your neighborhood, it’s rarely one agency’s fault. They recognize these as complex challenges that cross organizational boundaries and demand cooperation.

Sometimes, this requires personal trust built over years that transcends hierarchy and formal mandates.

Here’s what these cross-boundary initiatives do differently:

Begin with citizen outcomes, not organizational outputs. This means multiple stakeholders working simultaneously toward shared final results, regardless of difficulty. Think of national development frameworks that require whole-of-government approaches.

Develop shared strategic hypotheses. These groups craft testable theories about what might work, and every stakeholder buys into the same hypothesis. This alignment is invisible but essential.

Create distributed ownership. Few thoughtful observers believe complex social problems can be solved by single agencies. For example, the pipeline that leads people into the criminal justice system involves education, social services, mental health, employment, and community development—not just law enforcement.

Deploy data surgically. By targeting specific areas and measuring them with modern tools, these coordination bodies receive rapid feedback and can adjust quickly.

This list isn’t exhaustive. But the fundamental shift is enormous: committing yourself to citizen outcomes that can’t be mapped to your organization chart or short-term results requires courage.

Three Immediate Actions

1. Redefine How You Measure Success

Stop asking: “Did I meet my targets?” Start asking: “What outcome do citizens actually need—and who else must I engage to deliver it?”

This single reframe changes everything.

2. Cultivate One Strategic Partnership This Quarter

Identify the single senior leader whose work intersects with your biggest bottleneck.

Don’t request a generic “collaboration meeting.” Instead, bring value to the table: “I have data on [specific challenge] that affects both our organizations. Can we review it together?”

This mirrors the trust-through-transparency approach used by successful cross-agency bodies.

3. Launch One Cross-Boundary Experiment

Select one problem requiring multi-agency partnership. Design a small, 90-day pilot with concrete metrics.

Approach your leadership and secure explicit permission to “test and learn” across boundaries they may guard carefully.

For instance: “Can we reduce youth reoffending by 15% if we coordinate case management across education, justice, and corrections for 20 young people?”

The Memorial Test

Two decades from now, nobody will remember your Q3 performance ratings.

They’ll remember whether violent crime decreased in their city. Whether young people found pathways to employment. Whether communities became more resilient to natural disasters.

You face a choice: operate within comfortable boundaries and deliver forgettable results, or cross organizational lines and create something that endures.

The question isn’t whether you can collaborate across silos. It’s whether you’re willing to be remembered for something beyond meeting targets.

Six Strategic Prompts for Cross-Silo Leadership

Prompt 1: Define Your True Impact Zone

“I lead [your organization]. Our formal mandate covers [state scope]. But the outcomes stakeholders actually need are [list 3-5 challenges].

Analyze: What’s the highest-impact outcome I should pursue that requires collaboration beyond my current organizational boundaries? Map which other agencies must participate and why.”

Prompt 2: Chart Your Collaboration Landscape

“I want to address [specific cross-cutting challenge, e.g., chronic homelessness or youth workforce development].

Create a stakeholder map showing: (1) Which organizations control relevant budgets, authority, or data, (2) Each organization’s current incentive structure, (3) Where natural friction points exist, (4) Which ‘connector’ leaders I should approach first.”

Prompt 3: Build Your First Strategic Experiment

“Using evidence-based delivery frameworks, help me design a testable 90-day strategic hypothesis for [boundary-crossing problem].

Include: (1) The specific measurable outcome we’re testing, (2) The minimum viable partnership (which 2-3 organizations must coordinate), (3) Key assumptions we’re validating, (4) Early warning indicators that signal we need to pivot, (5) How to present this as a ‘safe-to-fail’ experiment to leadership.”

Prompt 4: Draft Your Trust-Building Approach

“I need to engage [counterpart at another organization] about collaborating on [challenge]. They’re likely skeptical because [explain context: past failures, territorial concerns, resource limits].

Write a 200-word email or meeting opening that: (1) Leads with evidence they care about, (2) Frames the challenge as shared rather than ‘my request,’ (3) Proposes a low-risk exploration, (4) Acknowledges their constraints to build trust.”

Prompt 5: Navigate the ‘Not My Responsibility’ Response

“I’m encountering resistance to cross-boundary work. The objections are: [list specific pushback like ‘that’s outside my role,’ ‘we lack capacity,’ ‘that’s Agency X’s territory’].

Provide: (1) A reframe for each objection that shifts from ‘mandate compliance’ to ‘stakeholder outcome delivery,’ (2) Examples from successful cross-agency coordination that show how leaders navigated similar resistance, (3) A compelling case for how this enhances (not threatens) institutional reputation.”

Prompt 6: Track Progress Across Organizational Lines

“I want to monitor progress on [cross-cutting outcome] involving [list 3-4 organizations]. Currently, each tracks different metrics that don’t create a coherent picture.

Design: (1) A simple dashboard with 4-6 shared metrics all organizations can feed, (2) A quarterly reporting rhythm that minimizes bureaucratic burden, (3) How to make this data transparent for public accountability without making organizations defensive.”

Note: Expect targeted insights specific to your context and constraints.

This is a longer version of my recent column in the Jamaica Gleaner.